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| The graphic design industry is blessed with immense talent and several contemporary graphic designers emerging every now and then. The best part of this industry is that it is a community, carved with mutual co-operation and sharing. When a logo guru shares his experiences, others get to learn from his achievements and mistakes.
Today, I will feature three of the six interviews (featuring Chris Spooner, Jacob Cass and Sneh Roy) I conducted with the top graphic and logo designers of the contemporary design world. My apologies to all the co-operative designers for the delay in posting, but I had to make sure I properly credit all the designers mentioned in the interviews. I hope that I have succeeded in doing the same. I will be featuring the remaining interviews next week.
Last but not least, I would like to extend my heartiest gratitude to all the designers who dedicated their precious time in sharing their experience with us.
Here are the interesting questions; the replies of which you would love to know:
Q.1 Which of your personal logos is your favorite and why?
Q.2 Which other contemporary logo designers’ work do you like the most and why?
Q.3 What was your worst experience with a client?
To view the excerpts from the interview, click on your favorite designers. |
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Chris Spooner
www.spoongraphics.co.uk
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Q.1 Which of your personal logos is your favorite and why?
I’d probably pick out the Vivid Ways as my favourite. It was a project I really enjoyed working on, which led me to writing up a walkthrough of the design process on my blog, which then led to the logo and post becoming pretty popular, which overall has resulted in the logo becoming quite widely recognised in the community - which is awesome!
When Google Wave was announced, I was amazed that there were comments on the Mashable website stating that their logo looks like my Vivid Ways design. It’s also fantastic to see people picking up on rip-offs of the logo and instantly getting in touch with a heads up. |
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Q.2 Which other contemporary logo designers’ work do you like the most and why?
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| I’m a big fan of the work of David Airey , David Pache, and Jon Hicks. |
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David Airey is an inspiration and serves as a great reminder that logos don’t have to be full-on pieces of colourful art, but often work the best in their simplest form. |
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David Pache shows how simple and effective logo designs can be spruced up to look great, while sticking to the important principles of design and not inhibiting the versatility of the design at all. |
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Finally I’m a fan of Jon Hicks‘ work, which often sits at the opposite end of the spectrum. Jon’s popular logos and icons, such the Firefox logo and Mailchimp character show how detailed and complex designs that are a touch closer to illustrations, can break the traditional mould of what a logo design should look like. |
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Q.3 What was your worst experience with a client?
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When I first began taking on client work after graduating, I didn’t have any experience of dealing with project, or know of the common pitfalls I designer should look out for. I took on a project that ending up lasting forever. The client didn’t know what he wanted, but he reckoned he’d know when he saw it. I naively created revision after revision. Needless to say he never saw ‘it’. We finally made it to a design he liked, so I supplied the final files, but the next day he decided that after sleeping on it he wasn’t keen anymore. I had to end the project there and take a loss on some of the extra time and work I’d put into the logo, but at least the time I’d saved by closing this client’s project made time to take on much more economical work. |
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Jacob Cass:
www.justcreativedesign.com
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Q.1 Which of your personal logos is your favorite and why?
Most probably my own logo, Just Creative Design simply because I remember how much work I put into it at the start of my career, it represents who I am and as a bonus, includes my initials in the name. I wrote about the design process for those interested. Apart from this biased opinion, my other favourite is probably the FITUCCI logo.
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Q.2 Which other contemporary logo designers’ work do you like the most and why?
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| There is so much talent out there, every day I see design that I love. The problem with this is that whenever I see a great piece of design I want to find out who is behind it. I soon found out it was impossible to do this so now I don’t follow any particular designers (on a strict basis) but rather get inspiration from everywhere, at random. My other site Logo of the Day has been a great help for that, as a lot of the logo designs now come to me. I find this helps me create my own style based from many places, rather than a select few designers, that subconsciously will affect my own designs. Though in saying this, I do like nearly all of the work that comes out of Pentagram. Most of their work has a minimal, simple, yet creative typographic style that I relate too. |
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Q.3 What was your worst experience with a client?
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| I’ve had 2 separate clients that stopped responding to calls & emails calls out of nowhere; I still can’t contact them today, even by phone. Another bad experience was when a client wanted their 50% deposit returned for a website header that didn’t live up their (lack of) standards. It was a petty job from back in the day, but I remember it because they filed a PayPal claim against me and it’s still on my records. I now know better. |
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I hope these fascinating experiences will help all future graphic designers in their careers. Don’t forget to check out the sequel of the interviews featuring
- Jeff Fisher (logomotives),
- Gino Orlandi (youthedesigner)
- Chetan (chethstudios).
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Nice to see the experiences from these designers. I always try to draw fro those experiences in hopes that I may make better decisions.