I first came across the work of Denis Olenik through the Behance Network (www.behance.net) which is a platform for creative professionals to showcase their work.  His portfolio literally took my breath away.

He describes himself as a “multi disciplinary designer specializing in business communication services: logo development, signs, corporate and brand identity, brand development, rebranding, corporate and brand guidelines and websites. Experienced in developing exciting creative business ideas to refresh and transform brands and make them unique, clear and attractive through different media”.

His work has enabled him to attract major clients such as Adidas, Visa, Volkswagen, Mitsubishi, HP and many more.  He is currently working as Art Director at Avivo, Ljubljana (Slovenia).

This is just a taster of his incredible portfolio and I would encourage you to view his full range of work at his website denisolenik.com

Avivo Corporate Identity

Savviva Corporate Identity

Bella Sicillia Identity

Cocoa Stuff Identity

All images sourced from Behance (http://www.behance.net/maximalist) August 2011

I have come across some extremely clever minimalist logo designs recently that I wanted to share with you.  I find these logos very inspiring because they showcase the art of communicating meaning through simplicity.

To say that Paul Rand was a legend is an understatement.  The more I researched his life, the more amazed I was at how much influence he has had on the design profession as a whole.

In 1993 Paul Rand wrote

[blockquote author="Paul Rand, Failure by Design"]Design can help inform, delight, and even persuade — assuming that the designer is an artist and not just someone focused on the nonsense of “self-expression” or on the fads of the moment.[/blockquote]

Despite attending design education, Paul Rand was largely “self-taught as a designer, learning about the works of Cassandre and Moholy-Nagy from European magazines such as [Gebrauchsgraphik].” (Michael Beirut in Tribute: Paul Rand 1914-1996)

The legacy of his corporate logos speaks volumes and very early in my design education, I realised that he was a designer that I wanted to learn more about.  I was fascinated to learn that Paul Rand was one of the originators of the Swiss Style which really interests me because if its use of of typography and simple graphical forms.  Initially I was inspired mainly by Rand’s timeless logo designs, but as I began to look through some of his vast portfolio, I quickly realised that his graphic design talent was much more far-reaching.  I found his poster designs hugely inspiring.  They are such emotion producing designs that were completed in a wide variety of styles for a wide variety of purposes.

More About His Life

Paul Rand was born Peretz Rosenbaum, August 15 1914, in Brooklyn, New York. As a boy he designed signs for his fathers grocery store in Brooklyn. Rand’s father did not believe art could provide his son with a sufficient livelihood, and so he required Paul to attend Manhattan’s Harren High School while taking night classes at the Pratt Institute from 1929-1932. 4 He attended the Parsons School of Design (1932-1933), and the Art Students League (1933-1934). (“Timeline”, paul-rand.com)

He was embarking on his career in Graphic Design at the same time in history as the Bauhaus school in Germany was changing the Graphic Design profession forever. One of the Bauhaus professors Laszlo Moholy-Nagy later commented on Rand:

[blockquote author="Lazlo Moholy-Nagy"]Among these young Americans it seems to be that Paul Rand is one of the best and most capable [. . .] He is a painter, lecturer, industrial designer, [and] advertising artist who draws his knowledge and creativeness from the resources of this country. He is an idealist and a realist, using the language of the poet and business man. He thinks in terms of need and function. He is able to analyze his problems but his fantasy is boundless.[/blockquote]

Early in his career he decided to hide his obviously Jewish name ‘Peretz Rosenbaum,’ by changing his firstname to ‘Paul’ and taking ‘Rand’ from an uncle to form his new surname. A friend of his, Morris Wyszogrod, thought that having four letters in his first and surname would create a nice symbol.

His Career

In an interesting way the chronology of Paul Rand’s design experience has paralleled the development of the modern design movement. (“Paul Rand | American Icons” – areaofdesign.com)

In his book about the designer, Steven Heller wrote that “when Paul Rand died on 26 November 1996 at eighty-two, his career had spanned six decades, three generations and numerous chapters of design history. In the late 1930s he began to transform commercial art from craft to profession. By the early 1940s he influenced the look of advertising, book and magazine cover design. By the late 1940s he proffered a graphic design vocabulary based on pure form where once only style and technique prevailed. By the mid-1950s he altered the ways in which major corporations used graphic identity. And by the mid-1960s he had created some of the world’s most enduring corporate logos, including IBM, UPS, ABC and Westinghouse. He was the channel through which European modern art and design — Russian Constructivism, Dutch De Stijl and the German Bauhaus — was introduced to American commercial art. The first of his four books, Thoughts on Design, published in 1946 when he was thirty-two, was a bible of Modernism. In his later years he was a teacher, theorist and philosopher of design. Although intolerant of faddish trends, Rand ended his career with the same guiding belief as when he had begun: good design is good will.”

He goes on to say that “Rand did not set out to reform graphic design, he just wanted to be the best at what he did. Reared in the commercial art production departments — or `bullpens’ — of New York’s publishing and advertising industries, he understood the demands of the marketplace and accepted that design was a service not an end, or an art, in itself. Yet he was critical of the poor aesthetic standards that prevailed, maintaining that everyday life — especially commercial art — could be enriched by the artist’s touch. He modelled himself on avant-garde artists, such as painter Paul Klee, designer El Lissitzky and architect Le Corbusier, each of whom advocated a timeless spirit in design. Adhering to Le Corbusier’s dictum that `to be modern is not a fashion, it is a state’, Rand devoted his life to making what he modestly called `good work’, and what others called exceptional design.” (Stephen Heller. “Paul Rand” Phaidon Press Limited)

The Swiss Style

Rand was one of the originators of the Swiss style of graphic design which “emphasizes cleanliness, readability and objectivity”. (“Swiss Style” Wikipedia Online)

Emerging from the modernist and constructivist ideals, the Swiss Style can be defined as an authentic pursuit for simplicity – the beauty in the underlines of a purpose, not beauty as a purpose in itself. The principle “form follows function” became a battle-cry of Modernist architects after the 1930s. As a consequence of this principle, most of the Swiss Style craft is devoted to the minimal elements of style such as typography and content layout rather than on textures and illustrations. (Diogo Terror “Lessons from Swiss Style graphic design” – Smashing Magazine)

Paul Rand’s influence and modernist philosophy underpins much of the graphic design industry today.

Some of his work

(Images sourced from http://www.iconofgraphics.com/Paul-Rand)

(Image sourced from paul-rand.com)

One final quote

[blockquote author="Paul Rand, A Designer's Art"]From Impressionism to Pop Art, the commonplace and even the comic strip have become ingredients for the artist’s cauldron. What Cézanne did with apples, Picasso with guitars, Léger with machines, Schwitters with rubbish, and Duchamp with urinals makes it clear that revelation does not depend upon grandiose concepts. The problem of the artist is to defamiliarize the ordinary.[/blockquote]

Wordpress is an extremely popular open-source CMS (Content Management System) and is currently by far the most popular CMS available.  Once the website is set up, a CMS allows any user to log into the website using a backend and update the website content.  It means that clients can update their website themselves rather than having to send updates to a designer for them to manually code into the website.

Here are some of the reasons that I love to design and develop websites with WordPress.

Open Source

Due to the fact that WordPress is open source it is completely free and can be downloaded and installed on a web server in a matter of minutes.

Easy to Use

It doesn’t take long to get used to the WordPress backend.  This can be used to update any aspect of the website including, menus, pages, blog posts and other website content.

Themes

Wordpress themes which control the layout and look of the website can be quickly installed.  There are several free themes available as well as commercial themes which tend to be higher quality and are offered at an extremely affordable price.  Themes can be purchased from several sources such as Themeforest and Woo Themes.  Any theme can be customised by a web designer who understands HTML and CSS to fit in with the company branding and desired layout of the website.

Plugins

One of the greatest features of WordPress is its huge range of plugins which are basically snippets of code which extend the functionality of the website.  Plugins are developed and supported by anyone in the WordPress community and can help achieve anything from fancy photo galleries to social media integration.

Search Engine Friendly

There is little point in launching a website if it is not optimised for Search Engines (such as Google).  Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is built right into WordPress and can be extended even further with the use of SEO plugins.

Large Community Support

Wordpress is growing hugely in popularity and is being adopted by more and more web designers and developers.  There is an incredibly large community of people that are ready to answer any questions that may arise and these same people are constantly releasing new themes and plugins as well as contributing to the development of the WordPress framework itself.

Your Website Will be Quicker to Produce and Therefore be a Lot Cheaper!

What this all means is that a beautiful, functional website can be produced in a fraction of the time and therefore at a fraction of the cost of developing a website from scratch.  There will always be the need for such bespoke, custom coded websites but I feel that most companies would benefit from all the advantages that WordPress has to offer.

This is why I use WordPress for most of my client websites.  If you have any further questions feel free to get in touch.

A large proportion of clients who approach me to design a website for their business, haven’t got a professional logo.  Often it is something they haven’t had the chance to put any thought into or they don’t see a particular need for one as the main aim of their website is to present information.

A professionally designed logo should always be the starting point once the idea for a business has been finalised.  The purpose of a logo is to capture the company’s goals, purpose and emotion in an easily recognisable, simple, graphical form that looks good in any context (whether in black and white or colour, on business cards, websites or billboards).  A logo should be well-crafted and refined which may make it appear simple at first glance, but it is far from it.  The best logos go through several revisions to make sure they achieve their purpose in the most efficient and memorable way and can stand the test of time.

Logos commonly consist of a combination of a graphical symbol and well-matched typography but they can often be just typographical or a symbol on its own.  They form the basis for any company branding and advertising.

Common mistakes

A lot of people recognise the need for a logo but decide to try and find the quickest and easiest route to obtaining one without fully understanding the disadvantages of these approaches.

Generic logos

A lot of websites have sprung up recently that offer ready-made logos for sale.  The customer simply looks through the options presented and purchases their favourite after filling their company name in the blank space provided.  The major problem with this approach is that the whole process of the designer capturing the “essence” of the business has been circumnavigated.  Although the end result may be colourful or aesthetically pleasing, it communicates nothing to your audience about what makes your company unique.  It will of course be lost in the sea of advertising in which we live and can even put customers off your company as it may make it appear impersonal.

Crowsourcing

I was surprised to discover that a recent UK government business initiative to help encourage people to start new businesses recommended a particular website which offers them the chance to present a short design brief to hundreds of “designers” from around the world.  The reason I call them “designers” is because there are absolutely no necessary criteria for them to fulfil before they can offer their designs to the customer.  Therefore there is a huge variation in quality.  The other downside is that there is absolutely no connection between the company and the designer during the process which means that it is very unlikely they will be able to effectively produce a logo which achieves its objectives.

Asking a friend with no background in logo design

In order to save a few pennies, many people will ask someone they know (who either has an arty side or is a bit of a computer enthusiast) to produce a logo for them.  Often these friends have little or no experience in logo design and while there is a chance they could surprise you with exactly what you are looking for, the end result will probably fall far short of your expectations.  In order for a logo to be used in any format (tiny and still readable or massive and sharp quality) it must be designed using industry standard software and methods by someone who is very experienced in not only the right software, but also the process behind logo design.

Use of clipart or stock images

What some people don’t realise is that the use of clipart as a logo (which is often extremely dated and not very nice to look at) is actually illegal.  Remember also that the purpose of a logo is to be unique!  While the growing number of stock image sites (where you can buy the rights to use a professional image) is extremely useful when you need a great image fast, it is also illegal to use any part of these images as a logo or trademark.

The process that should take place

The first and most important step is that the designer should fully understand what you are trying to achieve and what makes your company unique.  To help them do this it’s often ideal to meet and discuss this in person.  If this is not possible then they may send you a lengthly questionnaire with questions specifically written to help them to go deeper into the company and give them a behind-the-scenes look at what makes your company unique.  The inspiration behind the company, its goals and objectives, its target audience and researching other companies in the same field are all essential information which the designer will gather before going any further.

The next stage will be brainstorming, sketching and coming up with several concepts before narrowing these down and refining the best ones.  This should all be done with paper and pencil which allows the designer free reign of thought.  Most designers will be happy to show you the sketches that lead to a strong idea.

Once a design concept has been decided upon, this can be drawn up on the computer using the correct software and further refinements made (using grids etc).  At this stage the design should still be in black and white as the focus should be on the form itself.  This insures that the logo will stand strongly even when used in black and white.

The final step will be addition of colour.  A strong understanding of colour theory will help the designer evoke emotions in the target audience.  It is very important to ensure that the logo is readable, recognisable and effective whether in the form of a tiny icon or the size of a multi-storey billboard.

Finally

It’s important to note that the client should be involved at every step of the logo design.  This will help ensure that the designer is following the best route to achieve the final result and he/she can clearly explain their decisions at every stage.

Starting a company is usually the result of several years of thought, planning and inspiration.  Working with a designer to capture this in a beautiful, simple, refined logo can be an incredibly rewarding experience and can help crystallise your vision for the company and encourage you to push forward.  It is definitely worth the time and finance required as strong branding will set your company apart and give your audience an incredibly professional first impression.