My Favourite Graphic Design Blogs

When I changed this over to be a graphic design blog I was hoping I'd be able to use a lot of my school work to talk about since I am only working on only the rare side project. Sadly things are really slow in class now, almost to the point of frustration.

We're working on typography right now, but not exactly in the pure sense. While a lot of what we are learning is essential, the module is too short and lacks some of the minute details I would have really liked. I'm slowly becoming a typophile, and would really like to know more of the minutia in regards to fonts. The teacher we have now is awesome, simply because she is really picky about pretty much everything, and is good at explaining things in clear, concise ways, but I'm often left to my own devices because I find the work pretty simple most of the time. I should be encouraged the majority of the class often takes up to twice as long to complete the exercises we're working on, and often with more errors than myself (not to sound conceded or anything), but it can result in me being rather bored, specially since the school has a lot of sites blocked.

From this I end up reading a lot of blogs and am always looking for new ones to subscribe to. I mainly read other graphic design or typography blogs, which both make me realize how much I still have to learn.

So here is a list of blogs I follow, along with a quick little something about them. If you somehow stumbled upon this site in search for graphic design insight, these would probably much better suit your needs for the time being. These links are in the order that I have them in Google Reader, so there is no real order to them.

•Brand New - Part of UnderConsideration.com, this is one of my favourite blogs. It goes into companies rebranding efforts, comparing their old logos and brands to the new brand. It'll also examine new companies from time to time. While they don't go too deep in to overwhelm, the insight into how they see new brands is educational and they don't hold back on their criticisms, even of efforts they deem well done.

•We Made This - An interesting blog that seems to cover a range of different items, seemingly whatever the authors seem interested in. They offer links to some cool and interesting stuff, and occasionally talk about different projects. While they don't delve as deep as other blogs often do, it makes for some faster reads and it's updated often enough to keep my happy.

•Swiss Miss - I just recently subscribed to this one and I love their content. It's not a deep site, but they put up several posts a day of either great pieces of graphic design, interesting links or simply some cool, quirky stuff.

•I Love Typography - Another one of my favourites, which sadly isn't updated as much as I'd like. It really goes into the 'hows' and 'whys' of type design and is definitely a site worth scouring the archive if you are at all interested in type. When there is an update (seems to be bi-weekly these days) it always puts a smile on my face as the content is always super informative/interesting and really well written. If it weren't for the lack of constant updates, it would probably be my favourite read.

•The Font Feed - From what I can tell, it's a site made to plug FontShop, but it's done is a non-obtrusive way, and the content is just too good to pass up on. Obviously this is another font related site, but rather than delve into the hows and whys that I Love Typography touches on, it goes more into where type is being used, occasionally announces new fonts (from FontShop, of course) and has an awesome, monthly post going into movie posters and media stuff.

•David Airey's Blog - The first graphic design blog I started reading, and probably the most unique I've come across. Rather than delve into design, David Airey instead goes into the world of being a designer. He talks about how to deal with clients, how to land a job, build more experience and all the ins and outs of working within the industry. For anyone who is working in the industry, or thinking about working in the industry, I'd strongly suggest checking this blog out.

•Logo Design Love - Another blog by David Airey, where rather than going into industry details, he now goes into logo design, as the title indicates. The archives here are stocked full of great information including logos he's created for companies and the details of the design process, and new content is put out on a regular basis. If you are at all interested in graphic design, branding, or logo design, I'd say this is a must read.

I have several others I read as well, but for the most part I have simply subscribed too recently to comment on, or feel others I have already talked about are better examples of the same type of thing.

New Logo

I was finding it difficult to portray the idea of transition with text only, with many of my attempts involving the use of changing letter colours. This came across as bad gradients, so tried using gradients, all of which just ended up looking like early ‘90s crap. So I tried to come up with different graphics that could portray the idea of transition.

My first idea ended up being what my final version derived from. I liked the concept, but thought it was a bit too busy and maybe even a bit tacky. I’m a big fan of simplicity, and so I really thought that it was too much like some visual throw up, but one with a solid concept behind it.

Then came this next version, which was even wilder. Despite wanting to make something simpler, I made it more complicated in an attempt to really get the idea of movement going. I think I accomplished the added movement, and thought that maybe it would work well on it’s own (without the text), but that it was just way too busy for my tastes. I debating trying to use it on it’s own, but found it didn’t work at all, even though it probably could with some major work done to it, I didn’t feel like pursuing a road I’d already decided I wasn’t going down.

Determined to fulfill my goal of simplicity, my next design came about. The first version (which I never saved) was still a bit too busy. I had simply made the lines shorter (all the criss-crossing was driving me nuts), but they were still rather thin and the start and end lines were at small, awkward angles. I reduced the number of lines, and then increased their weight to make them a bit more prominent. The idea of black to orange was both to match the text (as far as starting and ending points are concerned anyway), as well as to show a movement from dark to light. A similar idea went into the lines direction, with the vertical line to the horizontal, a sort of ‘standing tall’ symbolism at the end of the journey.

Being happy with this design I tried a few more. One was incorporating an arrow in a few different ways, but I found all of them to be a bit boring and unimaginative. I moved from that to the ‘wave’ concept, which I actually like a bit and think could be rather nice with more development, as it seems to be lacking some life to it. I would have kept going with it, but for some reason it made me think of a bank. I wish I knew why.

To try something else I went with a bouncing ball, from the dot of one ‘i’ to another, but it looks horrible, mostly because of the all caps with on small ‘i’. I probably should try it again with all lowercase letters, but I think it’ll only be slightly less of a failure, so that was that. The last one I tried was the one with the black box, in an attempt to get some irony by keeping the word transition bounded by a black box. In the final version I made the box a bit smaller in an attempt to have the word ‘transition’ escaping the box, but overall I just don’t think the idea works to well for this project.


It wasn’t over here, though. I went with the simple ‘transitioning lines’ one I mentioned above, but I hated how the second line from the right looked, so I then played with a differing amount of middle lines, ranging from the original four, to having as many as seven and as few as one. Anything more than the original was simply too much, and one was, well not dynamic enough. It was pretty much between having two or three, and I felt that three just hit home more for me. It wasn’t overly basic and simple or too crowded. Having only two bars in the middle just lacked a bit of the transitional idea, even though I thought it had a nice look. So yeah, that’s my new logo. I hope you like it. If not, or even if so, let me know.