The evolution of the Google logo.

Nice article on Wired.com about how Google got its logo. Ruth Kedar is the graphic designer who developed the now famous logo and she walks us through the process, from initial ideas and thoughts to how it looks today.

Logo design

Ahh, logo design. One of the most enjoyable and fulfilling, yet at the same time most frustrating experiences of design. A bit like golf. Or learning to snowboard. Creating a logo is not easy, it’s not even hard, it’s frustratingly hard! It’s an art.

Everyone thinks it’s easy. Find a font, type your company name in the company colours and walah (walah?), you have a logo! Maybe find a cute icon and you’re done. Oh no no no, its not that easy and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. So many friends ask me to “whip them up a quick logo”, I invariably fall for the challenge and many frustrated days later, I tell myself I will never accept another logo design brief. But I always do. Because I love doing it. The pleasure of seeing a new logo come to life, on business cards and letterheads to the website to a TV ad, it’s awesome.

Sometimes it all comes together really quickly and easy, but that’s rare. One (there are many) of the keys to getting it right is a clear understanding of what the client is looking for, not what you’d personally like to do with the concept, because it’s such a subjective thing, it’s a tough balancing act keeping yourself and the client happy.

You might even land the jackpot and get paid £4 million to come up with an absolute piece of poo Olympic Games logo.

Anyway, I could write for days on how to go about creating the perfect logo (is that even possible?), maybe I will post some thoughts on it in the future, but for now I’ll point you in the direction of some great logo design resources.

Switch Design Group in South Africa has been in the press quite a bit recently and while their website is horrible, they have created some of South Africa’s most recognisable and iconic logos such as the Springbok logo, 5FM, Investec and Debonairs identities. Their poster design has also just been voted to be the official poster of the 2010 Soccer World Cup.

http://www.brandsoftheworld.com/ – Great resource for browsing most of the world’s famous corporate identities and allows you to download the vector forms, so long as you have copyright permission of course.

http://logopond.com/ – I look at this all the time. Logo pond is all about logo inspiration and lets you upload your own logo. Other users can then vote on it, yay or nay. If you don’t like the attention, you can set it so that people can’t vote. But what’s the point then eh?

http://www.underconsideration.com/brandnew/ – I like this one. A blog of opinions on corporate and brand identity work.

http://faveup.com/ – Fave Up is a popular one and is an inspiration gallery for logos as well as business cards and flash sites.

http://www.logodesignlove.com/ – Just found this and it looks well worth a bookmark.

While I was writing these, I remembered Switch Design were also commissioned to create the official identity of the 2010 Soccer World Cup . There’s been a bit of controversy about how they were selected and not a few people think the identity they came up with is average to say the least. Personally I don’t think it’s too bad. Could’ve been better, but overall I reckon it’s pretty flexible and will work easily across a multitude of media. “Not the 2010 logo” has been set up by disgruntled designers who are giving the public and designers a chance to submit their own designs. While there are some really nice ones (and some absolute shockers), I still think I’d struggle to say “Yip thats DEFINITELY better than the one we have now”…

…but then it’s such a subjective thing isn’t it.