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Beautiful And Creative Logo Designs For Your Inspiration

By Matt Cronin, April 9th, 2009 in Design Showcase | 159 Comments

Last week we already presented our first selection of beautiful, clever and creative logo designs. This post presents the second part of our selection, featuring even more beautiful and creative logos that will hopefully inspire you or at least give you the idea of what the current logo design trends look like.

Just as last time, we focused on logos that use creative methods to represent the brand through color, shapes, and typography. Every design presented below tells you something about the company that it is supposed to represent. Also note the brilliant color palletes and unique patterns used in many of these. Finally, pay attention to the typography, especially font selection and coloring.

Below you'll find a collection of 40 more beautiful and creative logo designs to inspire you. Browsing through the showcase, you will notice many trends. Some of these include the usage of simple shapes to create something complex, origami shapes, coloring and transparency trends, and many more. You may want to take a look at the post Logo Design Trends 2009 for further reference.

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7 Ingredients Of Good Corporate Design

By György Fekete, October 6th, 2008 in How-To | 119 Comments

It’s hard to define design. We have a broad range of definitions to choose from: design refers not only to graphic design, but to design strategy, too. It is used in a variety of industries, such as engineering, architecture and Web design.

This means that design is not just graphical in nature (which is a form of visual artistic representation), but also the planning of processes to achieve certain goals. Large corporations clearly understand this and incorporate every form of design into their strategy to achieve success.

For a good corporate design, we need to be aware of two main elements, which can be further broken down into a total of seven “ingredients”: design, as in artistic representation (logo, typography, colors), and design strategy (brand, quality, community, culture).

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Isn’t it sweet? Mascots in Modern Web Design

By Smashing Editorial, January 15th, 2008 in Design Showcase | 115 Comments

The more emotional a site design is, the more likely it is to evoke positive feelings within its visitors. To achieve a lasting impression, designers tend to use visual cues and offer some eye candy for hurried and hectic users. E.g. vibrant color schemes, photos and illustrations can be used to draw user's attention to some specific site section.

But are there any further options? Yes, there are. Actually, mascots are traditional for sports competitions such as Football World Championship or Olympic Games. Mascot is a more or less nicely designed creature which is symbolic for something and is supposed to evoke sympathy and strengthen the sense of belonging to one single team.

Should Smashing Magazine have a mascot? We’d like to know your opinion. If yes, how should it look like? Please let us know in the poll below and in the comments!

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How To Choose A Logo Designer

By David Airey, November 9th, 2007 in Graphics | 73 Comments

A well-designed logo is probably one of the most important issues when it comes to design of corporate identity. The logo has to be describable, memorable, scalable and effective without color.

To fulfill these criterias is a quite hard task to accomplish which is why you need a professional logo designer to save your time and achieve best results up front. However, the choice of really good designers is quite time-consuming. What should you keep in mind in making your choice?

In this article David Airey, a logo designer himself, offers his personal perspective on the selection of logo designers, provides some insights in his workflow and explains why you should think twice before choosing logo designers from the Google's Results front page.

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Smashing Pumpkins and Halloween Redesigns

By Smashing Editorial, November 1st, 2007 in Design Showcase | 38 Comments

Right, it's the 31st of October. In spirit of the coming Halloween parties we'd like to spark some design flavour by showcasing Halloween redesigns we've stumbled upon over the last few days. Pumpkins, skeletons, dark colors and spiders can be found almost in every Halloween design. In some cases designers replace some of the logo elements by visual elements (images or Flash-movies); other designers tend to add dark background colors and an according Halloween theme to the web-site's header. And sometimes the whole design is completely replaced with a Halloween theme.

Last week we've presented some beautiful wallpapers and tutorials in our Halloween Roundup: Wallpapers And Tutorials and asked our readers to send us their redesigns of our Smashing Magazine logo. As a result we've got a number of Smashing Pumpkings which we'd like to present in this post as well. And we've also replaced our logo with the Halloween logo designed by Marian Buhnici (first logo in the list below).

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Creative Favicons: Tiny Artwork

By Smashing Editorial, September 11th, 2007 in Graphics | 73 Comments

Since visual elements are easier to remember, they can be used to draw visitors' attention to the brand identity of the site. As visual indicators, favicons can establish the communication with visitors and make a web-site easier to remember and get back to once you need it - for instance, once the visitors look for the site in their bookmarks. Still most sites don't make use of them - just like 404-error-pages, favicons are often forgotten or simply ignored. It's time to change that, folks. Every once and again we present some of the most creative and beautiful favicons — to prompt you to design them for your sites. In fact, we are willing to do that until the trend is finally established. The design of favicons might look like a simple task; however to
- make the design recognizable,
- keep it simple and
- combine visual identity with
- visual clarity
- within a 16x16 rectangle
is a creative challenge you shouldn't underestimate. The details build the foundation of a successful logo, and to take care of the smallest details is extremely important for a usable and visually appealing favicon. The images below can be clicked - apparently, they lead to the sites from which the favicons have been taken. The examples show not only how a well-designed favicon might look like, but also which creative approaches can be used to give a favicon the freshness and clarity it deserves. The examples also demonstrate how favicons can support the overall design of the site it is being used on. You can find further favicon-showcases and some more information in the posts we’ve published before:
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Logotrend 2007: Leaves

By Smashing Editorial, August 31st, 2007 in Graphics | 74 Comments

In modern logo-design leaves stand for fresh ideas or - more generally - for an innovative way of thinking. In Web they are mostly used to communicate light-weight solutions as well as clean and unobtrusive designs. In fact, leaves, plants or ornaments which appear to be related to the nature can be found almost everywhere; it's a trend that will probably be reversed soon, due to an extreme overuse of the theme in modern designs. The sites themselves, using leaves for their logos, mostly do not have a relation to foliage - and even although often green color is used, that is not necessarily the case.

We'd like to present you some of them. The following logos aren't supposed to represent the quality of logo designs with leaves, but the trend we observe on the Web. The images can be clicked and lead to the sites from which the logos have been taken. You'll also find tutorials you can use to learn how to create "leaf logos". Please notice that this post features only those logos which are related to the Web. What do you think? Is an extensive use of leaves in logos a current Web 2.0 hype which will disappear soon or are the leaves here to stay?
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Creative Favicons: When Small Is Beautiful

By Smashing Editorial, June 14th, 2007 in Graphics | 87 Comments

We love creative favicons. Their beauty lies in the approach a designer has chosen to put something really unique inside of the 16x16px box. Designing favicons, it's necessary to work with miniature images, and every extra pixel can be the wrong one. A good favicon is original, beautiful and - in best case - fits to the logotype and color schemes used in the web-site. Creating them is a challenge not every designer is able to cope with. It's hard, but not impossible. In fact, many creative solutions are possible, but it's damn hard to come up with some of them once you need them. Sometimes it's enough to rescale the logo to an appropriate size, as shown by Xpanity Favicon: If rescaling doesn't provide optimal results, you can try to extract some parts of your logo and bundle them together, like Kijiji did. We've collected some of them - 40 gorgeous, creative and visually appealing favicons you can use as a source of inspiration, e.g. if you have a creativity block. Images are linked; to visit the page with the favicon you like, just click on it. You can find further favicon-showcases in the posts we've published before:
- Inspire Yourself: 50 Remarkable Favicons
- Inspire Yourself: More Creative Favicons
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Winners of the Logo Contest

By Smashing Editorial, April 7th, 2007 in Events | 64 Comments

It took us five days in a row to find five best designs for our Smashing Magazine Logo Contest. It was hard and it was a neck-and-neck race for 5 competitors. You can find selected designs in the article Logo Contest - Sketches and Designs. And now we have the winner. It was a tough decision to choose 5 best logos from over 190 sketches. Our choice might not look reasonable for all of you, but you have to keep in mind that the logo should fit perfectly to our color scheme and our site layout. We had to create many screenshots with different logo variation and check, whether the look we get is optimal. Not every beautiful logo we liked first passed this test, so only "bulletproof" logos remained.
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Logo Contest - Sketches and Designs

By Smashing Editorial, April 5th, 2007 in Events | 114 Comments

It was a tough decision to make. Three weeks ago we've announced the Smashing Magazine Logo Contest for the most creative, clean and fresh logo for our site. We've received over 190 Logos from 105 participants, living all around the world. We had a big choice and it wasn't easy to select the winner. After all, the logo shouldn't be just creative or gorgeous - it should fit to our web-site perfectly. In our decision we've considered many aspects such as typographic clarity, used color schemes, ideas, simplicity and, of course, design. We've taken our time and selected the best works five days in a row. In the end it was a neck-and-neck race for 5 competitors. We'd like to thank every participant of our contest. We really appreciate your creativity, your work and your time. We'll announce the winner tomorrow. Today, however, we'd like to present most original and interesting works we've received. Not every sketch is gorgeous, so not every design will be presented. Thanks, guys. Your participation means a hell of a lot to us.
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Smashing Magazine Logo Contest

By Smashing Editorial, March 14th, 2007 in Events | 90 Comments

Few days ago we've re-aligned the Smashing Magazine web-site, changed the theme and - most importantly - re-designed the navigation menu. So far so good. However, in the end we've found ourselves in a dilemma - Smashing Magazine doesn't have a proper logo, which would mark our identity and relate to the subjects we cover on our pages. In fact, we need a unique, fresh and stylish logo. And since you determine the content of Smashing Magazine, we'd like you to help us in creating it. So, basically, this is what this post is about.
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Inspire Yourself: 58 Creative Logos

By Smashing Editorial, March 13th, 2007 in Graphics | 156 Comments

Logotypes stand for Corporate Identity. The better a logo is designed, the greater is the probability that your potential clients will remember your CI and get back to you once your service is needed. Consequence: designers have to be creative and put many efforts in designing beautiful, unique and catchy logos. And the results they come out with are sometimes stunning and spectacular. Both in graphic design and web design. This isn't just another collection of logotypes. These are 58 creative logos you can inspire yourself from. Nevermind how different the logos are - they show the current trend in modern logo design. The logos we've selected below have been created and optimized for Web.
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