Dan Rubin's SuperfluousBanter

The Final Word on IE6

Wednesday, September 3rd, 2008

A friend of mine recently asked the ques­tion “Why the Hate on Inter­net Explorer 6?” He explains some very log­i­cal rea­sons why it doesn’t make sense to be so neg­a­tive about IE6, and as I agree with him on just about all points, I thought I’d give the clear­est answer I could.

Sim­ply put, IE6 shouldn’t get any hate. Nor should it receive any love, either.

The best thing the web stan­dards com­mu­nity (and any other smart web folk) can do is stop com­plain­ing about an ancient browser whose devel­oper waited too long to replace, and just stop sup­port­ing it altogether.

One of the ben­e­fits of web stan­dards is that our doc­u­ments are marked up cor­rectly before we reach the pre­sen­ta­tional stage. One of the ben­e­fits of IE6 (et al) is that we can tar­get spe­cific ver­sions using Con­di­tional Com­ments. The com­bi­na­tion of the two means we can still send our con­tent to old browsers, but not have to bother with the pre­sen­ta­tion, thus sav­ing our­selves hours of need­less headaches and frus­tra­tions, while not pun­ish­ing the users of said old browsers by deny­ing them access to our content.

There’s con­stant dis­cus­sion about whether or not to con­tinue sup­port for IE6, and the only rea­son ever given these days in favor of sup­port­ing that browser is its mar­ket share. That mar­ket share is dimin­ish­ing, and we’ve already reached the sec­ond beta of IE8, so let’s start drop­ping it already. Make the argu­ment against sup­port­ing IE6, to your clients, your boss, your team—whoever needs to hear it, keep apply­ing pres­sure and don’t back down.

It’s time to stop sup­port­ing IE6. Period.

Categories:

• CSS
• Internet
• Technology
• Web Standards

55 Comments

Regex Patterns for Single Line CSS

Friday, August 29th, 2008

Update: You can now down­load the Text­mate macro file rather than record­ing your own (skip to the down­load »).

There has been plenty of dis­cus­sion about the pros and cons of single-line style sheets, and I’ve been includ­ing them as an option when teach­ing CSS man­age­ment and orga­ni­za­tion in my Web Design World pre­sen­ta­tions in Chicago, Seat­tle, and later this year in Las Vegas (at Web­Builder) and Boston.

It’s a mat­ter of preference

As a fel­low Side­bar–ian (Side­bar­bar­ian?) Steve has been try­ing to con­vince me to use the single-line approach for a while of course, and Bryan and Jon have also become fans of this for­mat­ting style for their own work. Although they are enam­ored with it, I haven’t taken to it yet, still pre­fer­ring to write my style sheets using the “nor­mal” indented for­mat­ting most of us are used to.

Now, before any­one gets their knick­ers in a twist about why they love, hate, “can’t live with­out” or “will die before they try” single-line for­mat­ting, let’s just take a step back and remem­ber one thing: it isn’t any­thing spe­cial, just an alter­nate for­mat­ting style that doesn’t affect the way the browser inter­prets the style sheet one iota. It’s a per­sonal preference—remember that before jump­ing on or off this par­tic­u­lar bandwagon.

Always keep your options open

Now that I’ve got that out of my sys­tem, let’s talk prac­ti­cal­ity: there are indeed ben­e­fits to be had when using single-line CSS formatting—for exam­ple, I find it can make a dif­fer­ence after a project has been com­pleted, at which point I’m usu­ally more inter­ested in visu­ally scan­ning a style sheet for the selec­tors first, and then for a par­tic­u­lar prop­erty I’m inter­ested in edit­ing. This is where I’ve found single-line for­mat­ting can come in handy.

But my edi­tor already does that!

This is the point where some peo­ple will start going on about how you could just use Textmate’s “fold­ings” fea­ture to get the same visual result (with­out alter­ing your file), or how CSS Edit has a handy list of all the selec­tors in a col­umn on the left side of its win­dow, or that you could always use your editor’s “find” com­mand and search for the selec­tor you want to edit. Yet while those are all per­fectly log­i­cal, sane sug­ges­tions, they don’t account for flex­i­bil­ity and choice.

Just another way of doing things

Much like Jon Hicks with his harem of web browsers, I tend to be a bit of a “text edi­tor polyg­a­mist”, bounc­ing from Text­mate to CSS Edit to Coda to BBE­dit to Transmit’s text edi­tor and a host of CLI edi­tors, mostly depend­ing on my mood (though some­times con­tex­tual if I’m at a com­puter that doesn’t have a par­tic­u­lar application—a Win­dowsXP box with noth­ing but Notepad, for instance). It’s the times when I’m using an edi­tor that doesn’t have “fold­ings” or pretty columns of selec­tors that I start to appre­ci­ate single-line CSS when mak­ing quick edits, so I’ve started con­vert­ing style sheets to a “sim­ple” single-line for­mat (with­out the left-aligned tab blocks to start each rule’s prop­er­ties) once they are ready to go live.

Pat­terns fit for a kilt

Edi­tors like Text­mate and BBE­dit have built-in com­mands for for­mat­ting (the stan­dard, multi-line approach) or com­press­ing (the entire style sheet on one line, osten­si­bly to reduce file size by strip­ping white space) CSS, but no way to con­vert to single-line for­mat­ting and Textmate’s “For­mat CSS Com­pressed” bun­dle can for­mat your stylesheet to a sin­gle line per-rule, though it’s all squished together, mak­ing it dif­fi­cult to scan due to a lack of white­space. Con­vert­ing a style sheet by hand every time would be much too time-consuming to bother with, but that’s where reg­u­lar expres­sions come to the rescue.

In Text­mate, you can record a macro using each of these regex pat­terns as a sep­a­rate step (I’m sure other edi­tors have a sim­i­lar fea­ture, so please feel free to post details in the com­ments below). This allowed me to cre­ate a “For­mat CSS Single-line” com­mand, com­plete with a key­board short­cut, which enables an easy switch between multi– and single-line formatting.

Unfor­tu­nately, as of this writ­ing Text­mate macros can­not be exported and shared For those using Text­mate, get­ting the macro is a sim­ple mat­ter of down­load­ing, expand­ing and double-clicking this file:

• Down­load the “For­mat CSS Single-line” Text­mate macro » (ZIP, 1KB)

While sim­i­lar to “For­mat CSS Com­pressed”, this macro retains a sin­gle blank line where your orig­i­nal con­tained two or more blank lines (help­ful if you group your rules), and adds white­space that matches my stan­dard for­mat­ting pref­er­ences (which I find makes it eas­ier to scan quickly). To switch between each for­mat­ting style, just run each com­mand in turn (via the Bun­dles menu or the key­board shortcuts).

How­ever, that wouldn’t be much use to every­one who doesn’t use Text­mate, so here are the respec­tive groups of regex I used for the conversion:

\n{3,}
\n\n
 
[ \t]+
 
(?m)([;:])\s+
$1
 
\s*}
 }
 
\s*{\s*
 { 
 
[ \t]*,[ \t]*
,
 
@import(.*?);
@import$1;\n\n

What’s miss­ing

In Text­mate and BBE­dit I can return to multi-line for­mat­ting with a sin­gle com­mand, but that might not be as sim­ple in other edi­tors. What I’d love to see is a pair of shell scripts that con­vert from multi– to single-line and back, and pos­si­bly a web-based proces­sor that does the same (paste your style sheet into a textarea, select your for­mat­ting, hit “process” and the script pro­duces the result). If any­one would like to take on those tasks, I’ll hap­pily update this post to link to the prod­ucts of your labor.

And in the end…

If you’ve never tried single-line for­mat­ting, this makes it easy to exper­i­ment with­out com­mit­ting your­self (and I do rec­om­mend giv­ing it a try—you may be sur­prised once you’ve worked with it a few times).

Ulti­mately, because I can return to multi-line with a sin­gle com­mand my pri­mary text edi­tor should I ever feel like it, automat­ing the switch from multi– to single-line is a con­ve­nient way to get the ben­e­fits of single-line for­mat­ting with­out back­ing myself or my clients into a for­mat­ting corner.

Categories:

• CSS

60 Comments

Simple CSS Hover Tab Thingy

Tuesday, August 19th, 2008

Update: The orig­i­nal edit of this post and demo file didn’t quite work in IE6/7 (ok, didn’t work at all, really). That’s what you get when you rush and/or don’t care about cer­tain browsers :) See the com­ments for my quick expla­na­tion of the fix (the demo now works in FF2/3, Safari 2/3, Opera 9, and IE6/7).

Ok, so the name won’t win any awards, but let’s be hon­est: nei­ther will this mini-tutorial, or the idea itself (noth­ing ground­break­ing here, move along…). But after throw­ing together a quick lit­tle (you guessed it) hover/tab/thingy for my pre­vi­ous arti­cle, I thought I was fun enough to share, in case you find a need for it someday.

The usual suspects

The “thingy” in ques­tion is just a sim­ple unordered list, with each list item con­tain­ing an anchor and an image—we want the images in this case because I want them to dis­play in my RSS feed and for any­one who can’t (or chooses not to) view the styled ver­sion of this site.

Note: Feel free to ref­er­ence images in the stylesheet rather than inline if that suits your pur­poses. Because I know you need per­mis­sion, don’t you…

If you were too lazy to click the link to my pre­vi­ous arti­cle above (and who could blame you, really), here’s a quick demo page.

Mov­ing right along…

First, the markup (with URLs trun­cated to save trees):

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<ul id="hover-tab-thingy">
  <li id="one"><a href="...">One <img ... /></a></li>
  <li id="two"><a href="...">Two <img ... /></a></li>
  <li id="three"><a href="...">Three <img ... /></a></li>
</ul>

Sim­ple, unclut­tered, uncom­pli­cated. Just how I know you like it.

Next, the CSS—not quite as short as the markup, but that’s how the story often goes:

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ul#hover-tab-thingy {
  position:relative;
  padding:0;
  width:500px;
  height:498px; }
#hover-tab-thingy li {
  float:left;
  list-style:none; }
#hover-tab-thingy li a {
  float:left;
  padding:9px 21px;
  background-color:#eee;
  color:#999;
  font-size:9px;
  text-align:center;
  text-transform:uppercase;
  border-right:1px solid #fff; }
#hover-tab-thingy li a:hover {
  background-color:#f60;
  color:#fff; }
li#one a,
li#one a:hover {
  background-color:#e5e5e5;
  color:#555; }
#hover-tab-thingy li a img {
  position:absolute;
  left:0;
  top:30px;
  width:500px;
  height:460px;
  clear:left;
  margin-left:-9999px;
  padding:1px;
  border:3px solid #e5e5e5; }
li#one a img,
#hover-tab-thingy li a:hover img {
  margin-left:0; }
li#two a:hover img,
li#three a:hover img {
  border-color:#f60; }

This is all fairly straight­for­ward, so here are the high­lights that may help when dupli­cat­ing this on your own:

1. The entire idea is that you have tabs that are each asso­ci­ated with con­tent (images in this case) which are made vis­i­ble when the user hov­ers over the tab. There are more things you could do with this, but that’s your job, grasshopper.
2. The tabs are floated; the con­tent ele­ments (img in this case) clear the floats.
3. The con­tent ele­ments are set to position:absolute, so they can appear in the same loca­tion for each tab. To accom­plish this, the ul is set to position:relative (in short: an absolutely posi­tioned ele­ment will be posi­tioned rel­a­tive to its near­est posi­tioned ancestor—see Doug Bowman’s great write up for more), and it’s prob­a­bly a good idea if the dimen­sions of your ul (the con­tainer for your con­tent) have a lot in com­mon with those of your con­tent elements.
4. IE6 has a prob­lem revert­ing ele­ments that set display:block on :hover to their orig­i­nal state (e.g. display:none). To counter this, use a neg­a­tive left mar­gin as the default posi­tion­ing, and then set margin-left:0; on the hover state, which works in all mod­ern browsers.
5. The width and height is spe­cific to my exam­ple (the dimen­sions of the images I used), ditto for the padding on the tabs and the top posi­tion­ing on the img ele­ments (to push them below the tabs). Bend them to your will.
6. Every­one dies at the end of The Departed. Seri­ously, every­one. That should be the sub­ti­tle of the movie.

Oblig­a­tory wrap-up

This may be some­thing that you’ll find use for on a reg­u­lar basis—one of those tiny snip­pets of reusable “stuff” that you’ll be glad you don’t have to type every time. Or you’ll never need it because you can’t for the life of you think of any rea­son why you’d need to reveal some con­tent whilst hov­er­ing over a tab (I’m pretty much just paint­ing the sar­casm with a roller at this point…).

What­ever your future may hold, now you have some­thing you might not have had before, and that’s never a bad thing—unless we’re talk­ing about some sort of dis­ease, in which case…

Categories:

• CSS

14 Comments

I Need Some Spacing

Tuesday, August 19th, 2008

Way back in June over on Sub­trac­tion, Khoi pre­sented a tweaked ver­sion of the Gmail inter­face (and then a follow-up arti­cle regard­ing the feed­back on the first), improv­ing spac­ing and align­ment by mak­ing a few small but sig­nif­i­cant changes overall:

“…by nor­mal­iz­ing the space between like ele­ments, align­ing ele­ments along sim­i­lar spa­tial planes, mod­er­ately increas­ing the space between stacked items and pay­ing atten­tion to how ele­ments are framed by neg­a­tive space, we can get what is, in my opin­ion, a sig­nif­i­cantly more attrac­tive Gmail inter­face.” —Khoi Vinh

This is some­thing I’ve wanted to see for a while in Gmail, and in fact had pre­sented a few exam­ples last year (July 2007) as part of my inter­view process at Google (I really must write about my series of amaz­ing job inter­views last sum­mer, but I’ll leave that for another time). After reading—and commenting—on Khoi’s post, I had intended to pub­lish my vari­a­tion on Google’s mid-2007 inter­face, but as the ded­i­ca­tion to blog­ging con­tin­ues to elude me, this too fell a few pages back in the Mole­sk­ine to-do list—until now.

The Setup

I took a slightly dif­fer­ent approach than Khoi, though my goals were similar:

• Give all ele­ments more room to breathe
• Make it eas­ier to tar­get nav­i­ga­tion and oft-used links
• Nor­mal­ize align­ment of text and other elements
• Do it all with­out dras­ti­cally alter­ing the appear­ance of the interface

That last goal was impor­tant and acted as a guide to the rest: I wanted to present improve­ments that could be made right away with­out caus­ing a neg­a­tive reac­tion among Gmail users.

Rather than adjust the line height of the main mes­sage area, I decided to bring as many of the other ele­ments in line with that as I could. You’ll notice spac­ing improve­ments within each line how­ever, reclaim­ing some poorly used hor­i­zon­tal space. Like Khoi, I felt the mes­sage lines were a bit crowded, so to give the impres­sion of more room in those lines, I removed the grey hor­i­zon­tal lines between each item and allowed the back­ground color to bleed through (all they need is some separation—further empha­sis on those lines just adds weight). The result is that it feels like there’s a bit more space, with­out actu­ally adding any.

The main nav­i­ga­tion lost its under­lines (again, remov­ing unnec­es­sary visual weight—the “this is a link” cue is super­flu­ous here) and gained space (match­ing the base­line of the mes­sage list). The “Com­pose Mail” link got an extra high­light by way of a back­ground; the extra padding makes it the only nav­i­ga­tion item that doesn’t align with the base­line, but that also gives it a lit­tle more con­trast ver­ti­cally, thus it stands out more with­out hav­ing to scream for atten­tion. Less impor­tant text links within the mes­sage area were made slightly smaller (but kept their under­lines), and “Mark as read” was pulled out of the drop-down menu and given its own but­ton: I had spent a week or so watch­ing peo­ple use Gmail before doing this exer­cise, and that was the sec­ond most fre­quent action users needed (right behind “Delete”) but was hid­den in the drop-down.

Finally, all rounded cor­ners were cleaned up a bit, footer text was aligned to the base­line, and the mes­sage list was enclosed on the right side (maybe it’s just me, but it’s always bugged me how those lines just run right to the edge).

Reveal Already!

• Before
• After
• After (with baseline)

I’m still happy with how this turned out a year later, and it was well received by the Google inter­view crew. Com­pare the before and after images, and you’ll also notice that the improved spac­ing in this exam­ple actu­ally reduces the over­all height of the page, allow­ing two addi­tional mes­sage lines to fit in the space of the original.

Both Khoi’s and my realign leave almost all the orig­i­nal ele­ments of the inter­face intact—this is very impor­tant when mak­ing changes (even if only sug­gested ones) to such a pop­u­lar appli­ca­tion, and the same goes for any prod­uct, pub­li­ca­tion or web site that is part of a person’s daily routine.

Whether Gmail incor­po­rates any of these sug­ges­tions is out of our hands, but it’s still nice to have the chance to compare.

Note: many changes have already been made to the Gmail inter­face over the last year, and even in the last few months since Khoi posted his exam­ple. Not all are improve­ments, but at least someone’s mak­ing an attempt.

Categories:

• Design

12 Comments

Some Thoughts on Logo Design

Friday, June 20th, 2008

A few months ago, I had the plea­sure of answer­ing a few ques­tions for an arti­cle being writ­ten by my friend Elliot Jay Stocks for .net Mag­a­zine (Prac­ti­cal Web Design here in the States). Elliot quoted me quite nicely in the arti­cle, but I thought it would be inter­est­ing to pub­lish my com­plete answers here, along with his ques­tions, and he kindly gave his permission.

Note: The arti­cle itself is full of some solid infor­ma­tion and quotes some bright minds—well worth pick­ing up if you get the chance (as is the rest of the issue).

EJS: Please could you tell us a bit about your­self and your work with logos so far?

DR: I’ve always loved logos, and some of my ear­li­est exper­i­ments with design were logo­types (I tend to pre­fer type-driven logos with min­i­mal imagery). I don’t get as many oppor­tu­ni­ties to design logos for clients as I’d like, but I do a fair amount for friends and per­sonal projects, some­times for imag­i­nary ideas just as an excuse to design a logo or logotype.

EJS: Which logo (that you’ve designed) are you most proud of and why?

DR: I’m torn between the cur­rent logo for Super­flu­ous­Ban­ter and a logo I did a few years ago for a real estate com­pany that by brother was start­ing. I put most of the work I do into two cat­e­gories: design for myself, and design for others—so those are my cur­rent favorites from each category.

In the case of SuperfluousBanter’s cur­rent logo (there have been a few over the years), the “sb” mark on an orange field sport­ing a lighter spi­ral (with the counter of the “b” over the cen­ter of the spi­ral) has a nice bal­ance of sym­me­try and asym­me­try at the same time, with­out get­ting complicated.

With the logo for the real estate firm, the busi­ness name was that of the main part­ner in the com­pany, so it required a visual mark in addi­tion to the logo­type in order to com­mu­ni­cate the type of busi­ness. Not that it was ground­break­ing in any way, but the mark does its job well, with­out being too complicated—the more basic the shapes, the eas­ier it is to rec­og­nize an image at a glance (impor­tant for prop­erty sig­nage), and the bet­ter its repro­duc­tion at var­i­ous high– and low-resolutions. The qual­i­ties of the mark that make it my favorite are sim­i­lar to those of the Super­flu­ous­Ban­ter mark: a com­bi­na­tion of sym­me­try and asym­me­try that results in bal­ance (it’s extremely impor­tant to have all three), and in this case, the end result was almost exactly what I pic­tured in my head before even sketch­ing the first rough.

EJS: Can you name an all-time favourite (web-related) logo that some­one else has designed? Why do you like it so much?

DR: It’s hard to decide, but I’ll go with Dan Cederholm’s Cork’d logo. I like Dan’s style in gen­eral, but the Cork’d logo is just ele­gant in its own lit­tle way (recur­ring theme: com­bi­na­tion of sym­me­try and asym­me­try result­ing in an over­all bal­ance). I wear the t-shirt so much that I’ve almost worn it out ;)

EJS: What do you con­sider to be the cur­rent trends in web indus­try logo design? Are they good or bad?

DR: While there are still a lot of “web 2.0” design trends every­where (not just online, either), in my expe­ri­ence these design trends result almost as much from client demand as from design­ers impos­ing those trends on their work. As I said before, I’m a fan of type-driven logos, with sim­ple, straight-forward visual marks to sup­port the type. Aside from the drop-shadows, bevels and other stan­dard design clichés, I don’t think there are any awful trends per se (some peo­ple might say there’s been enough rounded type and bright, happy col­ors, but if a client wants their brand to be ‘friendly’ etc., more often than not it’s the right direc­tion), but I could still do with­out bla­tant 3-D or an over abun­dance of fil­ter effects. And let’s not get into the pros and cons of reflections…

EJS: Where do you get your inspi­ra­tion from and can you rec­om­mend any good places of inspi­ra­tion or resources (books, web­sites, design­ers, etc.)?

DR: I’m con­stantly search­ing for new sources of inspiration—my per­sonal pref­er­ence is to find as much as pos­si­ble offline rather than use the web. Not only does it give my eyes some needed respite from the glare of the screen, but I find my reac­tions are dif­fer­ent when read­ing a book, sift­ing through old album cov­ers, dig­ging through piles of magazines—the tac­tile expe­ri­ence engages more senses, and that helps get the cre­ative juices flow­ing for me. As for spe­cific resources, I think it’s use­ful to have good exam­ples around (for com­par­i­son if noth­ing else), and the Logo Lounge series of books is a good place to start for more recent designs. A sim­i­lar resource online is Logo­Pond (though I wouldn’t per­son­ally sub­ject in-progress work to pub­lic exam­i­na­tion like some users of the site). If you can find books about logo design and brand­ing written/printed prior to the mid-1980’s, you’ll find some great exam­ples of how to design marks with­out going over­board (a sim­ple mark that repro­duces well in black after being faxed will likely trans­late quite nicely to the web).

EJS: How do you approach the logo-designing process? Is there a sys­tem (maybe in 6 steps) that you can recommend?

DR: While I don’t have a fixed set of steps in place for any of my work (I like to think it helps avoid pat­terns and forces me to think from a fresh per­spec­tive on every project), I do tend to go about the problem-solving process the same way each time:

• Find out as much as you can about the client/product/organization/person/service that the logo will rep­re­sent. With­out that input, a logo is just some text, lines and color.
• Research other brands in the same market—I used to use this step as moti­va­tion to “design a bet­ter logo” or “beat the com­pe­ti­tion” but I feel that was mis­guided. Now I use it pri­mar­ily to get a feel for what is already suc­cess­ful, and to know what to avoid visu­ally in order to cre­ate some­thing unique.
• Sketch and Play—this step is the most ran­dom for me: some­times I’m sketch­ing with pen­cil in a Mole­sk­ine, other times I’m mess­ing around in Pho­to­shop or Illus­tra­tor, and a few times the good ideas have come on the req­ui­site cock­tail nap­kin or in the mar­gins of a mag­a­zine. The exper­i­men­ta­tion is the fun part—it’s not always needed (if you see the final logo in your head the first time inspi­ra­tion hits, get to a com­puter as quickly as pos­si­ble and just draw the thing!), but when you’re wait­ing for the light­ning to strike it’s a good way to try things out.
• Design in black and white until you have your logo­type and/or mark, then add color and adjust as needed.
• Once you have some­thing, print it out. A lot. I tend to do most dig­i­tal logo work in Illus­tra­tor so every­thing is vec­tor and eas­ily printed at var­i­ous sizes. Print vari­a­tions in type weight/style, as well as inverted ver­sions of your logo­type and mark. Print large ver­sions and paste them to the wall, or lay them out on the floor. Look at them for a few hours, or a day, or a few days—as much time as it takes you to really let things sink in.
• If it’s paid work, don’t deliver final art until receiv­ing final pay­ment. If it’s for a friend, give them a CD over dinner.

EJS: What tools fea­ture in your logo-making process (and how promi­nently, like mainly Illus­tra­tor and only a bit of Pho­to­shop?), and can you name any that peo­ple might not know about (i.e: any apps out­side of the Adobe family)?

DR: I guess I already answered that for the most part. Illus­tra­tor is my pri­mary weapon, though any­thing that allows vec­tor illus­tra­tion should be fine (even if you’re design­ing a logo for a web site—there’s noth­ing worse than design­ing a kick-ass logo in Pho­to­shop at 72dpi and then real­iz­ing that you have to recre­ate it from scratch as vec­tor art because the client wants to make t-shirts).

EJS: What prob­lems have you encoun­tered in design­ing logos and how do you avoid them?

DR: Aside from fig­ur­ing out the start­ing point (always a mov­ing tar­get from project to project), clients and their expectations/preferences are the biggest prob­lem. That’s a big­ger topic of dis­cus­sion, but I retain as much cre­ative con­trol as pos­si­ble, and let my clients know up front that I expect them to trust my opin­ions. If you’re firm with your client from the begin­ning, their expec­ta­tions will fall more closely in line with yours.

EJS: What gen­eral tips can you offer for other logo design­ers out there?

DR: Play. A lot. Look for sources of inspi­ra­tion that may not seem imme­di­ately obvious—if you’re stuck for ideas on a logo for a children’s book, start dig­ging through some heavy metal album cov­ers, or a stack of per­for­mance car mag­a­zines, or some swimwear cat­a­logs. The con­trast can do won­ders for your subconscious.

EJS: How would you define a good logo? What ele­ments does it need?

DR: Though I have my own, sub­jec­tive thoughts on this, I’m sure not many would dis­agree that a good logo is one that com­mu­ni­cates the intended mes­sage effec­tively. Usu­ally that mes­sage helps define the brand in an eas­ily digestible way. So a suc­cess­ful logo is one that can rep­re­sent the brand (whether it’s an indi­vid­ual, a small non-profit orga­ni­za­tion, or a multi-national corporation).

When it comes to the actual visual ele­ments, I pre­fer logos that do the above described job with­out being com­pli­cated. Strik­ing the cor­rect bal­ance between typog­ra­phy, color, shapes and sym­me­try isn’t some­thing that can be quantified—it will be dif­fer­ent for every logo. I find that the logos that pique my inter­est the most are those with some level of bal­anced asym­me­try: if you split a logo down the cen­ter of either axis, it should not result in a mir­ror image. Type is a straight­for­ward way to achieve this, since you can very eas­ily bal­ance the let­ter­forms with­out cre­at­ing a mir­ror image. In fact, you’d have to work very hard to achieve that effect, to the extent that if it was the intended effect, it would likely be a more cre­ative end result (and as such, become a suc­cess­ful excep­tion to the mir­ror rule), for exam­ple the ambi­grams of John Lang­don.

EJS: What would you con­sider to be mis­takes in logo design, be them your own or made by others?

DR: A level of detail that pre­cludes low-resolution or small-size repro­duc­tion, includ­ing color and type selec­tion in some cases. This is a poten­tial issue with the pre­pon­der­ance of pho­to­re­al­is­tic logos that are becom­ing increas­ingly pop­u­lar with soft­ware com­pa­nies, but I’m start­ing to see it creep into other uses. I also feel like type­face selec­tion is often not given as much care­ful con­sid­er­a­tion as it requires. Of course, logos can still be suc­cess­ful with­out being “per­fect” by any one person’s definition.

Many thanks again to Elliot and the edi­tors of .net Magazine.

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