Occasionally, I get my hands on some anchor points that need a better foundation. Such was the case for a recent client project. The guilty font was none other than Quicksand. It’s a trendy free font right now. The main problem with the font is the lack of optical balancing in the letter forms. I’ve included an enlarged view of the previous form (pink) and the optically adjusted form (blue). Whenever you have an arm or bowl of a letter meet a vertical stem, it’s tasteful to have some tapering in the connecting area so the font doesn’t feel too clunky. Especially at small sizes, the font will tend to look muddy or heavy.
You can see the full update here.
Head on over to gingermonkeydesign.com to appreciate a little illustration/type goodness. I particularly enjoy the color selections and textures. I have yet to tire of the extremely ornate as long as it is hand done, the more raw the elements the better.
My responsibilities were logo creation, product design, photography, website design, interaction, and managing the shopping cart coding and some training.
This is a proposed logo design for a network Flash developer experts in Utah County.
Instead of clubbing people over the head with an ubiquitous illustration of the actual tines of a gear, these letter forms reference the workings of a motor with pulleys, belts and gears.
When creating strong logo systems, it’s important simplify instead of cramming or illustrating a concept into a logo. Example: Nike does not have shoes or sporting equipment in their logo. They do, however, communicate speed and motion.
Team Grub logo design features custom type
I came across a Utah company that I have a lot of respect for for many reasons and noticed a weakness in the typography of their corporate logo. Kerning. For those of you who may not be familiar with the term, kerning is the space between pairs of letters. Applications like Adobe Illustrator and InDesign have excellent tools for adjusting your fonts to look excellent at many levels. (photoshop on the other hand seems to have significant problems reading the embedded kerning pairs of fonts)
Have you ever looked at a sign and thought, “man, something about that looks really low quality” but couldn’t pin down what the problem was? Even though the fonts were nicely sized, colors tastefully chosen, and correctly spelled, the kerning may have been misadjusted. Viewers make subconscious decisions about reliability and having a logotype or signage well kerned will help clearly communicate quality.
One of the simplest ways to kern a word is to view a set of three letters and compare their spacing, adjust any letters to the proper position for consistent spacing, then proceed to do the same test for the rest of the letter combinations.
There are finer details of kerning that I won’t discuss in this post, but you can help your logotypes read properly by taking extra time to adjust the spacing between the letters. There is never a good reason to overlook kerning when creating a logo that will represent a company and oftentimes be the first way a company is introduced to a new prospect.
As you can see in the example below the original directpointe logotype seems to divide the word into sets of “dir”, “e”, “c”, “tp”, “o”, “inte”. I’ve quickly kerned the type to feel and read better.
I don’t know if you will clearly see it on your screen, but this font also suffers from a slightly heavier “d” and “p” weight. Consistency and craftsmanship in font weight creation can also help text read and feel proper and help the kerning appear more correct.
Exercise files
I’ve uploaded a Illustrator/PDF kerning file for you to work with. The second layer is presently invisible. After you’ve kerned the type, make the layer visible and compare. I’d be interested in seeing your versions.
