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Archive for March, 2010

Logo design should be stretchy

Friday, March 26th, 2010

Why?

Because a logo design needs to cover a number of key aspects for successful delivery as we will explore in todays entry.

At Mediamojo we understand that a logo is the first point of visual contact for your customers, but we also keep in mind how its going to be used across different mediums. Before we tackle any graphic design project,  careful consideration is given to the following aspects: reproducability, colours, reversability, complex simplicity, font and versatility.

The initial idea…

This is where the target audience is identified, relevant symbolism applied, sketches are made and the main idea conveyed in a few final concepts…

Reproducability

It is very important to think about where the logo is going to appear, what is it going to be printed on and how can it be reproduced to suit other media such as signage and packaging.   Aspects we consider are:  how much detail to add to your logo design. Lots of small shapes and skinny lines should be avoided as they could disappear or print very broken and rough when reduced to small sizes. We also look at the eveness of white negative or white spacing and carefully consider any gradients which may be used to colourise your logo.  As a client you may be very easily tempted to get carried away with your design and add cool or funky effects, but the bottom line is “does it make the design better, or does it make it worse.”    When in doubt, leave it out.

how a logo can be reproduced

Reversability

This is process where your logo should be able to look outstanding on a black background, usually in muted shades of black, grey and white.

Colours

Colour is one of the most emotive elements at your disposal and can vary from warm, cool, neutral, vivid, complimentary, analogous, soft, light, dark, bright and saturated.  Colour unfortunately is bound by ethics and morals so subject matter can never be overlooked when applying colour… for example a butchers would not be painted red, red is alarming and can symbolize blood – in the same way wrong combinations of colours can alter the message such as: primary colours used for a deep and serious Law Firm, reds, yellows and blues symbolise variety and happiness. There are some colours that will convey a message more successfully than others.

How colours can mean different things

Complex simplicity

This could be looked at as bit of an artform at turning something very simple into something interesting by making a couple of graphical adjustments to create a bit of visual flare and excitement.  Overly complex logos are a no no as when reduced for business card or letterhead format  some of the intricate detail can be lost or filled in by printer inks.

Font

In the careful design process, we choose a font that is appropriate and looks great alongside your logo, often customising the type to appear as to be part of the logo.  Often, a logo is simply stylised text so its very important to choose fonts appropriate to the message being conveyed, similar to choosing colour palettes.  An important aspect of font is its readability and the simple rule applies once again – funky things like drop shadows and 3d effects can make things a little hard to read and reproduce, so when in doubt, leave it out.

Keeping type simple and uncluttered

At the end of the day, your logo should be “stretchy” in the way that it should cover all the above aspects and if it is, then your branding for further collateral, websites etc.. will come together very nicely.

We hope this helps and gives you an insight as to how we do things and if you like, let us know!  We look forward to working with you on your next big project!

Categories : Other stuff, Print Tips
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Recent Projects

Tuesday, March 23rd, 2010

The recent months has seen us working on engaging projects from a series of both new and valued clients.  Below you can read up on brief excerpts and see what we came up with – from the team at Mediamojo, please enjoy!

Easts Leagues Foundation – Community Benefit Fund

To design a logo that reflects community spirit and the idea of giving back to the community.  The logo must jump off the page and generate an emotional reponse
to the viewer.

Pomegranate Marketing

To create branding for a marketing company called Pomegranate Marekting.  Utilize strong colours, fresh ideas and create a contemporary and appealing logo.

1300 Cruise

To create a website which focuses on ‘best value deals and personalised service’ for ocean cruises.

BreakinWind

To create visual branding for a company called BreakinWind who produce beach accessories such as towels and wind breakers.  The ideals include fresh, funky, naughty and appealing to a 18-30 year old market.

If you would like to see more of our examples of our work , please see the following galleries:  Graphic Design, Web, Print, Illustration

Categories : Other stuff, What's New
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Adding posts to your Blog

Thursday, March 18th, 2010

To write a post:

  1. Log in to your WordPress Administration Panel (Dashboard).
  2. Click the Posts tab.
  3. Click the Add New Sub Tab
  4. Start filling in the blanks.
  5. As needed, select a category, add tags, and make other selections from the sections below the post. Each of these sections is explained below.
  6. When you are ready, click Publish.

Check out the video below for a more indepth visual guide

Descriptions of Post Fields

WordPress Admin Writing Post Advanced Panel – Top of Page

Title

The title of your post. You can use any words or phrases. Avoid using the same title twice as that will cause problems. You can use commas, apostrophes, quotes, hypens/dashes, and other typical symbols in the post like “My Site – Here’s Lookin’ at You, Kid.” WordPress will clean it up for the link to the post, called the post-slug.

Post Editing Area

The blank box where you enter your writing, links, links to images, and any information you want to display on your site. You can use either the Visual or the HTML view to compose your posts. For more on the HTML view, see the section below, Visual Versus HTML View.

Preview button

Allows you to view the post before officially publishing it.

Publish box

Contains buttons that control the state of your post. The main states are Published, Pending Review, and Draft. A Published status means the post has been published on your blog for all to see. Pending Review means the draft is waiting for review by an editor prior to publication. Draft means the post has not been published and remains a draft for you. If you select a specific publish status and click the update post or Publish button, that status is applied to the post. For example, to save a post in the Pending Review status, select Pending Review from the Publish Status drop-down box, and click Save As Pending. (You will see all posts organized by status by going to Posts > Edit). To schedule a post for publication on a future time or date, click “Edit” in the Publish area next to the words “Publish immediately”. Change the settings to the desired time and date. You must also hit the “Publish” button when you have completed the post to publish at the desired time and date.

Publish box

Visibility – This determines how your post appears to the world. Public posts will be visible by all website visitors once published. Password Protected posts are published to all, but visitors must know the password to view the post content. Private posts are visible only to you (and to other editors or admins within your site)

Permalink

After you save your post, the Permalink below the title shows the potential URL for the post, as long as you have permalinks enabled. (To enable permalinks, go to Settings > Permalinks.) The URL is generated from your title. In previous versions of WordPress, this was referred to as the “page-slug.” The commas, quotes, apostrophes, and other non-HTML favorable characters are changed and a dash is put between each word. If your title is “My Site – Here’s Lookin’ at You, Kid”, it will be cleaned up to be “my-site-heres-lookin-at-you-kid” as the title. You can manually change this, maybe shortening it to “my-site-lookin-at-you-kid”.

Save

Allows you to save your post as a draft / pending review rather than immediately publishing it. To return to your drafts later, visit Posts – Edit in the menu bar, then select your post from the list.

Publish

Publishes your post on the site. You can edit the time when the post is published by clicking the Edit link above the Publish button and specifying the time you want the post to be published. By default, at the time the post is first auto-saved, that will be the date and time of the post within the database.

Post Tags

Refers to micro-categories for your blog, similar to including index entries for a page. Posts with similar tags are linked together when a user clicks one of the tags. Tags have to be enabled with the right code in your theme for them to appear in your post. Add new tags to the post by typing the tag into the box and clicking “Add”.

Categories

The general topic the post can be classified in. Generally, bloggers have 7-10 categories for their content. Readers can browse specific categories to see all posts in the category. To add a new category, click the +Add New Category link in this section. You can manage your categories by going to Posts > Categories.

Excerpt

A summary or brief teaser of your posts featured on the front page of your site as well as on the category, archives, and search non-single post pages. Note that the Excerpt does not usually appear by default. It only appears in your post if you have changed the index.php template file to display the Excerpt instead of the full Content of a post. If so, WordPress will automatically use the first 55 words of your post as the Excerpt or up until the use of the More Quicktag mark. If you use an Explicit Excerpt, this will be used no matter what.

Send Trackbacks

A way to notify legacy blog systems that you’ve linked to them. If you link other WordPress blogs, they’ll be notified automatically using pingbacks. No other action is necessary. For those blogs that don’t recognize pingbacks, you can send a trackback to the blog by entering the website address(es) in this box, separating each one by a space.

Custom Fields

Custom_Fields offer a way to add information to your site. In conjunction with extra code in your template files or plugins, Custom Fields can modify the way a post is displayed. These are primarily used by plugins, but you can manually edit that information in this section.

Discussion

Options to enable interactivity and notification of your posts. This section hosts two check boxes: Allow Comments on this post and Allow trackbacks and pingbacks on this post. If Allowing Comments is unchecked, no one can post comments to this particular post. If Allowing Pings is unchecked, no one can post pingbacks or trackbacks to this particular post.

Password Protect This Post

To password protect a post, click Edit next to Visibility in the Publish area to the top right, then click Password Protected, click Ok, and enter a password. Then click OK. Note – Editor and Admin users can see password protected or private posts in the edit view without knowing the password.

Post Author

A list of all blog authors you can select from to attribute as the post author. This section only shows if you have multiple users with authoring rights in your blog. To view your list of users, see Users tab on the far right.

Note: You can set basic options for writing, such as the size of the post box, how smiley tags are converted, and other details by going to Settings > Writing.

Categories : Web Tips
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