While it is good to absorb as much creative output as you can, there comes a time when you must venture within yourself for the answer. Forget the technology, forget your habitual styles, forget the conditioning.

Sometimes you may feel stressful at trying to find the design solution. Please picture this: The designs we try to create are merely solutions to problems that we created in the first place. Without us first creating the problems, there would have been no need to find a solution now. So look back to before the problem occured and see what was working naturally already. There’s the solution.

Try to feel what would be most natural in the design, try to feel your own hints of discomfort. We have become so desensitized to media and sensory bombardment that we don’t even realize the stress on ourselves. Look around and see what makes you happy, and study it. Why does it give you pleasure or peace of mind? Then try to replicate that harmony, strength and comfort into your designs.

Look around you again, caress the textures with your eyes, feel the flow of the air circulating around the room. Go back to the basics, don’t add complication to an uncomplicated matter. Nurturing the pureness of your creativity will unlock many new insights and approaches to design.

Computers are a tool through which our creativity can express all the colors of our imagination. Avoid the pitfall of letting the computer tell us what we can make, but instead, look inside to see what you want to create. It is a fast-paced world we live in, don’t forget to slow down sometimes to enjoy it.

How do you get your design inspirations?

1. Keep it really, really Simple.

Find your business message, and distill the idea into a symbol over and over till there’s nothing left but the single message. Try to stick with one central meaning. You have 2 seconds of someone’s attention. By the end of that 2 seconds, they either understood the meaning of your logo, or they got confused and shut you out forever.

2. Use symbols, Not Pictures.

Firstly, a symbol is easy to identify at different sizes, from giant billboard signs to tiny business cards. Secondly, symbols are more universally understood, especially if you managed to distill the brand idea into a proper symbol.

3. Make your symbol look Rock Solid.

Use font and symbols that look strong. Even feminine logos can have gracefully strong lines. But if it looks too fragile or undecided, your logo will get lost in the sea of crappy logos.

4. Use Less Colors.

Colors are part of your brand image, associate your brand with a color that will appeal to your target market. And the less colors you use, the less it cost for printing. Designing first in black and white will help with this.

5. Test it Hardcore.

Move the symbol around to different sides of your business name. Place it over textured graphics, place it over different colors. Zoom way out. Zoom in big. Rotate it. Put it in the middle of other logos. Is your logo still looking awesome? Great. If not, work on it some more.

There you have it, the quick and dirty on determining if a logo is good or bad. Got any other essential tips for good logo design?

That’s where I come in. Over a series of posts, I will be discussing how to improve your brand image through intelligent marketing and design. In a way that anyone can easily understand of course. So please check back often and you can also subscribe to my RSS feed here.

What Makes a Bad Logo?

There are many ways to make your logo irritating, unmemorable or downright wrong. I’ll save the details for another time, but here’s everything summed up into one piece of advice. Don’t over-complicate things. That’s right, it’s that simple. Many people tend to add a billion little meanings into their logo or company name. Or they think they are smart by basing their company name on an inside joke that should be kept at the dinner table. And I’m using logo and company name interchangeably because they are similar enough in their function.

Many people don’t realize that there are other companies out there trying to dig into the same piece of pie. When your company logo or company name is on a big list of choices,  you want something simple and direct. Because people do not have time to research every single one of the options available, so any logos that give a vague sense of purpose will be skipped entirely.

Does your Logo tell the story within 0.5 Seconds?

Pretend you are a stranger to the market and to your business. If you, as a stranger, were to see your logo and business name, would you instantly know what the business is about? The consumer’s mind can be sorted into several piles. The “Seems Interesting and Relevant” pile, the “Completely not relevant to me” pile, and the “It is too vague and I’m getting confused” pile. The first 2 piles are straightforward, but if you end up in the Confused pile, it will automatically be sorted into the “Not relevant” pile as well. Simplify, communicate your business function, and do it within 0.5 seconds.

Sounds like I’m screwed, what can I do?

Don’t worry, rebranding can be done to fix it, and it starts with the logo. If you’re stuck with a vague business name, then you will have to fully utilize the power of the logo. Make the logo stand out. Simplify it. Simplifying it some more. Use a symbolic representation that can strongly communicate your business function. And it better be good because it will have to cover for the weakness of the business name. You might want to consider hiring a identity designer at this point, preferably one with typography and branding skills as well.

I will get into far more detailed solutions later on, so please check back often for those. How do you feel about your current business name and logo? Do you feel that there can be room for improvement?

1. Adobe Kuler AIR

We’re not talking about the website, but the Adobe AIR version which sits nicely on your desktop. And just in case you didn’t know, Adobe Kuler is a software which connects to a community server to share and rate color sets. It comes in both a website version, and a standalone Adobe AIR version which you can grab here.

You can either copy individual hex values from the swatches, or send entire swatch themes to Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop and Indesign. Note: to grab entire swatch themes, you’ll have to create an Adobe account then click on Download in Kuler AIR. Oh and you also need Adobe Switchboard, which creates the connection between Kuler and other apps.

CS4 already has Kuler fully integrated within its software suite, but just in case you haven’t got CS4 yet, this will work just as well for your color cravings.

2. Mondrianum

For those on a Mac, you can also access Kuler through this program called Mondrianum. It allows you to replace the Mac built-in color picker with a Kuler enhanced version. So this is like Kuler AIR, except it’s system wide integrated. Apps like iWork, iLife, Google Sketchup, Adobe Photoshop, Coda, CSSEdit and many more will all work with Mondrianum.

Instead of just stuck with color slider bars or the Ball of Rainbow Colors, you can see what kind of colors other people are using and get some inspiration that way. You may not need it every single time, but it sure helps on a creatively dry day.

3. ColorZilla for FireFox

This little tool is so useful, it’s one of the first Firefox plugins that I would install on a new computer. Just right click and you can access all its functions. It can grab any color value on a webpage, select and save palettes and even scan a site for all the colors used. It does exactly what I want it to do and it does it quickly.

There is no quicker way of coding up CSS designs than to do it with this tool. You can download Colorzilla here. And while you’re at it, get SEO for Firefox too. That’s another bread and butter tool I install for Firefox right away. It checks for 20+ types of link, NoFollows etc.

Selecting colors for a design isn’t easy, but these tools make it much easier. Use it for inspiration, and use it to know the competition. Once you get the hang of it, you can even share your amazing color combinations with the global community too. Do you have any other color tools you would like to share?

I thought of things like imprinting the website name on an arcade red coin slot, or even making it look like an embossed polished brass/metal stamper. Very cool effects to be sure, but after I did some quick tests to see how they would turn out, they just turned out way too complicated.

With my primary background in Print, I realized that the logos might look really cool and gaming-like in an Ad or blog post images. However, it would be inflexible at best when placed in different media or even different places around the website. And scalability would simply be horrendous.

That is exactly why I like working with Vector for logos. I quickly loaded up Adobe Illustrator and thought about gaming and gamers. I needed to distill all the ideas and perceptions of the topic into a symbol that is instantly recognizable and contextually memorable.

The thing with Vector graphics, is that with less or no texturing, the logo’s colour scheme is easily adaptable to different placement scenarios. Light background, dark background, red, pink, blue, yellow, green, whatever. The way I set it up, all I had to do was change the colour of the symbol that I’ve chosen with one click. I left the wordmark itself in greyscale so I would not have to change that, and it’s nice to have some constant in the logo anyways.

Of course, I also had to make sure that all the text and lines were sufficiently thick so that it could be scaled down to a minuscule size and still be legible. Nothing kills a sponsorship logo placement quicker than a poorly designed logo that becomes unreadable at smaller sizes.

After that, just cross your fingers and hope the client likes the design. If you know the client is picky, may I also suggest doing so over a friendly drink or two.

Got any more good logo tips? Would love to hear about it.

Before anyone jumps the gun and tell me about all the super designy stuff that uses a large number of fonts, those are merely the exception and not commonplace. To use a great number of fonts effectively, there must first be a great understanding of typography and how each font can affect one another. Every font that you add to the mix will increase the complexity and difficulty of the design. So use more fonts at your own risk, you’ve been warned!

While the design may have started out innocently enough with the attempt to separate elements in the design, an overuse of fonts usually make it look more like a flea market flyer more than anything else.

If you must use typography to separate areas in your design, try using fonts in the same font family at least. Fonts such as Helvetica or Utopia have a very large breadth of styles, enabling you to use different weights in your design to separate the elements. Such as using “Medium” for body copy and “Bold” for headlines. But even then, still try to keep the different font style usage to a minimum.

After you have mastered using different font weights within one family for your designs, try adding a font from a vastly different font family to create a distinctive difference through the typography. Why use a vastly different font family rather than something more similar, such as Utopia and Garamond? The reason is because the resulting difference might be mistaken for a poorly designed variation of the same font family, rather than a purposely chosen 2nd font family.

The same applies to font sizes that are really close to one another, but not exactly the same. The viewer’s eyes will wonder whether the font size is the same, not quite sure, and it’ll just end up looking sloppy and unprofessional.

Play with your fonts, learn about them, have fun with them, but please do not abuse them. Got any examples of typography that you hate or love? Share them here!

Many things contribute to stress, such as lack of sleep, overworking, taking on too many responsibilities, thinking too negatively and maybe even from a lack of exercise. With all the things that we have to deal with every day, fixing your mental wellbeing might be the last thing on your TO-DO list.

Hence the Creativity Catch 22. Frustration is felt as you struggle to think clearly, to perform well. When a little simple creativity will free yourself from the stress.

If you’re working on a project or problem that requires a certain degree of creativity to solve, you want to be in your best mental condition. Having a big stress knot in your head will not only make your mind difficult to focus, but any creativity that comes will be slow and tainted by your tense mind. So how do we get around that?

Create an Emergency Creative Box.

What the heck is an Emergency Creative Box? Think of it as a time capsule, from the stress-less you, to the over-stressed you in the future. Think of the last time something made you smile and feel awesome. What was it? Write it down on a piece of paper and put it in the box. And you can use any sorta box for this. Small jewelry box, cigarette box (smoking adds to stress by the way!), snuff box, tin candy box, any box that won’t get thrown away easily.

This way, when you are totally stressed out and unable to think of anything but going on a rampage upon those around you, dig into that box and follow a helpful suggestion. You might be surprised what the past-unstressed-you actually thought of to help lift your current mood!

There are many people in various job positions where creativity is frowned upon. That is also one of the reasons why as soon as something goes wrong, the speed of adaptation and response to the situation would be slow. Just do what you’re told and stick to it.

Like the classic sci-fi robot that is only programmed to do certain tasks and nothing else. Something out of the scope happens and you have a headless chicken running around.

On the other hand, The joy of giving birth to that creative moment is priceless. It is a great fulfillment and affirmation of the immeasurable brilliance that humans are capable of.

And besides, creativity can actually lead to job fulfillment. No way… but it’s true! It makes a person feel surprisingly good when they are acknowledged and their ideas actually accepted and implemented. How about stress relief? Or even finally finding a solution to tricky relationship issues? The list goes on, and all it takes is exercising a little creativity.

There is an elitist mindset out there for designers who think that anything not blessed by a designer is sure to be ugly and desperately needs to be saved. Sure, there are many Ads or business card designs that begs to be redone, but the important key is to realize that any one of us can be creative, as long as you let it happen. And that’s exactly what I hope to achieve with this blog.

Having killer graphics software skills is one thing, and having 100% open minded, unbiased creativity, is quite another. You can’t buy that kind of creativity with all the money in the world, yet it doesn’t cost you a single cent.

Do not fall for the stereotype of a creative person as someone that merely has moneymaking skills in a creative area. Creativity is idea sharing based on our individual experiences. You might say, I just use my creativity to think of new ideas, but it doesn’t mean I will share it. Oh right, we don’t share anymore, not unless someone gets billed for it right? The idea will eventually be shared in one form or another, it’s just that we have gotten used to entering money into the equation.

We should nurture creativity in others and in ourselves. With the abundance of problems in relationships and in the world today, we need solutions that actually fixes the problems instead of sweeping them under the carpet for another few years. Creative solutions, not the same old crap that never worked.

I have been wondering what I should write about for my first blog post, or even what this blog should be about. After all, there are already tons of sites out there promising to make you a Photoshop Super Star in 10 easy steps. Or those sites that will deliver crazy Search Engine Optimization for your blog all before dinner time. While I see the benefit of such guides, I just don’t see that as the most worthy goal for me as a person.

*Flashback* Now that I think back, I first started with the idea of using Advertising to convince people to help improve the world. So I went and learned all about marketing and advertising. Well actually, the start wasn’t quite as noble as all that, but it sure made me feel better for having to sell useless corporate crap to people.

Then I realized that perhaps I could distill that idea into using any form of Design to accomplish the same goal. Of course, many media visible designers are already on that boat and I’m definitely not trying to get on that overcrowded vessel.

So that brings us to today. Is it possible to make creativity a wonderfully engaging, amazingly fun, supremely practical lifestyle that anyone and everyone can relate to? Creativity, the life band-aid! I believe that creativity not only empowers you to advance in your career, but it can also bring you a greater joy and fulfillment in every day life. Instead of feeling frustration with a difficult problem, creativity will allow you to connect all the knowledge in your head to many innovative solutions. It’s really a win-win situation.

And who knows, maybe with enough people being happier and able to think of better solutions, we may make this a better world yet.

Hate it? Love it? However you feel, please share it here, I would love to hear it! Welcome to CreativeHerb.com ~