BonFX

Typography & Graphic Design Blog

3 Ways the logo design process is like making a comic

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Someone just sent me a link to Daryl Cagles comic section on MSNBC where he discusses and shows examples about how he creates his comic strips. He shows the artwork in various stages from rough sketch to final color. This is very similar to how logo designers work. Daryl doesn’t show aborted and half-baked ideas, but rather starts with the final concept he is going to render. This is similar to when a logo designer commits to a concept and finishes the brainstorming process. From this point, Daryl lists the following steps:
  • Messy rough sketching with no attempts to “look good”
  • Finished line art on velum
  • Scan into Photoshop and add color
The parallels to the logo design process are as follows:
  • Brainstorming concepts with no attempt to “get it right”, until one concept is selected and refined
  • Vector art construction, usually in black & white
  • Addition of color in Illustrator, after contrasts and tonal values are worked out
Every cartoonist has their own style and method of brainstorming and producing final art. The same also applies to a logo designer. However, with all the variation in methods, these basic steps apply in general to. They reflect the essence of the creative process and not necessarily the specific mechanics. Hey, we all dance to a different tune, right? So visit Daryl’s article today and enjoy the work of a master cartoonist!

First report: Hubspot’s Website Grader for BonFX

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I have the good fortune of having owned “bonfx.com” for the last 10 years. It could be any domain name, but having had it for so long with the same subject matter is a benefit for SEO. It has always been a freelance graphic design website focused on my portfolio of web, print, and logo design work. It has never had a blog on it until last week. As of right now, I only have about 15 articles, all authored in the last week. I got a hat tip from Jacob Cass over at Just Creative Design to check out the Hubspot Website Grader. I ran a report and I think – someone correct me if I’m wrong – I have reason to be pleased with where I’m at after one week of changing to a blog format. Of course I have a lot of work to do now, but it could be worse. See the report: http://www.grader.com/site.php?URL=bonfx.com I have a score of 83, and a Page Rank of 4. All of my old content is still being indexed, like totally random stuff and like Flash demos installed in their own folder from my days as a hack Flash Developer, temporary junk like a folder of pictures from when I sold my Jeep (96 Jeep Cherokee 4×4 – what a vehicle!), old customer sub-domains, and temp folders for friends like “stuff” hanging off the root. So what did I learn? First, I learned that the way to increase SEO and ranking is to be humble, true, and honest and write good content. There is so much bad information out there that tries to game the system, but it won’t work. I just read last night, I think it was Jacob Cass (not sure now) that there are hundreds of PhDs working at Google and the like. You are not smarter than them, and they know how to write algorithms that smoke out the impostors. Essentially, do what is good and right, and do it in a good and right way, and you will do well in ranking. Essentially, it seems to be a fact now (and certainly more so as search engines get even better) that search engines will bless hard honest work and not much else. Part of my blogging will chronicle my work in regards to ranking. Click the link above to Website Grader for a detailed report (and then get your own) of the BonFX website, or read some interesting facts I need to act on immediately:
  • My page title is way too long. It should be 70 characters or less and mine is 236
  • My site description is also way too long. It should be no more than 150 characters, but I hit 160. I guess less is more for these first 2 points!
  • 2 images are missing alt tags.
  • My domain is going to expire in 4 months. I had no clue this could count against me, though the site is old! The farther the expire time is out in the future, the better search engines feel about the site.
  • My Page Rank is 4. From what I gather, 4 is pretty good considering what has been going on on my site for the last 8 years (nothing!).
  • I have a form! I guess having a form on the site counts towards looking alive to the search engines!
  • I am looking to lock down some decent search engine rankings for 2 basic terms: freelance graphic design and logo design. It’s not clear if I have to pick one or the other and focus on it. For now, I’m not doing too badly (20-30 ranking) for having done nothing, essentially, in regards to “freelance graphic design” other than having had that in my title for eons. Notice I didn’t even rank for logo design, but I’m just starting that, like 5 days ago:
    freelance graphic designer 1,401 30
    freelance graphic design 1,775 30
  • It looks like my site vocabulary is too high, being ranked as college undergraduate. It is suggested I lower it. It’s probably due to my predilection for run-on sentences. Why stop when you are having fun? Yes, I’ll work on that. If you want some long sentences, try reading German Biblical scholarly titles translated into English. There are some sentences that are close to a full page. Not good, not user-friendly.
  • Overall, I got a score of 83.
  • The last thing I learned is that there is an astonishing array of very powerful tools to help you analyze your site, and a wonderful cadre of friendly bloggers to help find the way.
As usual, thanks for reading! Please subscribe to my feed in the top right corner to keep tabs on my progress

50 Feedback comments wanted on new blog!

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Blogging tips needed!

My blog is brand new. I’m new to this kind of blogging as well. I’m fairly new to SEO though I have gotten some great results with my initial site in it’s pre-blog incarnation. For instance, I was in the top 20 for some key terms (“freelance graphic designer“), and number one for local variations on that.

Evaluation of graphic design articles

If you have a few minutes, I’d love to hear some drag-down, knock-out assessments of some of the graphic design content on the site. The first few articles are longer and not very optimized, but as I researched how to write over the last week, I think I’ve made some progress. There are a lot of great resources and my learning uptake is about as fast as it can be. I’m drinking from the WordPress SEO firehose!

WordPress plugins to manage site and increase SEO of site

Can you recommend anything specific? I’d love to chat about it…

Evaluation of anything else for SEO

As my site finishes coming together and I get more content going, I’d love to hear whatever you might have to say, if you have any experience in SEO at all. It will be much appreciated! Thanks in advance!

6 best graphic design books for one penny

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Here are 6 books for one penny each (US dollars) that are a steal! They are used of course but their information is timeless and you can’t beat the price:
  1. Graphic Artists Guild Handbook (Graphic Artists Guild Handbook of Pricing and Ethical Guidelines) This book contains priceless discussion about and examples of contracts for graphic designer to use. New or used, every designer should have this on their shelf.
  2. Color Harmony: A Guide to Creative Color Combinations Sometimes you simply need to turn away from the computer and pick up a printed swatch book or some other tactile form of inspiration. This is a classic!
  3. Quick Solutions for Great Type Combinations A great book for seeing on paper how to combine classic fonts. Sometimes you just need to see up close examples done by skilled typographer to see what classic fonts are capable of, and how they work in combinations you might not have thought of.
  4. Inspirability: 40 Top Designers Speak Out About What Inspires It’s hard to find 40 designers in one place speaking about the timeless issue of how to get inspiration. For 1 cent, you just saved 5 hours of surfing the web looking for this info!
  5. 2005 Artist’s & Graphic Designer’s Market Why include such an old book? Surely the information is dated. Not exactly, not at all! Most of the information in the book reveals how you should approach all kinds of people, timeless marketing tips, and a ready list of companies that year after year are in the book. So, for 1 cent, you can nab the book. If you really want an updated list, you can then turn around and buy the new version. But for 1 cent, you get to see what all the fuss about this great book is year after year.
  6. Designer’s Guide to Color 3 (Bk. 3) I included this classic book which has been sold for years unchanged. It’s just another book you can turn to and hold and flip through when you need to take a coffee break and your eyes are tired of the glowing screen. It’s timeless and a book I pick up with some frequency nearly 10 years after I bought my new copy.
NOTE: When I checked these out there were limited numbers of copies from various booksellers for the 1 cent price. If the 1 cent copies are gone by the time you read this, there will be some under a dollar. And if you wait long enough (why you’d wait I’m not sure) you might see them again for 1 cent. Happy reading!

Further reading: