CreativeHerb.com

Let me tell you the story of how I narrowly managed to avoid making a crappy logo. I am doing a logo design for a gaming website, and I instantly thought of all the cool texturing and gimmicky things that I could do with it. I think it is a fairly common situation to be in when you are working with the gaming genre.

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. (more…)

Now, I don’t mean how many fonts you have available in your Photoshop font list, I’m talking about using 5-6 different font styles crammed in a single layout. It’s like plucking beautiful doves from the sky and messing up their feathers on purpose.

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. (more…)