What colors do Internet companies prefer for their logos? You might assume that they run the spectrum equally, but you’d be wrong. Colour Lovers took the time to collect the logos of the top 100 web brands and sort them by color. Attention marketers: looks like the pink/purple slice is wide open — the green space isn’t too crowded either. Further down they break the companies down into to category, and we notice that social networks seem to stick to the blue-green part of the rainbow. Whereas orange, Flavorpill’s color of choice, is all about blogging. Click through to check it out.
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For the past eight years Bill Gardner, the principal of Gardner Design and creator of LogoLounge.com, has filed an annual report on major trends in logo design worldwide for Creative Review. So what did he find this year? Transparency has become ubiquitous, as have brighter hues. Text is more important than ever. Color use is “more unrestrained now” — in spite of the economy. The Eastern Bloc is rocking it (“Designers there seem to have a freedom that some Western designers have lost.”), as is Scandinavia. Also spotted: lots of optimism, nested circles, “greenness,” and surface effects. Click through to view examples of five of our favorite trends from the 2010 report.
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Perhaps taking a note from AOL (nay, Aol.?), MTV is updating their logo for the first time in 30 years in the hopes of appealing to those pesky millennials. Frank Olinsky and his team at Manhattan Design created the original, which gave the network a lot of flexibility: they could play around with the colors/materials of the “M” while maintaining brand identity.
The new logo will feature revolving imagery housed within the iconic design — and drops the “music television” tagline altogether. [Insert joke about the last time you turned on MTV and saw a music video here.]
According to the press release:
It represents a new visually defined MTV, stimulating its past, present and future and embracing it’s diversity. Everything from Jersey Shore, to the VMAs to collaborations with the MoMA. The logo is part of MTV’s re-invention to connect with today’s millennial generation and bring them in as part of the channel.
So what do you think? Does this reboot better reflect the brand’s current identity? Or are they futzing around with something that was sacred?
Gallery exhibitions may be sexier, and museum patrons may be wealthier, but the government-backed National Endowment for the Arts is still alive and begging for your arts attention. The 2011 budget for the NEA was just proposed by President Obama at $161.3 million for the fiscal year, the same goal he set for 2010, which was ultimately increased by Congress to $167.5 million. (Some perspective: the Corporation for Public Broadcasting is slotted for $470 million, international disaster assistance for $860 million, and proposed military construction will net a staggering $18.18 billion.) What else is new?
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We’ve already chatted about the America Online rebranding, in which the online media conglomerate went hip with a sans-serif font, lowercase letters, and punctuation. (Aol. > AOL?) It got us thinking about the efficacy of that one small dot, and what brands are trying to convey by punctuating their logos. From greater-than symbols to obnoxious exclamation points to a growing number of quotation marks, we have to wonder if punctuation is the new emoticon.
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Rarely does graphic design inspire such heated discussion as in the case of the almighty logo (with the recent exception of Arnell’s Tropicana packaging, which we’ll be glad to never, ever revisit). Corporate versions tend to inspire particular ire, but are occasionally, thoughtfully, worth a second glance. After the jump, we have ten logos from big box retailers on down, plus secrets — lots of secrets! — that these companies may or may not want you to decode.
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