Logo Design Tips

Your logo is a visual representation of your company and your brand.  It is one of the most important components to your identity and it will impact all of your marketing efforts. Successful logos can become iconic images for products. Poorly crafted logos are a long-lasting nightmare for the designers and marketers that are left to work with them. Whether you are developing a new logo or refreshing the look of an existing one, here are some basic tips to follow to make sure that your logo succeeds:

1. Understand

The first step in the process is to really understand the brand that the logo is being developed for. Make sure that you understand some key marketing elements:

·         Brandpositioning: what place does the brand occupy in the competitive landscape?

·         Brand message: what is different, special or unique about the brand?

·         Target audience: who is this brand being sold to? Need to know basic demographics like age and gender. Geography and culture are also important to understand as symbols and colors can have different meanings for different regions, religions and nationalities.

2. Research

Find out what is being done in the marketplace now.  Gather information and logos from at least the top five competitors. Knowing competitor’s positioning and messaging will also be helpful. You want to create a logo that is impactful and memorable, so knowing what already exists is essential. For logo redesigns or refreshing, collect all past logo versions. Perhaps continuity is the goal or a complete departure is needed. Either way, you need to know what has been done in the past to move forward.

3. Inspiration

Whether you are a designer or a marketer, inspiration needs to come from somewhere. Look for visuals, symbols and words that communicate your brand message. Do an online search for images or keywords and see what appears. Additionally, many logo sites exist where you can see what is currently being done in a wide variety of marketplaces. This can be a great starting point. You can even use some old school tools like a dictionary or thesaurus to look for meanings and ideas. Old sketchbooks and even previous designs you’ve done or seen can all help to get the creative process started.

4. Design

Let the fun begin! Typically this is the part that everyone enjoys the most. Here are a few things to remember when designing and reviewing logos:

·         Typography: Type only logos can be powerful and memorable. Just think Coca-Cola, Disney and FedEx. Whether using an existing typeface or creating a custom type, remember to keep it simple and readable. You want something that will stand the test of time. Also make sure that the type you pick matches the brand’s personality. Finally, remember to use a maximum of two fonts, for clarity and legibility.

·         Color and Usage: Make sure you think through all uses and color scenarios. Will the color logo work in a black and white format? It probably looks great on a white background, but how about on a dark or photo backdrop? Some simple modifications are usually all it takes to make the design work in all the necessary formats.

·         White Space and Negative Space: Keep a defined area of clear space around your logo so that the focus stays where it should—on the logo and therefore the brand. This standard can be reinforced when developing a brand book or graphic standards manual. Also, don’t forget that you can utilize the negative space in your logo to reinforce messaging, but keep it natural and not overly forced. Some cleaver examples include FedEx (look for the arrow) and the Big Ten logo (when an eleventh school was added).

DYC - Search Local Schools, Colleges, Institutes, Tutions and more

Techniques to Clean Up Your Web Design

Most people assume that a clean website design is similar to a simple web design. There is a difference between these two types of designs.

When you use a simple design, you focus on eliminating non-essential aspects and place a premium on getting your message across. This makes it easy for the content to be the main focus of the site.

Simple web designs tend to be highly functional and practical. On the other hand, a clean design includes some aesthetic aspects. It allows you to refine the elements on your website.

Use Colors Strategically

A clean design calls for strategic use of color on your website. For a clean look, you need to select light, neutral colors. These colors will allow the content to be the focus of your website. You do not want to overwhelm visitors to your site with bold colors. A limited palette is also suitable because including a wide variety of colors will shift focus from the message.

Include some limited color splashes to accentuate particular components such as your headings, navigation and logos. Using bold colors on important elements helps to draw user attention. Single, solid shades work between than gradients when you want to create a clean Melbourne fl web design.

Invest in Good, Professional Photography

People are visual, and love photos. Good imagery helps establish a connection between your business and the website visitors. This is why it is important to find quality images. A large number of website visitors judge a site based on the imagery that you include. In most cases, it can break or make your website and you should invest in professional photography.

Consider stock photos with services such as iStockphoto or Thinkstockphotos. Downloading imagery from the internet may seem like an easy way out when you are designing a clean web design but they will provide the visual element that attracts visitors and lowers bounce rates. Original images will capture the website visitors and encourage them to read the content.

Fast Load Times

Waiting for a website to load is one of the most irritating things. A professional web design needs to ensure visitors enjoy fast load times. If your web pages take minutes to load, you are highly likely to lose visitors and this can translate into lower sales. Your web design should ensure that the load time is as fast as possible. looking into cloud hosting if you have to.

Most website owners tend to compromise on load times in order to include more aesthetic elements, such as JavaScript and jQuery. Site visitors are actually more interested in fast load times and not bold colors. If a website loads fast, a visitor will be able to go through all the sections with ease and they are more likely to be visit again. This makes it easy to convert visitors to customers.

Use Intuitive Navigation

A clean web design includes intuitive navigation to make it easy for visitors to locate information and pages. It’s imperative to have a navigation bar that displays all the titles on the different pages on your website. Internal links are also helpful because they connect visitors to different pages. Intuitive navigation also includes sitemaps especially if your site has several pages.

Why Your Google Authorship Photo Suddenly Stopped Displaying In Search Results

If you have Google authorship setup on your site or blog and working properly, you may have noticed in recent weeks that your photo is no longer being displayed in relevant Google search results. Even if you haven't come across this issue, do a quick Google search for a topic that you know will return your site in the search results. If you don't see your Google+ photo displayed and you know for a fact that it once did, this may shed some light on what's going on.

When I first came across this issue, I was noticing while my profile photo was absent, my name was sill being displayed as the author on the search results page. I went over to Google's Structured Data Testing Tool and plugged in my site's URL. Strangely enough, Google displayed a message saying that 'Authorship is working for this webpage' and it even showed me a preview of what a piece a content of mine will look like in a Google search. Even more strange is that this preview was displaying my Google+ profile photo. I went through all the other steps to make sure authorship was properly setup on my site; verifying that all my content linking to my Google+ profile had rel=author" and that my contributor section on my profile had reciprocal links back to the sites with all my authorship content. After verifying all that, I was still baffled as to why it wasn't working.

After reading through practically every thread, I was finding that this was a common issue but wasn't finding a succinct reason as to why this was occurring. Until I came across two responses from two different posters: Grace Massa Langlois and David Deering.

Thanks to these helpful souls, I learned that Google was doing some experimenting behind the scenes lately with rich snippets, including authorship snippets which has resulted in sometimes your profile image and your author name not being displayed. And sometimes it's just your author name, and sometimes neither. I realized my authorship was working just fine, hence why it was displaying my author name in search results and not my photo. 

Blog Dieni Rossini

25 Powerful Photoshop Light Effect Tutorials

No matter how long you've been working with Photoshop, it’s impossible to know everything. The possibilities are endless and people constantly find new ways to use old tools. For example, even the most amazing light effects can be achieved with a couple of basic brushes and filters without using any third-party plugins.

With so many free Photoshop tutorials out there, it would be a shame not to be able to create some beautiful lighting effects! But people are lazy and often need a little “push”. That’s why we want to share these 25 Powerful Photoshop Light Effect Tutorials to get you moving!

1. Design a Vista Styled Wallpaper

2. Vibrant Blackberry Inspired Ad in Photoshop

3. Eclipse Effect in Photoshop

4. Space Lighting Effect

5. Windows Vista Aurora Effect Photoshop Tutorial

6. How to Create Light Streaks in Photoshop

7. Create a Glowing Light Painting Effect

8. Creating a Mac-Type Background in Photoshop

9. Luminescent Lines

10. Brilliant Light Effects with Photoshop

11. Dazzling Dance Photo Manipulation

12. Create an Electrifying Light Guitar

13. Make a Dreamy Abstract Background

14. The Making of “Constant Slip”

15. Create a Red Giant Star in Photoshop

16. Amazing Photoshop Light Effect

17. Create an amazing Ad in Photoshop

18. Awesome Digital Bokeh Effect in Photoshop

19. How to Make Your Photos Look Hipster

20. Flying Girl in Photoshop

21. Slick Dusky Lighting Effects in Photoshop

22. Create A Futuristic Photo Illustration

23. How to Illustrate a Camera with Light Streaks

24. Abstract Light Streaks Poster

25. Morning Glow

DYC - The Voice of Generation - World's Largest Education Classified Portal

Dreamyourcareer.com is World's Largest Education Classified Portal. DYC is a website that lets people find the schools, colleges, institutes, tuitions in your local area. DYC utilizes technology in a unique way to list educational information as main landing page. People can search exact location of schools and colleges because Google maps API is included in site. DYC having solutions for all: PHP, Java, .net, SAP, ERP, C, C , Ethical Hacking, CAD, Web Designing, IPhone Trainning, Jobs, schools, colleges, Institutes, tuitions, coaching, education, study, result.

Best Responsive Websites 2014

We all need some inspiration sometimes. Especially with responsive design. Here are some of the best responsive websites that have been inspiring me, in January 2014 so far.
Some are based on aesthetic and some on technical ability. I tend to come across a lot of websites that look amazing, but have crazy long load times. Although these websites are very eye catching and impressive, I try not to condone this practice. Just because a websites looks great, doesn’t mean a user should have to wait 10 minutes for it to load, or use a certain browser.
Let m know what you think of these responsive websites or if you have some suggestions of your own.

Best Responsive Websites January 2014 edition:

• Getgoldee.com
• Parrot.com
• Papertiger.com
• Lubiam.it
• Studioalto.com
• Hughesestatesales.com
• Flatguitars.com

Plugin To Switch Themes Conditionally

WordPress already includes a function which enables you to switch themes:

<?php fb_widget( $stylesheet ) ?>

The only problem is, this function will write to your database.

If you need to change themes conditionally, another solution is to use the stylesheet & template filters in WordPress which you can add to a simple plugin like this.

<?php

/**

 * Plugin Name: FB Widget

 * Plugin URI:  http://wordpress.org/plugins/fb-widget

* Description: Description Goes here….

* Version:     1.0

 * Author:      Geeta Dhamija

 * @copyright 2014 DYC

 * Author URI:  http://dreamyourcareer.com/author/geeta-dyc/

 */

add_filter( 'stylesheet', 'wpsites_change_themes' );

add_filter( 'template',   'wpsites_change_themes' );

function wpsites_change_themes( $theme ) {

    if ( ! is_user_logged_in() )

        $theme = 'twentyfourteen';

    return $theme;

}

The above example will display the Twenty Fourteen parent theme to all logged out users and display whatever theme you have activated in the backend to all logged in users.

How To Use This Code

You’ll need to create a plugin with this code then install and activate it.

1. Create a new file named plugin.php using a code editor like Notepad++ and copy the PHP code from the view raw link in the Gist labelled plugin.php.
2. For the readme.txt file you can simply use notepad to create a new file named readme.txt and paste the text into the new file.

Then all you need to do is place both files in a new folder and send it to zip so you can upload, install & activate the plugin.