Roll Your Own Logo

Prompted by a post from librarian extraordinaire, Joyce Valenza, I spent a happy hour fooling with logos (despite lacking any graphic design talent or training, I find typography and graphic design fascinating).

She writes about free logo tools, including https://www.designevo.com/, which is ridiculously easy and fun to fool with.  Here’s one I did for my employer.

And one for the blog, 

Yeah, they are nothing to write home about, but the tool is easy to use, and fun. And worth your while if you can’t afford a Pentagram designer! (And you probably can’t!)

 

 

Pretty picture: A couple of design tidbits

Herewith, a couple of engaging graphic arts encountered in my traversing of the web.  First, Design Facts, a collection of brief, fascinating snapshots of design history.

design_facts

Designer Michael Bierut of Design Observer takes on (and defends) the much maligned new logo for the The Metropolitan Museum of Art. (Which, like him, I rather like.)

Met Logo

 

From his piece,

There are lots and lots of reasons that this is, if not a great logo, then certainly a better logo than the one it’s replacing. The old symbol, that beloved (albeit to my eyes kind of generic and clip-artsy) Pacioli M, needed to be captioned with the full name of the institution: five words, ten syllables, twenty-six letters, all in poor old Trajan. This was cumbersome in every sense, particularly as the institution prepares to open in the former Whitney Museum building on Madison Avenue (to be renamed The Met Breuer after its architect). That new site, along with the less-visited but utterly lovely Cloisters, makes the Met a citywide complex that demands not a monolithic identity, but a way to connect up all the pieces. The new logo, a self-reading wordmark that acknowledges the institution’s two-syllable colloquial name, will serve effectively as the hinge for the whole system.

Change=hard.

%d bloggers like this: