Logos are a great way to help potential customers tell a reputable well-established company from one run part-time in someone’s basement. Business people know this, and that’s why good designers get paid good money for their design skills, while bad ones languish on pirated copies of Photoshop.

But if you manage to sell someone on your design capabilities, there’s still a chance you could gain notoriety, even if your design skills are absent. Your logo might end up on Yourlogomakesmebarf.com, a website dedicated to showcasing the most awesomely bad logos ever created to represent real, live companies. All the greatest amateur mistakes are here: MS Paint logos, illegible type, retina-burning color choices, logos that could not possibly hope to be reproduced in real world applications, etc.

Also check out their Instant Oval Logo Maker, a surefire way to make a great logo that will be forgotten the instant it’s out of sight.

Thanks, Chris!

Mark Weaver is another former classmate of mine, and since his “Make Something Cool Every Day” project was picked up by BoingBoing.net via Morbid Anatomy back in January, he’s been blogged on about a million different blogs. But instead of just blogging about Mark’s work, 16-year-old designer Angelo Logan was lucky enough to score an interview with him. Way to go, Angelo! (When I was 16 I’d just discovered Photoshop.)

I’ve been following Mark’s career for a number of years now, and am pleased to see him succeed in this rough-and-tumble design world. Of course, I’m not jealous or anything. I just wish I’d blogged him first.

News Post Leader article.

$150 seems like quite a deal, especially when professional design services can take weeks or months and cost in the hundreds of thousands. So what makes logo design normally so expensive? Well to start out with, time. Market research can take weeks, before even the first round of logo designs. Then the first round normally consists of dozens of sketches. 8-10 of those initial concepts with be fleshed out in a rough form for delivery to the client. The client can be just one person, but more often it’s many people from different departments, maybe from different offices around the world. Each person will have their own ideas about what the logo should look like.

Subsequent rounds will involve tweaking initial concepts, creating new concepts, trying different color variations, trying variations of those variations, trying different arrangements of the logo’s elements, comping logo concepts on vehicles and buildings, building an identity system based on the logo, deciding how the logo will work on advertising and corporate communications, deciding how the logo will affect corporate culture, creating a roll-out strategy, putting together a brand guidelines for distribution to other designers, etc etc etc.

So as a small businessperson, don’t expect the work to be done after you’ve paid $150 for a piece of artwork with you business name on it. The work has only just begun, and your designer is not even there to help you use your new logo. If you’re in it for the long-term, consider using someone who knows what your business goals are, and who’s going to be available to help you down the road.

Wall Street Journal article.

How much packaging material is wasted every year? This slide show at Treehugger.com demonstrates what are surely some of the most excessive bits of package engineering ever.

Via BoingBoing.net.