Logopalooza 3 - The Art of Brand & Logos. Digital design magazine.

G A L L E R Y • C A S E S T U D I E S • T I P S • T R I V I A • N E W S

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Unit 10, Mississauga,
Ontario, Canada. L6T 5G9
Toll-free 1.866.891.9794 (USA & Canada only)
International & local 1.905.564.6747
Logopalooza and related art is TM/Copyright 2006 The Logo Factory.
The Logo Factory is a registered trademark.
Example logos featured in Logopalooza – Volume 3 – are the property
of the copyright and/or trademark respective holders. Examples of“in
progress”work product are copyright and/or trademark The Logo
Factory Inc.
All rights reserved. Unauthorized use and/or reproduction prohibited.
Logopalooza Volume Three copyright 2017 The Logo Factory Inc. All
rights reserved. For further information on The Logo Factory visit us on
the web at www.TheLogoFactory.com or contact by e-mail at
info@thelogofactory.com
3

e first coined the name Logopalooza back in 2006 as a downloadable ebook to
showcase our work, a bit ahead of its time really - the only place you could find it was
on our website and bandwidth concerns being what they were, we had to be judicous
in how we made it available. Even then, the first volume of Logopalooza was
downloaded a couple of hundred thousand times. It never became as regular as we
would have liked - we published another one in 2011 - but the name continued to
serve us well. It was the name of our blog. When we launched a few podcasts we called
them Logopalooza too. It was always a great name for anything that celebrates logos, branding and the design
of same. This notion was always a part in the design aspect of the branded projects.
We’ve been kicking around the idea of revisiting Logopalooza as a
digital magazine for years now, but as we were celebrating our 20th
anniversary, we started work in earnest. We redesigned the logo,
while keeping true to the carnival vibe of the original, our dancing
Logopalooza man still intact. We’ve
recently launched a website -
www.Logopalooza.com - but where that’s
going to go is anyone’s guess. This is very
much an experimental project, but now
we’ve many distribution channels open, we may make it into a regular thing. Time
will tell.
This volume is still a showcase of work by the gang at The Logo Factory, but we’ve
expanded the format somewhat, adding some some case studies, tips and a few
other bits and pieces. If this turns into a regular gig, we’re planning to open future
volumes to other designers so that they can showcase their work too. We’ll add some
news, some more in-depth technical and design articles and maybe the occasional
surprise. We’ll keep you posted.
W
AboutLogopalooza

Studio 247 Interior DesignBela Flor Real Estate
ReptoLand Pet Shop
1.866.891.9704 www.Logopalooza.com3

1.866.891.9704 www.TheLogoFactory.com
Trivia:SoYouThinkYouKnowLogos?
The Nike Swoosh logo was created in 1971 by graphic design student Carolyn
Davidson, for $35.00, based on a billing rate of $2.00 per hour. Davidson did however,
get more of a payday from the athletic company in 1983 when Nike gave Davidson a
gold Swoosh gold ring and an envelope filled with an undisclosed amount of Nike
stock to express their gratitude.
The Rolling Stones lips logo has come to represent the legendary mouth of Mick
Jagger but designer John Pasche is on record that the original inspiration came from
an image of the Hindu goddess Kali. Pasche was paid £50 for his work at the time, but
received the generous supplement of an extra £200 a couple of
years later. The group themselves now own the
copyright, but in 2006, Pasche sold the original artwork for £400,000. People
often mistakenly attribute the design of the Rolling Stones logo to America
pop art legend Andy Warhol. While he didn’t design the logo, Warhol worked
with Jagger and The Stones on numerous projects including the cover art for
Sticky Fingers and Love You Live
The Volkswagen logo was the result of a 50 Marks office competition, won by
an engineer named Franz Reimspiess (the same man who perfected the
engine for the Beetle in the 1930’s).
The first Apple logo was designed in 1976 by Ronald Wayne and featured Sir
Isaac Newton sitting under a tree, an apple dangling precipitously above his
head.
According to the Yamaha description of their logo:“The
three tuning forks of the Yamaha logo mark represent the
cooperative relationship that links the three pillars of our
business — technology, production, and sales. They also evoke the robust vitality that has forged a reputation
for sound and music the world over, a territory indicated by the enclosing circle. The mark also symbolizes the
three essential musical elements: melody, harmony, and rhythm”.
For more logo news & trivia check out The Logo Factor design blog.

Tips:ThemostpopularlogocolorswithBigBrands

Numbskulls Sour Apple CandyWild Food Plants
Reliable Air ConditioningThe Retirement Hour
New Leaf LandscapingBulldog Studios

CaseStudy:Azure
Regardless of what some absolutists will say,
blends and gradients are perfectly legitimate as
long as they’re used judicially, not as a visual
crutch to substitute for something“missing.”
In this case, we needed to have a flame, it had to
be blue (the company name actually means blue
in Italian) so not much choice. For what it’s worth,
we did create some“flat design”versions anyway.
Alas, they didn’t have the same effect at all (truth to tell, logos with gradients have always required a flat version
anyway – for applications when blends are either not appropriate or technically unsound.)
A lot of designers freak over blends in logos,
claiming that they can’t be reproduced using
spot-color printing.
That simply isn’t true:
When it comes to utilizing gradients in logos, we
can dial it back when applying that logo to other
material.
Just because your lead logo is full of blended
goodness, that certainly doesn’t mean you have to
go to town on collateral material – business cards,
letterheads and the like – with wanton abandon.
Rather, using flat support graphics can set off a
logo with gradients quite nicely.

CaseStudy:HealthNut
Our studio is often brought in the very early stages of startups, to assist
with brand development – the‘look and feel’of the company’s corporate
image. Such was the case for a Vancouver based health food company who
were planning to market
heath bars and related
products under the name
Rawsome! It was under that
identity that our designers
started working up some
rough logo design
concepts:
Due to some trademark conflicts the company had to change their name in mid-stride and after a few weeks
came up with the provocative moniker‘Eat Me Raw.’Naturally, this name
required an entirely different approach to the logo, so we worked up some
concepts using edgier fonts and a rougher approach to the overall design. (left)
Somewhere during the conceptual stages, we developed a
graphic character
which would stay
with us through the
entirety of the project, and was eventually selected by the client as
part of the final logo. It was only after the packaging was designed,
did the client start to worry that the name was a little too
provocative. After talking to some of their vendors, they concluded
that the name – as humorous as it might be – was likely to narrow
the product line’s appeal and marketability. After a great deal of
hand-wringing and gnashing of teeth, a new name – Health Nut –
was proposed by our team. Luckily, the little graphic character we
had developed earlier, fit in perfectly with this new direction and
was, in fact, a appropriate depiction of a‘Heath Nut.’A little bit of font
jujitsu, and Health Nut had their new logo.

Big Bark Custom Card PacksBadland Buggy Off-Road Vehicles
Protair-X Technologies Inc.

Timbuktu Studios
Thinking Green!Speech Geek

Knotty Pine LiquorSal’s Pizza
Blue Omega Entertainment

Soupy’s Tequila Shack
Seaira Air Wave RegulatorsIngena Consulting

CaseStudy:DiceMan
Box manufacturers already have off-the-shelf die
lines available (you can see some of the pink die
lines in the artwork featured) and the assembly
process is set up for particular sizes.
The game originally planned to have die-cut
characters in the four Dice Man colors. These were
scrapped as being too cost prohibitive, so wooden
talisman from another game were substituted.
We designed this logo & packaging almost 20 years ago,
but it still makes an interesting case study in how logos
can‘drive’the artwork of design material around it. Dice
Man was a Canadian board game produced in the late
90s and was distrbuted through toy stores in the USA
and Canada. In this electronic game era, it’s not often
you get to design a logo for a board game. It’s even less
likely that you’ll get to design an entire game, from the
characters to the packaging, to the actual board itself. It’s
actually a lot of fun.
(Above) The Dice Man logo. (Right) the full design,
featuring the character himself. When designing
artwork for packaging and boxes, we have to work
within already established printing specifications.

When working on toy
and game packaging,
there are a host of
government and toy
council regulations in
regards to font sizes,
placement, warning
labels and the like. The
box art has to be
submitted for approval
before production.
Dice Man won
the Swedish
gaming industry’s
Årets Spel (Game
of the Year) in the
2001 Children’s
category.
Toy stores have
shelves that are
particular sizes,
and the box has
to fit within their
displays.

Random 55
GTA ExoticsAzure Midstream Company

Veteran’s For National SecurityDairyland Printing
E2 Optics

Tweeters Chicken CribKindred Spirits & Wine
Tiny Umbrellas children’s charityDizzy Dog pepper sauce
Fogazzo Wood Fired Ovens & BBQsGrilled Cheese & Co

The Logo Mechanics
Dante’s Cafe & BistroFutureTech Networks

Premium Guard Oil FiltersBrett Firm Legal
Putters Wild Extreme Mini Golf

Bullfrog Irrigation & Outdoor LightingThomas Allen Coffee Company
Monster MediaHosting Sky Cloud Services
Texas Heritage Real EstateD4

Ohio Valley Credit UnionAzurn Networks
Health NutLouisville Ladder
Oakley Redfish TourAlcana

Mojo Mamma’s Coffee Hut
Bar La Parata RestaurantThe Vital Spot Sports Bar & Grill

As much as it would help
us in our day-to-day,
there’s really no
automated solution to
turn sketches into usable
vector art (auto-tracing
results are iffy) and only
one way to insure file and
art fidelity – vectorizing by
hand.
CaseStudy:ComicVine
While these types of logos are not for every business
or venture, we’ve had a lot of requests for this kind of
design since we opened our doors and it’s remained a
specialty of our shop. Accordingly, we thought it
would be fun to show you the stages that go into
making a highly illustrative logo – anatomy of
an illustrative design if you will – and to do so,
we’d use the project for Comic Vine, a client
who, as part of their client brief, had requested
an identity with a“comic book vixen.”
Like all projects requiring illustrative work, the design
for Comic Vine began the old-fashioned way – with
pencil, pen and paper. Rather than hurriedly
jumping into desktop design software, our
designers always begin by drawing a series of rough
sketches and concepts which are then shown to the
client and“tightened up”through an iterative process.

Here’s the initial vector art as rendered from
preliminary sketches.
Once we have the
baseline to our vector
illustration, we can
colorize it, add details,
shading and turn the
image into a final study
of our leather-clad
hero. Here she is in
all her glory:
We needed to add some comic book appropriate type
so we worked up a skewed version of the client’s
name. This also needed to be dynamic enough to
stand on its own when use of the full logo wasn’t an
option, due to size restrictions or aspect ratio
limitations.
It was then just a
matter of
assembling the
various
components
into a full
logo.
Voila:

Aviva Capital ManagementPure Soul Coffee Company
Fusion Cafe Coffee HouseAnna Lord’s Lingerie
Red Door RealtyOra Lee’s Kitchen & Caterin

Opinion:TheDesignContestPyramid
The risks, rewards & payoffs of hosting (or entering) a logo design contest.
Designers
submitting
quality,
original ideas.
People who have coped
designs from somewhere else or
using material from stock image sites.
People with a working knowledge of design
software but little design skill or experience
in logo design or branding.
People with little or no skill and limited knowledge of
design software.Motivated to enter design contests by the
"earn money,anyone can submit" claims of the host site.
Most design contest sites do not have vetting procedures
in place - anyone can join and participate in contests anonymously.
Designers who reuse
recycled designs &
concepts fromother contests.

CaseStudy:Logopalooza
From the beginning, we knew we needed – this
was supposed to be a‘celebration’of logos, so it
had to be funky. Upbeat.
Maybe even a little zany.
When we first designed
the Logopalooza logo
back in 2006, we even had
a little dancing dude (who
was plugged into an iPod
for the podcast series.) For
what it’s worth, here’s how everything
looked back then:
Trouble is, we were never happy with it.
Sure, it worked with the theme but it just
wasn’t there. The longer it hung around, the less
“there”it became. The entire concept revolved
around the logo being consistent and yet we kept
changing it with each outing.
The little dancing guy came and went. The font
stayed the same, but we changed its
configuration. And so on.
Logopalooza remained one of
“those”internal branding
projects – something that
we’d get around to
redesigning when we had the
time. For this design, I knew
from the get-go that I wanted
something different. I wanted unique,
colorful and a logo that spelled out
“celebration.”Easy, right? Not quite. This
logo is not without some challenges,
including the fact that Logopalooza is a very
long word. Eleven letters long to be exact. There’s also
two‘L’s, which are a pain in the kerning department.
Due to its main purpose (book covers like this one) the
logo needed to end up with a
squarish aspect ratio so we began by
stacking the letters. It needed a bold,
circular font, so the design was based
on Futura Extra Bold, made even
rounder and bulbous with absolute
circles. We looked for angles that we could
mirror throughout the design and how circles
could trim letters that were in proximity to
make interesting shapes that could be turned
into a logo. You can see some of the
deconstruction process at left.

Still unsure of the frequency of publication so for
the time being, we added a volume number‘bug’
to the design.
Choosing the right colors
for a logo is always
important, but in this case
would be critical – color
would not only bind the
design together, it would
lead the viewer’s eye
through the word.
With the fractured letters
and the word Logopalooza
itself, legibility was going
to be a big issue so we had
to use muted, harmonious
color schemes, trying to
avoid combinations that
would clash and/or vibrate.
Most of the schemes were
black and three colors (the
one we ended up with was
black plus four.) Once we
had the palettes figured
out, it was time to start adding them to various shapes
in the logo:
While we originally intended to ditch our little
Logopalooza dancing man, at some point he found his
way back in. He still seemed to fit with the general
theme of things and it’s always nice in a re-brand if you
can hat-tip the legacy design.

TechTips:VectorFiles
In technical terms, a vector graphics file is your
logo artwork, broken down into a series of
geometric shapes, consisting of outlines that
are curved and joined at X Y coordinates or
points. These
coordinates
and shape
outlines are
stored as
mathematical equations,
creating small and
portable file sizes that
are infinitely editable.
This is what a
vector file looks
like in preview
mode (left,)
wire-frame
mode (right,)
and without
vectors visible.
In the simplest
terms, you can
imagine a vector shape as a rubber band, wrapped
around nails that have been pushed into a
pegboard. The vector shapes work pretty well the
same way. Move the nail and the‘rubber band’
shape will change. The idea of vector formats also
applies to and typography that’s featured in your
design.
When type has been converted to a vector shape,
it is no longer editable as type (but is editable as
artwork) and doesn’t require
the font used to be installed
in the computer that’s
opening up the file. These
are referred to as
outline fonts.
Vector formats can generally be identified by the
following file extensions –
.EPS (Encapsulated Postscript.)
.AI (Adobe Illustrator proprietary format.)
.PDF (Portable Document Format.)
.SVG (Small Vector Graphics.)
.CDR (Corel Draw proprietary format.)
If you don’t have vector versions of your logo, you’re gonna need to get some.

Logopalooza
Logopalooza is a semi-regular publication devoted to the art of brand & logo design.
Each volume features design examples, case studies, tips, news and other interesting
tidbits revolving around logos and design. To be notified about future volume releases
visit Logopalooza.com
TheLogoFactory
The Logo Factory Inc. is a web-centric design studio that develops logos and brand
identities for clients across the globe, their primary activity since 1996. Clients can visit
The Logo Factory web site, view logo examples, submit their job requests to a team of
logo designers who can then take these ideas and bring them to visual reality with
preliminary, yet finished, preliminary designs. These initial concepts can be previewed
on The Factory Floor, a client only area, where logos can be fine-tuned until project
finalization. Once the project is completed, clients can download all the relevant logo
files and formats, while TLF design staff can guide you through the add-on design and
brand-building phase. For more information visit TheLogoFactory.com

www.Logopalooza.com
Logopalooza is a monthly publication of The Logo Factory Inc.
www.TheLogoFactory.com

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