Logo Design Love

In terms of general Web strategies:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=341138

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=351709

But here are some tips specific to niche blogs. I run a niche blog that has 17,000 subscribers and am in the process of building up others, so I have a few tips (but I am by no means an authority on this!):

- TWITTER! Use search.twitter.com to find people talking about your topic and talk to them. Follow them, get them to your site. Twitter about your topic. Use TwitterFeed to stream the titles / links to your blog posts into your Twitter feed.

- Sometimes niches are interesting to broader audiences. On HN you see stories relating to the Ruby programming language (or Rails) all the time - these are pretty niche topics but with some general appeal to hackers / programmers.

- Find the other blogs. Comment on them wisely and try to build up relationships. Find areas where you can complement what others are doing rather than just copying them. For example, let's say your blog is specifically about flash photography. You could get interest to your articles from general digital photography sites! If you're going to be niche, find the blogs that are one thicker branch further down the tree.

- Blog carnivals ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blog_Carnival )

- Get "outsiders" interested in your niche! I wasn't really all that interested in typography or logo design, but ILoveTypography ( http://ilovetypography.com/ ) and Logo Design Love (…

>> “...but also simple enough that you can't possibly need a whole book to explain it.”

Graphic designer Paul Rand designed several logos during his long career which will be familiar to many people to this day.

The deliverable for Rand was not just a mark, but also a presentation book (example [1]), which is different from the Style Manual describing how to use it.

A dilemma for designers in business is how to justify costs of their designs. (Not much different from R&D I would guess).

While it sounds like a good _idea_ to design cockpit in such a way pilots can be certified once and fly either plane, I could imagine an equally compelling argument the cost is too great compared to the cost of training (I have no idea why—maybe if training costs we’re somehow the burden of a secondary market—whatever).

In which case you might need a great deal of research and maybe a book to make your argument?

[1]: https://www.logodesignlove.com/next-logo-paul-rand

> I would say perhaps he was better at pivoting failures early

Right. Good at deciding, throwing weight behind even a wild and dramatic choice (like his sort of pirate-captain-and-pirate-crew with the original Mac team) and committing.

And then unusually brave at cutting losses or finding a new use for failures. He cut a hell of a lot of losses when he returned to Apple.

But in interviews he was also sort of a student-philosopher of decision-making. Witness the clip on this page, with Jobs talking about being taught about not interfering with brand design (in this case the NeXT brand) by Paul Rand:

https://www.logodesignlove.com/next-logo-paul-rand

You can see that made an impression on him and probably got absorbed into his sort of precision-anecdote-driven way of communicating his ideas.

(The other thing I like about this clip is seeing Jobs talking quite personally about someone he admires)

> Thus, we usually have to write the name of the oil company as "Exxon", though its proper spelling is "e exx o n". (Don't make the mistake of pronouncing "Exxon" like "exon"; you will appear unsophisticated.)

The development of the Exxon exx is shown here:

http://www.logodesignlove.com/exxon-logo-raymond-loewy

It's clearly a double-x rather than any more exotic character, the styling is just that - styling.

The Wikipedia article has it as /ˈɛksɒn/ and that's the pronunciation used in their commercials:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_s80Hbac2b8

So that's way off-topic. But what he says about "dox" vs. "doxx" is as much a preference as "focused" and "focussed", or "busing" and "bussing" - there's no "correct" way, not even if it is the original way.

If I were you, I would be inspired from http://www.cgsociety.org/ http://abduzeedo.com/ http://blog.drawn.ca/ http://www.logodesignlove.com/ http://www.davidairey.com/ http://www.helveticbrands.ch/blog/ and will try to create my ideas first on paper with pencil and then digitize them with proper technology, searching for tutorials like the ones on tuts network http://tutsplus.com/ CG Society is a great place to immerse yourself with graphic design.

But I think that if you want to learn graphic design just to create your own design and logo, I would say don't bother. You can easily hire a designer to do that for you and it would be cost effective. Just learn to distinguish good design from the bad and learn to effectively communicate the ideas you have.

There is a problem with the results. It can be best demonstrated by looking at what people came up with for the Lego logos, and compare with this: https://www.logodesignlove.com/lego-logo . You can see more than a few of the old logos categorized in the "Least Accurate" area of the memorized interpretations. For example, the pure black block letter one, and the red block letters on yellow background. I'd suggest this shows very high accuracy, since those people are accurately remembering logos from the 40's.

Still, its an interesting study. Too bad the results are less accurate than the participant's memories.