The 7 types of logos (and how to use them)

A logo is an image that symbolizes your business. But did you know there are 7 different types of logos? Though they’re all a combination of typography and images, each type of logo gives your brand a different feel. And since your logo is the first thing new customers...

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Do you have any advice for freelancers who also work and parent at home?

The best advice I can give is schedules! I know its hard with little ones, but scheduling is everything. When I first started full-time freelancing on 99designs, I had three little ones ages 7, 5 and 3. It was hard, to say the least. At first, I would work while they were eating or doing an activity like watching TV. I pretty much worked a few minutes...

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What prompted you to go freelance?

Well, a lot of things. The biggest reason was that I wanted to be a stay-at-home mom. I freelanced as a counselor online before I started to design. Now I can’t imagine working outside the home. The flexible hours let me homeschool my kids, which is very important to me. I want them to have an applied education at home rather than a set curriculum...

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top tips for balancing full-time freelancing with family

a Coulter (aka Daylite Designs) was one of 99designs’ earliest adopters and has worked full-time on the platform for more than a decade. As a versatile graphic designer and stay-at-home mom, working online from her home office has given her the flexibility to raise and homeschool her seven children—while still embracing her passions professionally. Over...

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What makes a good hotel logo?

How do you communicate a hotel experience through abstraction? How do you contain your core values and history in just a few memorable words? These are important questions to ask to begin visualizing how your logo may take shape. You want your logo to communicate the essence...

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Punny and funny logos

Humor is one of humanity’s most enduring forms of entertainment. If it’s the kind of entertainment your brand delivers, make jokes in your logo. Get your audiences laughing, or at least exhaling audibly, the moment they see your logo because if that’s how your relationship...

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What makes a good entertainment logo?

It’s not enough for your logo to just be entertaining. Your logo has to communicate who you are, what you do and why your target audience cares. Once you’ve got your brand identity down, your need to flesh out unique ideas that will work for your logo. Because you’re...

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THE VALUE OF A LOGO.

How much should a logo cost? Well, isn’t that another $64,000 question – what is a logo worth? Is it worth hundreds, or thousands of dollars? Can we even put a dollar value on something that will represent your company for (hopefully) its lifetime? That all depends on whether...

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THE VALUE OF A LOGO.

consistent identity or brand. Which is a pity. The company is in the community service field, sends out a bucket load of brochures and tri-folds, prints a ton of event T-Shirts, banners and trinkets. The logo is on the side of the building and I’m sure that they lose a great...

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DOYOU NEED A LOGO?

Selling your company to strangers. Once again, if you’re simply filing tax returns on behalf of friends and family for a few bucks on the side, none of this is an issue. Simply naming your company should be enough. If, however, you’re trying to sell you services to strangers...

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Inspiring Everyday Graphic Design Articles

inspirational things are often right in front of us. It might be the typography on a book cover, the colors of your favorite music album, the opening titles in that movie you saw yesterday. To celebrate all those little moments of inspiration, we have compiled some resources...

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Classification

In English, fonts are classified into several groups. There are three main groups. 1. Serif 2. Sans-Serif 3. Script Serif: A serif is the pointed ending of a stroke as in “I” or “T”. This is inspired by the letters carved on stone, using chisels. Thickness of the strokes also...

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How To Typography

Typography is the science of using letter forms for communication. We use letter forms extensively in our daily life, in various media like newspapers, signages, application forms, letters, notebooks, textbooks, currency notes, posters, tickets, SMS, email etc. A very large...

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Design Principle Positive

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Anatomy of a Font

As human body has many parts for identification like head, neck, shoulder, arms, tail, foot etc., Type Forms or Font face are also divided into parts, which we study under ‘anatomy of fonts’. Some examples you will see below: • Shirorekha connotes headline • Skandharekha,...

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Seven Design Principles

Design principles are guidelines. Designers follow principles to develop purposeful compositions. As with an architect’s plans, design principles orchestrate the construction of a visual message that is strong enough to support all the graphic elements that will be placed on...

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Gestalt Theory: Grouping Laws

Proximity Elements tend to be grouped together according to their nearness. As the example shows, four circles to the right appear to be in one group whereas two circles to the left appear to be in a separate group of their own. This is due to the fact that a larger gap...

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Use “white space” in print design

The use of negative space in print design is often called white space— it’s the space that doesn’t hold any content and it’s usually the key aspect of what makes or breaks a design. It’s also worth mentioning that white space doesn’t have to be white. Your background can...

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Design your website with negative space

In between columns, images, copy, and just about everything else on a website, there’s negative space. It’s our job as designers to maximize this space to its greatest potential so as not to crowd a website. We must use negative space to intelligently organize text and graphics...

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How To Negative space in photography

In photography you’re dealing with aperture, shutter speed, lighting, and focus at every moment, and whether you know it or not, you’re also dealing with negative and positive space. As we discussed earlier, we define negative space as being the empty space around the subject...

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Why use negative space?

If you work with negative spaces rather than on the subject (positive space), you’ll often end up with a more accurate and aesthetically pleasing design and balanced composition. Let’s look at this picture of a toucan, as it’s an excellent example of negative space. The positive...

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What is negative space?

When composing a piece of artwork, we generally work with three elements: the frame, the positive space, and the negative space (also called white space). The frame is the bounding size of the artwork, the positive space is the subject, and the negative space is the empty...

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How To Macintosh Fonts

Many Macintosh-specific fonts use a file structure that predates os x. In this structure, the file contents are divided into two parts: a data fork and a resource fork. Older versions of the Mac os used data in the resource fork to tell (among other things) what application...

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How To Opentype Fonts

OpenType is a hybrid font format created by Adobe and Microsoft. It reconciles the differences in the PostScript and TrueType formats, allowing them to exist together in a single file. OpenType fonts are also written in a file format that allows the same font file to be...

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How To Truetype Fonts

For a few years in the late 1980s, the typesetting world had in PostScript a single, standard font format for the first time in its history. It wasn’t to last. For a combination of primarily commercial but also technological reasons, Apple Computer and Microsoft collaborated...

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How to Postscript Fonts

PostScript fonts are written in the PostScript page description language, and they need to be processed by a PostScript interpreter before they can be imaged. (See “The PostScript Model” in for more information on PostScript interpreters.) For high-resolution printers and...

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How to Font Formats

Ultimately, what’s inside a font depends on its format. The word format has two meanings in computer type. First, it can refer to the platform for which the font was designed. For example, two fonts with the same data for the same typeface may have different file formats...

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What’s in a Font?

A font contains all the information needed to position and image the characters that it represents. How a computer operating system and an application program team up to use this information is covered in detail in. Here we’re just concerned with what’s inside a font and...

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Unicode: The Underlying Technology

All computer programs identify characters by number. International standards correlate every number to a unique character, so that a computer file from Europe, for example, can be properly typeset in Asia. It took decades before a single standard international numbering...

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How To Outline and Bitmapped

Typefaces are what you get to admire after your work is finished, but fonts are the tools you have to wrestle with in the meantime to get the job done. Computer operating systems and applications have made it much easier to work with fonts, but the process is still quite...

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A Bad Graphic Designer

Yes, this is a controversial topic, however I hope to raise awareness of some mistakes you may be making in your graphic design pieces that are making you look like an amateur, but please keep in mind that none of these are hard and fast rules, this is only a general guide of things you should be aware of. Please forgive me for the graphic and...

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Learn Graphic Design

1. Udemy: Introduction to Graphic Design Udemy, as most of you already know, is an online learning platform aimed at professionals, catering courses created by experts. The platform is filled with amazing courses whose legibility you can judge by the number of people who have rated/taken the course. If you are starting out, we would recommend...

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Role Of Typography In Modern Web Design

T As for why we care about typography and each of the defining characteristics of it in modern web design, there’s a good reason for it. While it would be great if a well-written blog post or super convincing sales jargon on a landing page were enough to keep visitors...

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Reference Guide For Typography In Mobile Web Design

A  In terms of how to handle typography in mobile web design, it appears that simpler and safer works best. In this article, we will break down the elements you need to pay attention to in mobile typography and then visit what the research says about how to handle...

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