Branding

Once a revered publication, Graphis has made the transition to an all-digital existence and continues its long tradition of hosting design competitions. The winners of the latest Advertising competition were recently announced, with the Platinum winners shown below.

DeVito/Verdi
Abington Memorial Hospital

Melanie D is one of StockLogos's best selling designers. Here is a selection of her work for your inspiration.

Landor Associates announced today the launch of a complete brand transformation for ITG, the independent research and execution broker. Currently celebrating its 25th anniversary, ITG has recently expanded its capabilities through acquisitions on the research side of its business.

Adapted from Good Design: Deconstructing Form and Function and What Makes Good Design Work (Rockport Publishers)

By Terry Marks

IDENTITY
HAZLITZ BESPOKE STATIONERY
BROWN DESIGN, LONDON

Hazlitz wanted to create a contemporary brand that would challenge the more established and stuffy stationers such as Smythson. To do this, the design would use traditional materials and print techniques applied to traditional elements such as business cards, letterhead, and so forth. But to stand out, it all had to be done with a twist yet still imply a level of personal, high-end service that Smythson was famous for. After all, the target audience was socially prominen, high-brow Londoners. The name Hazlitz was inspired by William Hazlitt, a prominent nineteenth-century English literary critic, grammarian, and philosopher.


The design is based on reams of paper and a complementary font. Letter-spacing, stroke density, and negative leading and tints were carefully prepared. The client liked the simple, pared back typographic approach common to premium brands. The designers established a black-and-white design and then focused on the quality of materials and print techniques such as engraving, embossing, debossing, and foiling items that their customers wouldn’t sniff at.

Read the full article on Graphics.com

Our critique section here on creativebits is really popular thanks to you folks giving great advice every day to all the guys posting their logos for feedback. I wanted to take this platform further, so we created a new Critique section on our sister site Brands of the World. Check out BotW Logo Critique.

In addition to the ability to upload your work I added a couple of special features that are designed to help the process more effective. When posting your work there is a special section for the brief, so designers can explain the objectives. Once you get feedback you can post the next version of your logo and it's all kept together as variations on the same job helping everyone see the progress.

When commenting on the posted work you can give ratings in different vectors, such as Idea, Symbol, Typography and Colors and these show up together with your comment. If the poster of the critique likes a comment, he can mark it as useful and this generates points for the commenter.

All the ratings are averaged and shown next to the logo so the critique poster will be able to see what needs improvement and what areas are generally liked.

After posting your work you can also invite member to give you comments if they allowed this option in their profiles.

Hope you will like it and please let me know any bugs you find. Cheers!

The inspiration came from Chi-Chi: a giant panda that had arrived at the London Zoo in the year 1961, when WWF was being created.

McCann is one of the world's largest advertising agency networks. Here is their new identity designed by Futurebrand.

This is the sixth annual edition of the BrandZTM Top 100 Most Valuable Global Brands. As we emerged from the crushing recession of 2009, we saw ever more clearly the power of great brands. While the overall recovery has been tepid, the value of the world’s best brands grew at a considerably faster rate. Compared with an overall improvement of 13 percent in the world’s equity markets during 2010, the best brands grew their value 30 percent faster, registering 17 percent increase since last year.

Apple leads for the first time in history followed by other mega brands such as Google, IBM, McDonald's, Microsoft and Coca-Cola. Check out the chart with the top 100 brands below.

We are all big fans of Mad Men. This is a collections of what the Sterling, Cooper, Draper, Price logo would look like with todays agencies.

As Wieden & Kennedy

For many corporations, their shining moment of the new year is releasing their Annual Report, chock full of earnings updates, unnecessarily big words, and overzealous hopes for the next year’s performance. This is not that report. Instead, Forty wanted to give the audience a glimpse through their walls with some eyebrow-raising, wacky statistics and stories from 2010. They worked their tails off for numerous clients, but the days were also sprinkled with Street Fighter battles, caffeine addictions, Post-it madness, and a hearty craving for snacks and leather notebooks. Check out Forty's Annual Report.