Whaaat? These are some of the /least/ creative logos I’ve ever seen. I can’t even tell most of them apart.

Some of these are really bad and yes, they all look too alike. Some of the fonts on these logos look like low quality free fonts. Too many betas as well - it’s almost as if they’ve built the ‘beta’ right into their logo.. like they’re never going to actually finish their product.

Awful…

some pieces at the top is just mediocre. yet, another stunning post from you guys. thanks.

I agree … they look much alike.

Now, if the title was “58 logos that say ‘I’m a Web 2.0 Company and I fit in’ …

Most of these logos are neither creative nor do they show a current trend in logo design. I would rather call them desperate attempts to paint me-too-logo-bullshit for web 2.0 companies. Anyway, it doesn’t really matter—the majority of them will disappear as fast as they popped up.

Some nice.. some poor - Skyblog=awful!

As always… very inspirational post!

paaaathetic.

seriously?
please retitle this post to ‘58 things to avoid in logo design’

to be fair, some are good, but the majority are plain nasty.

With the exception of a few, these logos are horrid and very cliched.

Thank’s A lot , keep insipiring us :)

great work .

some of them are good. stop bitching!!!

some of them are good, STOP b’itchin

Dropsend’s is the best by far

A couple things:

1) I enjoyed alltunes a lot; ideabox, dropsend, quest, and netvibes only some. All others were pretty bad.

2) Logo critiquers need to remember sometimes that a logo for a website (where the business is nothing but a web site) can be different than normal identity. They aren’t going to have delivery trucks, lots of letterheads, etc. most of the time. They can be fun and not have to conform to normal identity standards.

With that said, all of these were pretty big copycat logos. And they have the same tactics:
- Ariel Rounded MT
- awkward colors
- signal lines (RSS style)
- some sort of flowery thing
- reflections

3) The one to me that truly just doesn’t get it is “Texticate”. Hahaha.

4) This post sucked, but I thoroughly enjoy all your other posts. One of the few aggregate sites I check regularly.

It is simply a collection with a very ephemere feeling. Only created for work a few years on the Internet, on the “web 2.0″.

Not really nice collection. Sorry.

worst… logos… evar

you guys are doing a really nice job but i’d rather you put 8 truely great logos rather than 58 arguably-creative-and-certainly-web-2.0 ones. quality over quantity, what do you think? :)

still, i appreciate your work and effort!

I think these icons are good examples to use on Internet… Offline, in some cases, they have to be modified.

Sorry, no dice.

Many of these logos aren’t even logos–they’re basic type treatments.

Bottletalk has a strong idea, lacking execution.

DropSend is great.

ALL THE OTHERS are crap. The only message they convey is “I’m Web 2.0. Give me VC money!”

Yeah, what they said…

On the other hand, your scrolling list of Web 2.0 blah-ness helped me finally to name my feelings regarding this pervasive styling: “mushy”. They are all rounded edges and blue-plus-a-bright-accent and… mushy. I didn’t bother following any of the links, because frankly, I’ve seen enough Web 2.0 to know that Web 2.0 is to the Internet as Oakland was to Miss Stein: there’s no THERE there.

Gods. Grow up. If you’re going to criticize, why not offer a positive counter-example?

Why can’t any of you turn snark mode off for five minutes and say “I don’t agree, but here are some I think are creative” instead of turning into a bunch of YouTube-surfing middle schoolers?

“worst…logo…ever!!! ur log0Rehz hax0rs eth sux0Rz!111111!!!”

Some of these are nice but they all have that web 2.blow look. “I’m a wicked cool Graphic Designer, watch me design…”

My Punch Bowl, Quest, and Bottletalk are notable for being clever and communicating clearly, the rest are simply somwhere lower down on the cleverness and clearness scale. The most important consideration with a new website identity though, is if the clients were happy and they fit the mental identity of the site(business). I’ll grant you, if they are just pretty font treatments they don’t belong in a list of traditional logo design “Best Of…” but these weren’t created to win awards, these were probably just created to win contracts and get payed.

Got to say, what a weak selection. Conspicuous only by the abscence of real quality. Works brilliantly as a way of highlighting how hard it is to come up with a really nice logo.

sry for off topic but old design of this site was better then now :(

I have to agree with the critics, I’m afraid. Most of these logos are completely uninspiring. They follow the ‘web 2.0′ trend and are average at best.

None of them will stand the test of time - where’s the Cingular, the Fedex, the Apple, the Coke in this bunch?

Some of these are interesting but the point that most commenters are making is quite valid. Most of these logos follow a particular aesthetic and well…they kinda have the dull sameness to them especially when viewed together. And that doesn’t even begin to address that many of these tell the reader squat about the benefit or even function of the company they are supposed to be branding.

This link is typical of the same-old same-old “inspiration” thrown up by delicious. Web design is eating itself :(

Awful, no originality….they all look like they were created by a logo template with all of that glossiness and odd(but not interesting) shapes/icons that do nothing to suggest what the company does…The one I thought was decent was “Pathfinder” near the top. At least they took time to incorporate a “path” between the words ‘path’ and ‘finder’.

Nothing personal, I love your articles. Everyone has their own style, but I just don’t see these lasting more than 6 months before the trend fades.

these could all be sketches for one logo. you need to work on the concept of the mark and look at type as a part of the mark. having two colors in your type only works in a few cases. You have the ability to draw and put together a concept, you just need to take a few more risks and push the envelope. many small companies would probably love to get these for free. But in all they are not thought out or pushed and refined. hey at least you had the guts to put your work out there, now take the next step, take the feedback and head back to the drawing board. The closest to becoming something but still far from being finished is the bottletalk. you have yet to incorporate anything about talking/speaking/communicating. pick up a copy of communication arts magazine and look at some of the logos presented there. you’ll find that they all work in black and white and each mark is there for a reason.

Wow, all of these seemed to be designed by non designers with zero education/background in real design, yet somehow downloaded photoshop.

One man’s ceiling is another man’s floor.

really worst i’ve read seeen here… bad & sad :(

Imagine if this article had been written 10 years ago. There would be nothing but swooshes!

The logos are nice, but … well, just that. Maybe they seem monotonous because they’re all from generic Web 2.0 startups. It would be interesting to see new, innovative logos from non-tech or non-Web 2.0 companies.

They are nice but corporate identity means so much more than a logo. You’re only about 5% done with the logo.

How critical you all are. Quickly labelling everything web 2.0 just by looking at the logo is plain dumb. If you took the time to visit some of the sites you’ll see they aren’t web 2.0 at all. Granted - some are, but some aren’t. Nobody has really offered any good alternatives - apart from the highly original Coke, so get of your high horses and be constructive. Or are you all a bit jealous because your work ain’t up here?

Nice collection. Its pretty easy to see that lots of these logos are for companies with primarily online products and an online presence.

80% of those wouldn’t work outside of the web (ie on a letterhead). The difference between logos for web and print is huge :P. Just my thoughts.

wow :)

So many f****ng ‘beta’s…….argh!

Fantastic resource, I feel inspired to just to start up a Web 2.0 for no reason, hang on a minute most of them have no reason for there existence!

They are a bit samey…

however, to the bashers, who are numerous in number, how about you post a link to something you do like instead…

great stuff, thanks.

– Phil

Absolutely average!

just because they are web 2.0, does not make them good.

the only ones i liked were: bottletalk, mypunchbowl, and quest.

I agree with most people here, that these are … just polished fonts. In fact most are just logotypes with a trendy fontface. The added icon doesn’t communicate much (even the praised dropsend thing). But they do communicate: I belong to the web 2.0. That may be enough!

I hope you smashingmagazine makers don’t expect some sort of this for your website.

I am a designer. I charge 2500$ for identity design, including a style guide.

typography certainly takes a leap on most of these logos. what ever happened to making sure the viewer could tell what letters they were looking at? diigo, digo, dngo… what the heck does it say? jarnon, jamon, jaman? podchairs? rqnkqo? rqnxqb? are these code or something?

Wow. That’s pretty bleak. Another list of trendy crap.

A “great” logo:

1: Needs to have no name next to it
2: Can be recognized on something as small as a shoelace
3: Does not just come from good design, but great branding, advertising and consumer involvement
4: Should say something about the brand
5: Should have life past design trends 2.0

Link [apple.com]
Link [nike.com]
Link [bahamas.com]
Link [www.laist.com]

primitive logos which have nothing close to Design, besides bright children colorish.

Indeed inspiring. Bottletalk, awesome!

again great list

Only a couple of these logos were creative, the rest are standard Web 2.0 style decorated Company names rather than logos.

Want to be inspired, check out these Link [] and compare them with this list.

Ignore all of these negative comments. Most people don’t even know the first thing about making a logo, yet they can comment and act like a professional designer.

This is a very nice, focused, list of logos and it has a theme or topic, so to say.

Some very nice type treatment that the rest of the idiots failed to notice.

I enjoyed it. Keep up the good work.

Squiddo looks the best. The Motive interactive logo looks cool too. There’s a lot of crap in here though. Like say the Skyblog logo, which looks very ugly to be frank.

Worst logo list ever.

I just wanted to thank you for posting our website logo and back link. We’re a very small site and were surprised that someone back linked’ to us. It sounds like not everyone agrees that the logos here are nice - but the fact you thought our logo was nice and posted a link has helped us generate traffic and we really appreciate that.

Thank you!

Han
(founder buddystumbler.com)

All are beautiful, but creative is another thing… is the same style in the 58… almost the same type.

WOW! Great list.
Some of them are very nice!
Thank you.

Shame you took off the pathfinder.gr logo, I really liked it. I think the logo is the only thing worth about that site in the first place :-)

Great logos! My favorites are the Intervals and BottleTalk logos. They’ve both managed to go beyond the Web 2.0 stylings and created a timeless logo. Great choice of typography on both and good use of tying in the logomark to the logotype. Thanks for the inspiring post!

The Bottletalk logo is pretty clever but the rest are a bit rubbishy in my opinion

Well well well…

I think there are 2 angles from which you can look at these logos:

1) From a professional designer’s point of view most of these logos suck bigtime.They won’t print well or only at significant costs, most of them don’t give you the slightest idea about what the company’s core business is and they all shout “web 2.0 !” which might hurt when the 2.0 hype is over and rebranding is on the shedule.

2) Then again, if you take off the pro designers glasses you’ll see that indeed most of above listed businesses are completely web based, meaning their products are digital, they’re intended to go with the web 2.0 hype and they’re not meant to be there forever.And it’s in the nature of these businesses that some functions a “normal”/Print logo has to have like a hint on what they do or that the logo will work in b/w don’t apply here.Simply because these functions are not needed in this environment because they are replaced by viral marketing, blog mentions, digg.com and whatnot.Meaning those companies don’t have to rely on their logo to say *anything* because the “spread the word” is done by literally word of mouth on blogs etc.

As i consider myself a professional freelance (logo) designer i do say these logos suck from a creative point of view as well as seen from a strategic angle but honestly they’re probably not meant as “real world” logos and most of them won’t ever see the light og a print house.

Now, as some people here have asked for money where your mouth is feel free to head over to my little portfolio site:

Link [logo-design.info]

Far away from being completed but i do think you might find a few samples there that indeed could be considered “creative” as i always spend lots of time to implement a little twist here and there when designing logos.

As said, probably most above listed companies don’t need that twist though as long as they’re fully web-based.

The buddystumbler logo looks a lot like the Gnome foot, just the other way around.

Rubbish all absolute tosh, if they aren’t already similar to another with the usual san serif ‘modern’ font - they borrow, steal, plagiarise from other logos. No originality or thought went into any of these that I can see. Dropsend is the only one that I’d class as half decent, it does what it says on the tin (great app by the way Mr Ryan Carson).

The rest are half designed by ‘designers’ (i use the term of a person with a craft there quite loosely) who have obviously no desire to make something unique and different from the rest of these stylistically sick, bland and half-arsed web 2.0 logo sets.

Go back to your design history books and take a look at Paul Rand Link [en.wikipedia.org]

I like DropSend, Quest, AllTunes and Vision Media (hey, can we do that? ;-) ) logos.
Listible and Skyblog logos truly sucks, eeeggghh.
Other ones are good intentioned but boring and unmeaning at all, and worst of all, most of them lack on font, drawings, colors or I-didn’t-need-you-at-all effects (or all at the same time) and even on the realization.
Inspire Yourself: 58 Creative Logos
Inspire Yourself: 4 Creative Logos ant 54 things not to do on deign.

Too Good

These are HORRIBLE. What makes you think these are creative? These kids have no design education, experience and are powered by CS and a Adobe Type account.

i love that there is so much passion on this site.

here is my deak:

i am about to start building a new online business, i know. I know.how novel right?

what i need is a new logo for deign purposes before i start the build. i need the look and feel of the logo’s design to reflect in the entire site.

i would love to start a logo design contest.

does anyone know of a site that would aid me with this?

and who would up for the challenge?

thanks,

kev

don’t mind the remarks… some are good and some are bad.. sometime is the client fault … sometime lack of inspiration… but keep going - is the only way to get somewhere :)

Kev,

If you want a good logo, you should hire someone to make it for you. Good designers won’t waste their time on a contest, especially for a company they know nothing about.

KNEXUS logo already exists, since several years ago.
Check it:

artnexus.com

.

They remind me of the late ’90s, when every logo had a “swoosh.”

What?! Creative logos? Dude, please… What the hell? These are terrible. C’mon!

Unbelievable, everyone is complaining “Web 2.0 logos” and yet if someone clicks on your comment’s username link it goes to sites with terrible or no logo at all! Be responsible. The logos designs above follow the trend.

Steve

Always, without fail, without exception, any posting of logos will draw 100 people complaining about them. Surely, for a blog this popular, the author must have *some* good taste!

Here’s a new idea: since obviously any blogger who posts something as an example of an art form will get clawed up by the catty queens, why doesn’t Smashing post a logo beauty contest? Vote for a week on your favorite logo, and post the best ten at the end of the week.

Then, more importantly than what a blog considers best, we’ll have what the public considers best.

just terrible. I’m so pleased I thought they were all completely lacklustre before read to other negative comments. Who selected them?

Good web 2.0 logos

wow!! This is exactly what I was looking for! thanks for this page! beatiful logos!

I love the amount of web 2.0 logos there are here!

Thanks for including the Motive Interactive logo in your collection, while it was hard to stay away from the shadows, reflections and shades these days we think we developed something that can help extend our brand.

This great!

This is what for which I was looking. Thanks!

Creative Logos…Only Pathfinder and Bottle Talk…..all others are crap…….

Very nice logos. Thanks!

I don’t you upload your own logos? bet that you can’t do better than those who designed that ‘horrible’ logos. Some are good some are not so good, some suck - criticism does mean nothing untili you prove you can do best. ;) And if so you can upload to imageshare or stuff like that for the community to judge it… Bet most of them won’t like it…
Why? Free quality fonts… Why a Free Quality Font’ed Logo has to be cheesy fishy? You couldn’t paint a DaVinci even if you’d had the best quality inks of the universe… Shut up and upload your logos…

The first couple are ok, the rest are very uncreative and semi professional.

Even I, a 14 year old boy can see those are some of the most uncreative logos I have ever seen! Not to say that they are that bad, just not creative, although I do like the path finder logo.

I have to concur with stuart - these are pretty bland logos. Not bad logos per se, just not very creative. They look like they have been designed by the same person. Also, being trendy is not necessarily a good thing when it comes to logo design.

-amber

quite a sad collection.

2.0 should not be a “look”, that’s the problem in my view. 2.0 should be a new way to make the web WORK a certain way…not LOOK a certain way. Many seem to have forgotten that.

BottleTalk is actually the only one here thats creative and interesting. The rest are so, so and all get lost , I actually have forgotten about them. too web2.0ish. many more creative logos out there.. keep looking.

damn.
id like to see what all of you haters have come up with…
a few were clean, a few that weren’t.
but it seems like if you keep bustin em out, your only gonna get better. (well i hope)

ha

peac.e

I liked very, always is good for having sources of inspiration to work, parabens and debtor

“Inspire Yourself: 58 Creative Logos, FOR NON-DESIGNERS ” ? ;)

excuse me, but most of these are pity samples.

excellent, collection of logos.

These logos are lame. Very few of them would actually print well and all of them look like they came out of some logo generator or some free vector shape website.

Knexus logo is a complete rip off from artnexus.com

Excellent!!! Just too good.

this is a great collection of logos… Thanks For sharing… Squidoo logo definitely stands out

I don’t like it.. at all

very nice, and very usefull to creative idea and good collection

yes, some good some bad - but all inspiring. Could you make another list to keep everyone happy, as this was useful?

Most of these logos look very derivative….few of them are trully original

Does anyone know if there is a font I can download/buy that will produce similar results to the 3rd logo text - ‘fabra’?

Thanks

I think all the logos are very creative and eye catching.
Nice work mate.

Cheers!
Link [www.prabhathsfolio.net]

I love how everyone jumped on the “omgz worst ever” bandwagon. Yes some are bad, but others are good FOR THEIR PURPOSE. They are simple logos, not corporate identities.

And as for people saying “it doesn’t express what the company is”.. well the identity logos for fedex, mcdonalds, walmart, coca cola, nike, yahoo, google, microsoft, etc etc etc do not have anything to with what they are representing yet they are the some of the most well known in the world (because of the marketing team, not the design team)..

Some of the biggest companies in america have crappy logos… I always found it hilarious that someone actually got paid for “designing” the fedex logo. If you guys want to attack poor designing, call up fedex and bitch lol

BTW, for those of you throwing a fit, how about posting some examples of the work youve done, or at least some logos you do find creative. Theres not a whole lot out there that goes beyond simple font polishing/customizing.

I have to agree with the masses on this one, this is a pretty weak selection, there are maybe 5-10 worth showcasing.

Very Nice to see 2 Greek companies logos here.

Thanks, great article :)

Scott, you’ve missed something on the Fed Ex logo

->

I like the logo from Link [www.pacifictimesheet.com]. It reflect the company’s name perfectly with the sun over the rippling ocean. On the mean time the sun above the ocean has the hands in them, and it feels like clock. So it ties back to what they do: online timesheet. Just some silly thoughts.

Lynn

cool i like the net

Wow so most of you are just butt hurt designers grinding an axe, Lets see your logos. Bunch of babies.

horrible article. most of these logos are horrendous.

Tim,

Does your butt hurt? lets see your logos.

Hi,

i like that logos color combination,
Thanks

vijaypal

Lets face it, some of these logos are pretty good and fit in with their respective websites very well, at least in most cases. What is it with this world? People love to get on a bandwagon. It reminds me a little bit about the brainwashed teenage girls who follow celebrities and try to copy what they do. When the first couple of people criticised these slections here, everyone started doing the same without offering an example of their own that they is better. Please offer a counterselection that is better so at least you can show that you know something and not just simply following the herd.

In any case, I think everyone will agree you can have the greatest logo, but if your content or service or whatever the site provides is not good, it won’t matter much.

Thank you for these good references of web 2 logos.

wots beta???
cn n plz xplain???
nt a taunt…serious query…

These logos all look like they’ve been created by the same designer… not inspiring at all… kinda boring to say the least.