DesignYak

Snow White and Apple sticker

Snow White and Apple sticker for your Mac! Via Twitter and Stilsucht

How many mistakes can a logo make?

Look at the beauty I spotted on the way to work this morning!

Copycat logo?

Firstly, sorry for the lack of action this past week, I'm moving into a new flat this weekend so have been busy stressing and buying furnishings/beds/wooden spoons etc. I'm going to a private viewing of the Banksy exhibition tonight, so I'll take pics to make up for it! Anyway...

This logo has been one of favourite logos for a long time. It's by The Chase, and is for Leaf Street, an environmentally friendly housing association.

It's lovely. If by some chance you've never seen it, I expect your jaw to be on the floor. So this made me annoyed...

Yuck.

Innocent mistake? Blatant rip-off? Coincidence?  

New Packard Bell logo is u-g-l-y

I don't normally use DesignYak to poke and laugh at other items of design, but I've just seen the new Packard Bell logo on the design week website, and it's god-awful. Just extremely ugly. The logo features the initials 'PB' as they aim to drive the brand to be known by the acronym over time. The logo and brand was created by an as yet unnamed Italian design consultancy. PB now carries the tagline 'Puredesire', you can see this on their new website. See what you think...

Orbital album cover by Farrow

New compilation album and logo for Orbital's 20th anniversary, designed by Farrow. More new work to see on the Farrow website.

Toblerone Bear logo

I have never really looked at the Toblerone logo before, it's just an image of the Swiss Alps. How wrong I was. The chocolate, most famous for being the standard chocolate along with a chocolate orange to receive at Christmas time, has a hidden surprise in it's logo. Toblerone originated in Bern, a city whose name supposedly means City of Bears. Now look closely at the logo and you'll find a bear.

Two Copywriters logo

Sweet logo for Two Copywriters, created by Design by Jack. One of those 'wish I had done that' bits of work.

Look at how many Virgin logos there are...

Aren't they hideous...

Festive and celebratory Google logos

We all know the Google logo, we see it everyday, pretty standard in it's design yet one of the most recognisable logos around. What interests me is the special holiday logos they release during the year. Did you know that there is someone who's job it is to design these logos? Yes, it's true, his name is Dennis Hwang, and he designs festive logos for Google on special days. He creates about 50 logos each year. He is employed as an international webmaster and spends about 20% of his job on Google logos. 

They quite often celebrate people's birthdays, especially famous artists and cultural figures, two of the best are these for Van Gogh, Pollock and Escher.

 

I've featured this logo at the time, celebrating The Hungry Caterpillar books by Eric Carle. This is probably one of the best Google logos I've seen, it lends itself really well to the subject, and was designed by the Eric Carle Studio.

 

I really it when the logo doesn't even use letters, celebrating innovations such as braille and more recently, morse code. It still works, mainly down to the combination of colours that instantly recognise as Google.

Celebrating the phenomenon of Lego. I really like all of these examples of holiday logos, but quite often you get some dodgy cartoon execution, like the one below which was seen recently. Fair enough, I like the idea of combining St. George's Day and Shakespeare's birthday, but I don't like the drawing, compared to the others, it's just a bit dodge.

I always find the Google logo quite fun, and hey, educational at the same time. You can see every festive or celebratory logo by Google stretching back to 1999 if you click here. You can also click here to read about the evolution of the Google logo which is really interesting to see.

An Easter egg logo

As Easter has just passed, it gives me an excuse to show this logo for Egg and Spoon, designed by Thoughtful. It's up there with my favourite logos, simple but amazing.