Design and Branding Blog | BrandFreeze » Inspiration

Ultimate List of Share Icons for Your Blog

Brandon — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 23:08:51 +0000

Here are some of the best social share icons I’ve found. Share your content in style with these social share icons for your blog. Enjoy!

20 Creative Ways of Displaying Share Icons Twitter and Digg and Delicious – Oh my! In seeking...

Our Favorite Posts for the Week of October 19th 2009

Brandon — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 21:27:50 +0000

Here’s a roundup of our top ten favorite design-related posts for the past week. Enjoy!

Waterscape Photography: Beautiful Waterscapes and Tricks of the Trade

Nature provides us with a never-ending supply of inspiration, look no further than the coast for an array of majestic scenery. This article focuses on the point where land and sea meet, with 24 stunning waterscapes, essential tools of the trade.

Systematizing the Graphic Design Process

Unlike other forms of art, graphic design is not just about taking paper and pen and letting the work flow. Graphic designers have to help viewers get the message and help sell a service or product. Creating a design for a client with little or no strategy just doesn’t work. Unlike traditional art, graphic design has to convey a very narrow message.

14 jQuery Plugins for Enhanced Content Viewing

Whether you need to display content within a limited amount of space or you just want to make a section of your website more engaging, jQuery is an excellent solution. With jQuery you can easily create accordion style content boxes, image galleries, and content sliders. Here are 14 excellent jQuery plugins for adding this type of functionality to your site.

35 Creative Twitter User Profile Designs

One of the most important aspects of attracting followers on Twitter, in addition to quality tweets, is your Twitter page profile design; it has to be creative and attractive to show that you take tweeting seriously. This collection of Twitter user profile designs follows up on an earlier showcase that we published called 50 Beautiful & Unique Twitter Profile Designs. In this collection, you’ll find some of the great Twitter user profile designs out there.

The Mystery Of The CSS Float Property

Years ago, when developers first started to make the transition to HTML layouts without tables, one CSS property that suddenly took on a very important role was the float property. The reason that the float property became so common was that, by default, block-level elements will not line up beside one another in a column-based format. Since columns are necessary in virtually every CSS layout, this property started to get used — and even overused — prolifically.

Solution For Very Long Dropdown Menus

I like to be confident with post titles, but the reality in this case is a *possible* solution for very long dropdowns. The problem with long dropdowns is that the dropdown itself can go below the “fold” of the website. That is, below the visible area of the browser window. So in order to access those menu items down below, you need to scroll your browser window. For those of us with scroll wheels of some kind on our mice (mouses?), it’s not a big deal. For those without, those lower menu items are totally inaccessible, because to use the browser scrollbar means mousing off the menu (and probably having it close).

20 Handy Photoshop Tips For a Faster Workflow

We all use Photoshop on a daily basis, but I bet there’s at least one tip in this post that will give you the old ‘Why didn’t I know of this before’ moment! It’s tips like these that make the most common of tasks quicker and easier than ever to help speed up your Photoshop workflow.

Top 10 Site Search Options

Part of having a user-friendly site involves making it possible for visitors to quickly find what they are looking for. A site-wide search is one of the best ways to accomplish this. In this post we’ll look at 10 of the leading options for helping visitors to find the content that they want. Of course, most CMSs come with a standard search functionality, but this may not always be the best options (as is the case with WordPress’ default search).

Daily Inspiration #335

This post is part of our daily series of posts showing the most inspiring images selected by some of the Abduzeedo’s writers and users. If you want to participate and share your graphic design inspiration, just send us, via email, the image with the link from where you found it, also use “Daily Inspiration” in the subject, and don’t forget to send your Abduzeedo username; or via Twitter sending to http://twitter.com/abduzeedo

200+ Truly Useful Free Halloween Icons for Everyone

It’s only a week before we celebrate Halloween. As for our second collection of useful resources for the Halloween season, We compiled 200+ Truly Useful Free Halloween Icons for Everyone. These icons can be downloaded right into your desktop for FREE! Each set includes several icons that you can get for personal use. The following sets of icon were made by several of our creative graphics designers on the web to share their talents and uplift Halloween spirit.

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Usability Design Resources, Pattern Libraries, and Inspiration

Brandon — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 00:50:36 +0000

Here I’ve included a number of resources for usability best practices, inspiration, and design patterns for the web. There are many excellent sites and blogs on user experience and usability. If there are any that you read regularly and not included below, please share within the comments. Enjoy!

UXBooth

The UX Booth is a blog by and for the User Experience Community. Together, we’re writing articles and sharing resources on usability, user experience, and interaction design.

http://www.uxbooth.com

UX Magazine

UX Magazine was created to deliver a central place to discuss the critical disciplines that all enhance user experience. Extraordinary user experiences should be the goal of every interaction you deliver to your users at any level. All too often, businesses (large and small) get it horribly wrong. It’s painful to watch and even worse when it happens to you.

http://www.uxmag.com

Jakob Nielsen/UseIt.com

Jakob Nielsen’s website that contains a number of great reports on user experience and usability.

http://www.useit.com

Luke Wroblewski’s Functioning Form

Functioning Form is a blog about interface design by Luke Wroblewski. That is to say, it is where art and technology emerge as experience, where message and medium meld, and where interactions are useful, usable, and enjoyable. Luke is an internationally recognized Web thought leader who has designed or contributed to software used by more than 600 million people. He is currently Senior Director of Product Ideation & Design at Yahoo! Inc. where he leads the design of the world’s most accessed Web page (Yahoo.com) and many other popular products including My Yahoo! and Yahoo! Buzz.

http://www.lukew.com/ff/

Fuel Your Interface

You interface designers have your work cut out for you. Bigger and better and uber creative websites are cropping up everywhere these days. It always seems as if one form is niftier than the rest, or the typography on one site puts others to shame. How can you even begin to keep up? Why, Fuel Your Interface, of course!

http://www.fuelyourinterface.com/

UX Passion

UXPassion is a blog by Vibor Cipan who works with Microsoft Croatia. Vibor is passionate about application and web usability, interaction design, information architecture, SEO and blogging and sees all these elements as a part of broader “UX”, in the future UXPassion.com will bring you tutorials and articles targeting before mentioned topics.

http://www.uxpassion.com

Boxes and Arrows

Boxes and Arrows is devoted to the practice, innovation, and discussion of design; including graphic design, interaction design, information architecture and the design of business. Since 2001, it’s been a peer-written journal promoting contributors who want to provoke thinking, push limits, and teach a few things along the way.

http://boxesandarrows.com

Inspiration and Design Patterns

Yahoo Design Pattern Library

Yahoo’s Design Pattern Library is provides detailed explanations and best practices for various web design patterns.

http://developer.yahoo.com/ypatterns/

PatternTap

PatternTap is brought to you by the team at SquaredEye and provides inspirational snippets of everything from 404 pages to best practices for breadcrumbs.

http://patterntap.com

UI Patterns

UI-Patterns.com is the work of Anders Toxboe – a Danish web developer seeking to categorize what has before seemed like ad hoc approaches to developing web applications.

http://ui-patterns.com

Welie.com

Welie.com is a site by Martijn van Welie. Martijn is a Senior Consultant Interaction Design at Philips Design.

http://www.welie.com

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Our Favorite Posts for the Week: Week of October 4th 2009

Brandon — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 00:49:56 +0000

There were a number of great posts this week from 15 Common Mistakes in E-Commerce Design to setting up Automatic Thumbnails Without Using Custom Field. Here’s a list of our favorites. Enjoy!

15 Common Mistakes in E-Commerce Design
Selling online can open up huge new markets for many businesses. When your store can be open 24/7 and you can reach a global market without the costs of mailings and call centers, it can be a huge boon to your business. But there are plenty of things to consider when designing an ecommerce site. It’s not as simple as throwing up some shopping cart software and plopping products into a database.

Start-up Metrics that Matter
Dave McClure gave a killer talk at FOWA London that gave some great advice for web start-ups. If that’s you, make sure not to miss this talk. You can also view the slides or download the audio. Enjoy!

Interview with Wendell Fernandes: User Interface and Icon Designer
Wendell was one of several designers who brought us the new Monster.com. In addition to Monster.com, Wendell has also worked with clients like Dell, and DivX so it was really interesting to hear what he had to say.

Design a Vintage Radio Icon in Photoshop
In this Photoshop Tutorial, you’ll learn how to design an old vintage radio using simple shapes, gradients, patterns and textures.

Become a WordPress Theme Developer Who Rocks in Four Steps (and 50+ Readings)
The steps are clear and in this post you can find some useful tutorials and excellent readings to really become a star as WordPress Themes Designer.

So Your Client Says They Want to Get on Twitter…
Twitter. They talk about it on the local news, they talk about it on ESPN… it’s mainstream. It’s almost a household name like YouTube, Facebook, or Johnson and Johnson. Businesses know that other businesses are using it, and they feel like they are potentially missing the boat on something big. Because it’s web related, they turn to us, their web designers, for guidance. What do we say? “Sure, no problem”

Identity Design Process for a Personal Rebranding
Mike Tittel, an independent photographer approached me looking to take his personal brand identity to the next level. Mike Tittel Photography, an adventure sports/active lifestyle photography company based out of Salt Lake City, Utah, decided that if he wanted to move from his “basic Verdana [all type] logo” that he needed to work with a professional — something unfamiliar to him and his previous marketing efforts.

Interview with Steven Snell from Vandelay Design & DesignM.ag
I first connected with Steven back when I used to run Freelance Folder almost 2 years ago (Steven wrote some great articles there) and we’ve been in contact ever since. Here’s the interview I did with Steven recently, I hope you like it! Make sure you stop by in the comment section and feel free to ask Steven questions!

A Case of the Creative Munchies & How to Feed Them
Ask just about any creative professional and they will most likely tell you they have suffered from a creative block. It’s just a normal part of working in a career where your passions and talents meet….

How To: Start Selling Downloads from Your WordPress Blog in 5 Minutes
Selling downloads that are instantly delivered to the customer after they purchase is an easy way to earn some passive income. There’s no inventory to manage, no shipping calculations, and instant, automatic delivery means more happy customers and less support headaches.

Automatic WordPress Thumbnail Without Custom Field
Let’s say you want to show thumbnails in your blog’s front page. A lot of blogs do that now and it’s a good way of making the page look more alive. The only problem though is that using custom fields can be complicated and time-wasting. This post will show you how to make your theme generate thumbnails automatically, based on your post’s first image.

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25 Inspirational Designs for Website Footers

Brandon — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 12:20:46 +0000

If you think a website’s footer exists only to show copyright information you couldn’t be further from the truth. Below I’ve included 25 inspirational designs for website footers from design related sites and blogs from around the web. From illustrative to intelligent use of textures, these website footers are very creative.

13Creative

13Creative is a full-service design firm based in San Francisco. 13Creative’s footer serves a simple purpose-to encourage visitors to sign up for their email list. It makes an impact through the use of color and textures in the background of the website and sign up form.

http://www.13creative.com

37Signals

I think we’re all familiar with 37signals and their suite of apps. Recently, they re-designed their homepage to better present the various apps they offer, but I also love their footer. I like how they present each app within the footer and icons really pop on the black background.

http://www.37signals.com

Forty Seven Media

Forty Seven Media is a web and graphic design firm based in Knoxville, TN. Within their footer they provide us an easy way to contact them, see recent blog entries, and view recent projects they’ve completed in web and print design.

http://www.fortysevenmedia.com

Base6

Base6 is a web design studio located in Barnsley, UK. I like the weathered look of the website which they’ve carried into the footer where you’ll find complete navigation and recent tweets.

http://www.base6design.com

BSmalls Design

BSmalls Design is a small design studio in Minneapolis, MN offering web, UI, print, and identity design services. The illustration of the skyline in the footer is a nice touch-”Fo Shizzle”.

http://www.bsmallbeck.com

David Hellmann

David Hellmann is a designer based in Germany. His website’s footer is one of the more elaborate I’ve seen as it depicts an entire living room. I like the use of textures and the details in the footer.

http://www.davidhellmann.com

doejo

Doejo is a full service firm specializing in web design, branding, SEO, and social marketing. Doejo is a play on the word “dojo” which is a term for the place where students gather for Japanese martial arts. They take this theme into their footer with an origami bird and a throwing star embedded in the footer.

http://www.doejo.com

Element Fusion – Internship Program

Element Fusion is a design firm based in Oklahoma City, OK. They provide a number of targeted CMS solutions. This is a footer they designed for marketing their internship program. I like the use of the canvas texture with the skyline “painted” in the background. It’s simple and clean, but makes a great impact.

http://www.efinterns.com

Freelance Switch

FreelanceSwitch is brought to us by the Envato network and is a great resource for freelancers. I like the use of the “mascot” along with the tagline in the footer, the social media icons, and the subscription counts.

http://www.freelanceswitch.com

Future of Web Apps 2009 – Miami

Carsonifiedâ€™s Future of Web Apps in Miami this year has come and gone, but I’m still digging this footer design. Great use of texture combined with the cartoon-like sketch of the skyline. I also like the title within the footer -”Boring Stuff”.

http://events.carsonified.com/fowa/2009/miami/content

ILoveColors

ILoveColors is a great design and technology blog. The use of textures and colorful illustrations make the design unique and bold. I like the various backgrounds used within the footer including a cardboard-like background for the entire footer, a paper note for their Blogroll, and masking tape for the copyright, hosting, and “powered by” information.

http://www.ilovecolors.com.ar

Inspiredology

Inspiredology is a design blog brought to us by @chadMueller and @dertmobile. I love the blogâ€™s footer and its combination of the background pattern, transparent blocks, and light colored fonts that pop.

http://www.inspiredology.com

Jason Santa Maria

Jason Santa Maria has been a busy designer. He left Happy Cog (http://jasonsantamaria.com/articles/leaving-happy-cog/) earlier this year and recently launched Typedia. I like what he’s done with the footer for his blog. It’s different than many others that are included in this list as there are no gradients, illustrations or unique textures and backgrounds. What I like is that it contains a lot of great information that’s organized neatly into blocks.

http://www.jasonsantamaria.com

Juan Diego Velasco

Juan Diego Velasco is a designer in Bogota, Colombia. His blog is brightly designed and depicts a backyard scene with each post covering the lawn. The footer takes us beneath the lawn and into the soil. While one could claim that this has been done before Juan has done a great job of making it unique.

http://www.juandiegovelasco.com

Jan-Eike Koormann

Koormann.de is the website of Hamburg based designer Jan-Eike Koormann. I thought the goose was a fun and unexpected touch to the design of the footer. Anytime you can include a fun and unexpected element that delights the readers but doesn’t impede usability, it’s a win.

http://www.koormann.de

Kyan

Kyan is a web design and development agency located in Guildford, Surrey UK. They have a “hidden footer” you’ll find after clicking the worm peeking from the hole in the ground.

http://www.kyanmedia.com

Media140

Media140 was founded in February 2009 by Andrew Gregson as an independent platform for discussion, debate, workshops and press coverage of European events. They carry the media theme into their footer with the primary content consisting of tweets from #media140.

http://www.media140.com/london/

Orman Clark

Orman Clark is a Berkshire based web designer and “SEO Geek”. His site includes a unique and playful footer with a raccoon in a trashcan, a twitter bird, and a cow’s face on the side of a milk carton.

http://www.ormanclark.com

Sarah Longnecker

Sarah Longnecker is a Knoxville, TN based video editor and her site was designed from the team at Forty Seven Media. I really like the footer which includes a lightly textured background, inset text for each header, contact and social media links, and a link to Sarah’s resume.

http://www.sarahlongnecker.com

Sergio Noviello

Sergio is a web designer and developer based in Ireland. I like the simple three column layout within the footer which includes a cause that he’s passionate about, a Flickr photostream, links to connect with Sergio via the social networks, and several links to suggested sites. Sergio has done a great job of building trust with visitors and potential customers with the personal information he’s sharing within the footer of his site.

http://www.sergionoviello.com

SocialSnack Blog

SocialSnack is a creative agency based in Buenos Aires, Argentina. I like the footer they’ve included for their blog, which is playful and includes thumbnail photos of the primary operations team, social media links, and link to their contact information.

http://www.socialsnack.com/blog/

WebDesignerDepot

WebDesignerDepot is a Vancouver based design blog run by Walter Apai. I’m sure most of you are familiar with WDD and their illustrative style. I love the overall design of the blog and the bright colors, which are carried through to the footer.

http://www.webdesignerdepot.com

StoryPixel

Fall is just around the corner and StoryPixel, a blog by Lexington, KY based designer Sam Wilson, reminds me of the coming season. As you scroll down to the footer you’ll see the orange and yellow leaves cascading to the footer. I like the textures used here and the loosely drawn style.

http://www.storypixel.com

TeaRoundApp

TeaRoundApp is an iPhone app that helps decide who will make the tea. I love the look and feel of the footer and information they’ve included. Within the footer you can sign up for their newsletter, view screenshots of the app, and learn more about the company behind the app, WeCollaborate, which is a UK based design firm.

http://www.tearoundapp.com

UXBooth

UXBooth is a usability and design blog brought to us by Matthew Kammerer, David Leggett, and Andrew Maier. I like the subtle gradients, inset boxes, and the font colors used within the footer.

http://www.uxbooth.com

Thanks for reading! I hope you have found these footers unique and inspiring.

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20 Creative Ways of Displaying Share Icons

Brandon — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 21:59:24 +0000

Twitter and Digg and Delicious – Oh my! In seeking inspiration for different ways of displaying share icons, I compiled a list of 20 design blogs. Below I’ve included the various ways these blogs are displaying share icons. Any others that should have been included? Leave a comment and share.

Freelance Switch

Hongkiat

Tutorial9.net

Viget Labs

Mashable

InspiredMag

Outlaw Design Blog

SixRevisions

UXBooth

Fuel Your Creativity

Best Blog Box

Colorburned

All-for-Design.com

Base6Design

AndySowards.com

Ideas on Ideas by Eric Karjaluoto

InstantShift

Web Designer Wall

Think Design Blog

Pro Blog Design

And those are 20 creative ways others are displaying share icons on their blogs. Leave a comment below and let us know who else is displaying share icons in a creative way.

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Interview with David Leggett: Founder of Tutorial9.net

Brandon — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 02:09:34 +0000

David Leggett is a designer, blogger, and founder of Tutorial9; a leading website that provides Photoshop, Web Design, and Photography tutorials. David shares his experience in developing and growing Tutorial9, and provides advice for bloggers who are just getting started.

How did you get started in design?

Playing with 2D and 3D editing software was sort of a childhood passion of mine. Between a copy of Paint Shop Pro and Cinema 4D, I spent hours every day experimenting and dabbling on the computer.

I’m not sure I could justify that as design though. I believe that I’ve only just scraped the surface of designing, or creating experiences specifically built for certain groups of people in recent years. There is something about crafting an entire experience that greatly interests me.

Tell me more about Tutorial9.net….what’s your mission for the site?

Tutorial9 is a community platform for teaching and sharing resources. As a whole, we teach Photoshop, Web Design, Photography, and share useful downloads all for free. We pride ourselves in quality resources, and a super friendly community.

Our mission is to be the ultimate user-generated tutorial website by providing the best free resources online, and to inspire the community to lend helping hands to one another.

How long ago did you start Tutorial9?

We started working on Tutorial9 in December of 2007, and we launched May 1st, 2008. It just turned 1-year old, and it’s growing stronger every day!

I love the design of the site. How did you develop the concept? How much did it change from conception to final implementation?

Tutorial9 may only be a year old, but it’s already undergone 4 redesigns. A lot of our early attempts to capture the right mood and offer the right experience didn’t quite work out. Our current look is a huge step in the right direction, but it’s not flawless… Then again, a website is never actually 100% perfect!

The concept is slightly evolved from our original monochromatic look. Blue is sort of our color, but Tutorial9 never felt as friendly and fun as it actually was when we stuck to so few colors. The current design really put some emphasis on our creative side: Our background is chuck full of swirls and design elements that immediately identify T9 as a creative site.

Under the hood though, a lot of thought was put into the actual interface so that there is a balance between form and function. The site looks pretty, and also is very easy to use.

Which WordPress plugins do you use for Tutorial9?

These are the important ones – the fewer plugins, the better performance you typically have!

All in One SEO Pack (I actually really despise “SEO” as a practice, but this plugin is very useful for on the fly editing of page attributes that would otherwise require more work in the backend)
Dagon Design Form Mailer (Best. WordPress. Forms. Evar.)
Similar Posts (Modified)
Role Manager
SyntaxHighlighter Plus (For fancy code in scripting tutorials)
WP-CommentNavi (Paged Comments)
WP-PageNavi (Paged Category pages and archives)
WP Super Cache (Must have for power users)

How often do you post new tutorials?

We usually have 1-2 new posts every week. Our community is growing, and we’ll likely raise the bar to 2-3 very soon!

Typically, a tutorial or resource will take anywhere from 3-10 hours to complete. We try to make sure our resources are highly polished before sharing them with our community!

How many people do you have contributing to Tutorial9?

Currently, there are about 40 Active users who have contributed some sort of resource to our community.

We consider many of our viewers to be active contributors as well. Tutorial9 depends on its active community to help spread the word when new posts go up by sharing it with others socially. Without our awesome users, we wouldn’t be where we are today. It really is their website.

How many monthly unique visitors were you receiving 6 months after launching? 1 year after launching?

200,000 unique visitors at six months
400,000 unique visitors at one year

We’re expecting close to 500,000 for September 2009

What’s next for Tutorial9? Where do you see the site a year from now?

Right now we’re still focusing on building a strong foundation with our community. We’re really depending on our users to help us build the most useful free resource out there – and so far they haven’t failed to disappoint.

In the next year, we’d like to have Tutorial9 be the largest community tutorial platform online with an awesome reward/recognition system that showcases our top contributors and most helpful users.

How were you able to grow the site so quickly?

My recipe for a successful site is very simple:

Passion + Hard Work + Striving To Help People = Foundation for Success

Tutorial9 is all about helping people. Our contributors are all very friendly, helpful people who really care about other people in the community. We make sure that we reward our contributors amply so that they can share really top of the line resources with our audience.

How do you currently market the website?

I’m not really into all that marketing jazz. I think marketing can be a very good thing (despite all the bad stuff going on in the advertising niche – when done right, it isn’t a bad thing), I’m just not a marketer myself.

The community has really been our means for spreading the word about the site. By publishing great content, we’re constantly being featured in other design blogs, and our viewers are always sharing us with their friends and on social bookmarking sites.

What advice would you give other bloggers who are just getting started?

Value is key to building a successful blog: If you can offer something of unique value to your readers, everything else sort of falls into place over time. Think of ways you can help your specific audience. Can you educate them in something you know very well? Can you save them time or money? Can you make them laugh? Be Helpful!

I see that you have two additional websites, UX Booth and the soon-to-be-launched BetterBlogger.net. How will BetterBlogger.net help its readers become better bloggers? Tell us more about these websites.

UX Booth is a blog about user experience design. It’s a group project with a growing community (not by any means my personal project, just one I’m lucky enough to be a part of!) UXBooth is really a site that helps other designers and developers build better user experiences. We’ve recently had the privilege to share some of what we know in publications like the Smashing Book!

Better Blogger is a personal project of mine that will be launched “When It’s Ready.”

The whole idea behind Better Blogger is that there is so much absurd information about blogging (as a profession) on the internet that it is difficult for a new blogger to know where to start. There is so much hog wash about getting rich fast, making money without any effort, and terrible marketing techniques. My goal with Better Blogger is to share useful information from real life experiences that will help people get started on the right foot – and also help experienced bloggers grow their sites even more.

Here’s where David gets his work done:

David, thanks for taking the time to share your experience with us. We’ll be keeping a close eye on Tutorial9 and UX Booth as they continue to grow and on the lookout for the launch of BetterBlogger.net.

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High Quality Logo Design on a Budget

Brandon — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 01:56:29 +0000

One brand’s junk is another brand’s treasure. Some may criticize Brandstack’s approach of selling off-the-shelf branding, but I think it’s a great model. The service allows designers to sell any extra designs they have lying around from past projects. There are also a number of designs that include a domain name.

If you’re launching your business or re-branding and you’re strapped financially there’s nothing wrong with purchasing a ready-made design as long as it’s unique and clearly conveys the message and feel you wish to portray with your company. However, I do not recommend purchasing a logo from one of those out of the box services where they sell the same design to 100 different people and you slap your company name next to some clip-art of an orange shiny globe-I know you’ve seen it. While there’s a lot more to your brand than finding the perfect logo, it’s essential in supporting your organization’s mission and the feeling you want others to have when they interact with your company.

Brandstack has a number of high quality logo designs available and I’ve found myself paging through the site for hours (literally) looking through the thousands of designs available. Here are a few samples of logos that are for sale:

Prices range anywhere from $150 to $50,000, with the higher priced logos typically including a great domain as well, but not always the case. Of the 3,000 logos that are available over 500 include a domain name as well. Here are a few samples of higher priced logos (ranging in price from $1,800-$21,500) that include domains:

-and here are a few lower priced logos ($300-$700) that also include a domain name:

People are scooping them up. Here are a few designs that were recently sold:

The bottom line is you can invest a lot of money in getting your logo designed, but if you’re strapped for funds a service like this can give you the opportunity to get a very high quality logo design, and even a domain, for a fraction of the cost of a custom design. If however, you’re hiring a designer to help you with your logo I’d still recommend checking Brandstack for inspiration in helping to establish the look and feel that you’d like to capture. By having this understanding going into the design process and clearly communicating to your designer what you’re looking for, it can make the process move a lot quicker and save you money.

Custom Logo Design

If you’d like to hire a designer to create a custom logo for you, I’d recommend checking out 99designs from the team at Sitepoint. They allow you to set a budget, run a contest, and select entries from multiple designers. This is another great way to have flexibility in choosing the best design at a great value.

A second option for getting a logo designed to your specifications is Logoworks from HP. They have a number of design packages available ranging in price from $299 to $2,999. Each package differs in price based on the number of designers working on the project and the number of revisions. The higher priced packages include additional services such as website and stationary design.

These are three of my recommendations if you’re looking for a high quality logo design on a budget. I like what Brandstack is doing as they’ve developed a new model allowing designers to sell their “extra” designs and they’ve given entrepreneurs access to quality designs on a budget-it’s a win-win. If the “off-the-shelf” option isn’t for you, I’d recommend checking out 99designs and Logoworks.

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Top 12 Sites for Design Inspiration and Tutorials

Brandon — Sun, 23 Aug 2009 20:29:29 +0000

Hello Everyone! This is our first post on the site and I’m excited to get things kicked off. I’m working very hard to make this a great place for those passionate about design, branding and/or marketing and allow them to connect, share their knowledge and experience, and learn from others. Please be sure to read the “About” page to learn more about me and why I am launching this site.

There are a ton of sites that cater to designers offering inspiration, freebies and tutorials. I want to share with you my top 12 favorite sites for designers (in no particular order) along with my favorite posts from each. I noticed while putting this together that there are a lot of posts on popular design blogs that feature a set number of featured items. For example, 18 Tools I Use, 8 CSS Techniques, 6 Plugins You Must Have etc. Well, I guess this post is no different, so here are my Top 12 Sites for Design Inspiration and Tutorials. Enjoy!

psdtuts

psdtuts.com

Psdtuts is a very popular design blog from Envato’s Tuts+ Network. Psdtuts contains a vast collection of articles, tutorials, and freebies. Collis Ta’eed is the CEO of Envato, which employees a team of over 35 to run their quality network of design-related sites.

http://www.psdtuts.com

Subscribe to their RSS Feed

Follow them on Twitter

A few of my favorite posts from psdtuts:

How to Make a Menu Interface for a Fantasy Themed iPhone Game

A Comprehensive Introduction to the Type Tool

30 Super-Juicy Photoshop Illustration Tutorials

Web Designer Depot

WebDesignerDepot.com

Web Designer Depot is another very popular blog for designer that features design tutorials and resources. Web Designer Depot is a collaboration of leading designers around the world which contribute a wealth of expertise on all fields of design, such as coding, typography, Photoshop tutorials and more.

http://www.webdesignerdepot.com

Subscribe to their RSS Feed

Follow them on Twitter

A few of my favorite posts from Web Designer Depot:

250+ Resources to Help You Become a CSS Expert

How to Blog Effectively

20 Tips on How to Write for the Web

Smashing Magazine

SmashingMagazine.com

It’s likely that many of you are familiar with Smashing Magazine. With almost 700 articles and over 115,000 comments and trackbacks they are one of the most popular stops for designers and developers. They are also publishing a book, The Smashing Book, in late September.

http://www.smashingmagazine.com

Subscribe to their RSS Feed

Follow them on Twitter

A few of my favorite posts from Smashing Magazine:

List of CSS Galleries

50 Beautiful Blog Designs

35 (Really) Incredible Free Icon Sets

10 Useful WordPress Hook Hacks

Fuel Your Creativity

FuelYourCreativity.com

Fuel Your Creativity is a great site for getting the creative juices flowing. This site is part of the Fuel Brand Network and is run by Angie Bowen, Rob Bowen, Adelle Charles, and Michelle Krasniak.

http://www.fuelyourcreativity.com

Subscribe to their RSS Feed

Follow them on Twitter

A few of my favorite posts from Fuel Your Creativity:

Finding Fonts: Free and Premium Resources

18 Tools I Use as a Blogger and Designer

Interview with Collis Taâ€™eed

Tutorial9

Tutorial9.net

Tutorial9 is one of the most popular sites dedicated to Photoshop tutorials and is run by David Leggett. In addition to tutorials you’ll also find a great collection of freebies and resources from icons to plugins. David is also working on a new blog, BetterBlogger.net. So be sure to sign-up to be notified when BetterBlogger launches.

http://www.tutorial9.net

Subscribe to their RSS Feed

Follow them on Twitter

A few of my favorite posts from Tutorial9:

Create a Clean and Colorful Web Layout in Photoshop

5 Pixel Popping Techniques

Windows Vista Aurora Effect in Photoshop Tutorial

Think Design

thinkdesignblog.com

Think Design is a blog featuring design inspiration, resources, and freebies from the talented Nick Pagano of ThinkFourDesign.

http://thinkdesignblog.com

Subscribe to their RSS Feed

Follow them on Twitter

A few of my favorite posts from ThinkDesign:

48 Resources, Tips, Tricks, and Themes [for WordPress]

CSS Resource List

20+ Beautiful Free Serif Fonts

WebDesignDev

WebDesignDev.com

WebDesignDev was launched in the summer of 2006 by Michael Dunlop and Andrew Johnson and provides design and development tutorials, interviews, and inspiration. They also provide tips and tutorials on Dreamweaver and Flash.

http://www.webdesigndev.com

Subscribe to their RSS Feed

Follow them on Twitter

A few of my favorite posts from WebDesignDev:

Vimeo! The Best Video Host for Web Designers

Interview with Jacob Cass from Just Creative Design

15 Creative WordPress Header Designs

20 Ways to Promote Yourself as a Web Designer

Outlaw Design Blog

OutlawDesignBlog.com

Outlaw Design Blog provides design tutorials, resources, product reviews, and ways designers can earn passive income. Also, be sure to also check out their Podcasts.

http://www.outlawdesignblog.com

Subscribe to their RSS Feed

Follow them on Twitter

A few of my favorite posts from Outlaw Design Blog:

2009 Web Design Trends and How-To’s

Free Icons and Free Icon Sets

30 Wildly Creative Logos that Showcase Animals

SixRevisions

SixRevisions.com

SixRevisions is brought to us by Jacob Gube and features articles and tutorials on both web design and development. There are also several great articles on Project Management and Web Standards.

http://sixrevisions.com

Subscribe to their RSS Feed

Follow them on Twitter

A few of my favorite posts from SixRevisions:

10 Tools for Evaluating Web Design Accessibility

Five Ways to Speed Up Page Response Times

8 CSS Techniques for Charting Data

How to Create a Clean Design with Photoshop

ProBlogDesign

ProBlogDesign.com

ProBlogDesign is run by Michael Martin, who also provides blog and website design services. ProBlogDesign covers both web design and development and provides articles on anything from usability to CSS and PHP.

http://www.problogdesign.com

Subscribe to their RSS Feed

Follow them on Twitter

A few of my favorite posts from ProBlogDesigns:

16 Cheat Sheets on 16 Essential Topics for Web Designers

Does Valid Code Help Your Blog?

6 Tips to Make a Great First Impression

Blogussion

Blogussion.com

Blogussion is a relatively new site that was launched in early 2009 and run by Alex Fraiser and Seth Waite. Blogussion provides tutorials on design, tips on customizing Thesis for WordPress, along with additional tips on becoming a better blogger. As a side note, Blogussion is one of the best customizations of Thesis Theme for WordPress that Iâ€™ve found.

http://www.blogussion.com

Subscribe to their RSS Feed

Follow them on Twitter

A few of my favorite posts from Blogussion:

4 Tricks for “Awesome-izing” Input Forms

4 Great Ways I Customized My Thesis Theme

6 Plugins You Should Always Have Ready for Blog Emergencies

How to Setup a WordPress Backup System

Web Design Ledger

WebDesignLedger.com

Web Design Ledger is a popular design blog that features tips, tools, resources, and tutorials for designers.

http://webdesignledger.com

Subscribe to their RSS Feed

Follow them on Twitter

A few of my favorite posts from Web Design Ledger:

A Showcase of Fantastic Footer Designs

15 Stunning Examples of Data Visualization

27 Useful Logo Design Tutorials and Tips

15 Creatively Cut Business Cards

…and those are my top 12 design websites/blogs. I hope you find inspiration from them and learn a few tips and tricks as well. Be sure to follow us on Twitter and grab the RSS feed. We’ll be bringing you posts on design and marketing on a weekly basis. So please make yourself at home and we invite you to join the conversation and even write articles if you’d like.

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