All well-designed logos share these common elements:

• Memorable—they have recall value
• Striking—they grab your attention
• Captivating—they hold your attention
• Educational—you can learn about the company just from seeing the logo
• Simple—it captures the essence of the company’s brand

Nike

Nike’s logo is the most memorable logo in existence. It captures all the important principles of logo design. When you see the swoosh, you instantly think of Nike. Your head is instantly filled with images of sports and the iconic athletes that Nike has sponsored (Michael Jordan, Derek Jeter, Tiger Woods).

Fedex

FedEx’s logo is simple and recognized throughout the world. The bold typeface and contrasting colors leave a lasting impression. Its strongest feature goes unnoticed by many, but is widely admired in design circles. The negative space between the “E” and the “x” forms a bold, forward-pointing arrow. Once you see it, you’ll never look at the logo the same way again.

Lobster.com

It’s a lobster! Dot com. How great is that? Plus, the stylized illustration perfectly represents the brand’s rustic look and feel.

Six Locks

This logo comes from a logo submission site. It’s not for a real company, just a designer’s practice. However, it’s a straightforward, clever design. It’s a good example of type with graphics forming a cohesive design.

Red

Red is the most emotionally intense color. It stimulates an increased heartbeat and breathing. It is also the color of love.

For a long time the corporate color of choice was red. It was known as “corporate red.” This can be shown in the logos of companies such as: Shell, McDonalds, Exxon, Target, Johnson and Johnson. Red was a popular choice because of the eye’s natural attraction to the color red.

Red clothing gets noticed and makes the wearer appear heavier—so be careful with those red bikinis, ladies! Since it is an extreme color, red clothing might not help people in negotiations or confrontations. I know that you have heard that red automobiles are the most targeted cars to get stolen. Also when used in decorating, red is usually an accent—most decorators say that red furniture attracts attention, helping round out a bland room.

An offshoot of red—a pale red, pink is the most romantic color and is more tranquilizing than red. Sports teams sometimes paint the opponent’s locker rooms bright pink, so that they will lose energy. A little tidbit, the practice of assigning pink to an individual gender began in the 1920s and from then until the 1940s, pink was considered appropriate for boys because being related to red.

Blue

Most companies nowadays go with what is known as “Corporate blue.” This can be show in the logos of companies such as Citigroup, Walmart, and IBM. Blue is the most abundant color around us in nature and is known to have the properties of loyalty, trustworthiness, and stability (e.g., police officers)—the power suit of the corporate world. The large majority of new companies looking to brand their names go with the color blue.

Blue is a universal color—the color associated with baby boys, the sky, and ocean.

It creates the opposite psychological effect of red: peace and tranquility. A natural color, blue produces calming effects, so it is often used in bedrooms. However, at times it can also be cold and depressing.

Fashion consultants recommend wearing blue to job interviews because it symbolizes loyalty, intelligence, and confidence. People are more productive in blue rooms. Studies show weightlifters are able to handle heavier weights in blue gyms.

Black

Black is really a lack of color or an object that doesn’t emit or reflect light—the anti-color. Black is the color of authority and power. Very popular in the fashion world as it makes people appear thinner. It is also stylish and timeless.

Black also implies submission. Priests wear black to signify submission to God. Some fashion experts say a woman wearing black implies submission to men.

Black outfits can also be overpowering, or make the wearer seem aloof or evil. Villains, such as Dracula, often wear black.

White

Brides wear white to symbolize innocence and purity—virginity. White means kindness, and in some countries is worn to funerals.

White also stands for openness and truth, and at times can be a little cold. Doctors and nurses wear white to imply sterility.

White reflects light and is considered a summer color. White is popular in decorating and in fashion because it is light, neutral, and goes with everything.

Green

Currently green is the most popular decorating color. Symbolizing nature it is the easiest color on the eye and can improve vision. Change and transformation is necessary for growth, and so this ability to sustain changes is also a part of the energy of green. It has a calming and refreshing effect. People waiting to appear on TV sit in “green rooms” to relax.

Hospitals often use green because it relaxes patients. Brides in the Middle Ages wore green to symbolize fertility. Dark green is masculine, conservative, and implies wealth.

Yellow

Cheerful sunny yellow is an attention getter and is the easiest color to see. People who are color blind to other colors can usually see yellow—thus often used for hazard signs and emergency vehicles.

While it is considered warm and optimistic color, people lose their tempers more often in yellow rooms and babies usually will cry more often. Yellow enhances concentration, hence its use for legal pads. It also speeds metabolism.

Orange

The most flamboyant color on the planet! It’s the color tied most this fun times, happy and energetic days, warmth and organic products. It is also associated with ambition. There is nothing even remotely calm associated with this color. Orange is associated with a new dawn in attitude.

Purple

The color of royalty, purple connotes luxury, wealth, and sophistication. It is also feminine and romantic.

It is the color of people seeking spiritual fulfillment. It is said if you surround yourself with purple you will have peace of mind. Purple is a good color to use in meditation. However, because it is rare in nature, purple can appear artificial.

Because purple is a combination of red and blue, it brings a new dynamic to the expansion of blue and the activity of red. Red brings practicality to the undirected expansiveness of the blue, and allows more creative energy to emerge. For this reason, violet is associated with imagination and inspiration.

Brown

Solid, reliable, conventional—brown is the color of earth and is abundant in nature. Light brown implies genuineness while dark brown is similar to wood or leather. Brown can also be sad and wistful. Men are more apt to say brown is one of their favorite colors.

Too much brown can make a dull effect, but gives a feeling of solidity and allows one to stay in the background, unnoticed.

So what is the right choice for your company? The most important place to start is putting yourself in your customer’s shoes—your target demographic. Which color would be most pleasing to them? Sometimes when starting a company it is hard to separate your personal color preference with the preferences of your targeted customer. Your favorite color may be green but is it really the color that best represents your company?

Perhaps after reading this article you have decided it is most important for your company to seem trustworthy and dependable—blue is the color for you! That is the same color that many companies have, and you have to remember that a part of branding your company is to set yourself apart and make sure that people remember YOUR company.

New York clothing store, R.A.G. New York continues to see record traffic and sales on their website thanks to the search engine optimization performed by Blue Fountain Media between April and September 2008.  Our client was even mentioned in the NY Daily News thanks to our work.

See Blue Fountain Media in the NY Daily News

Currently, the website is not running any type of marketing program except through its 6 stores in New York City. The month of April broke all preceding records as can be seen in the two line graphs showing total visits and sales to the website since March 2008:

These results are both due to our re-design of the website as well as an extensive search engine optimization campaign which included months of link building, analysis, and a results-oriented team of dedicated individuals.

Website ReDesign: BioSpecifics gets a professional look and feel

Our Redesign: A broader, more open site with a clean and clear new design, showcasing the products, the company, and their customers, on a tight budget.

Before: A focus on the corporate side, with other aspects de-emphasized.

The Challenge: Create a highly professional site that appeals to biopharmaceuticals experts, but doesn’t intimidate non-experts. Incorporate high-level product discussion, fine-grained social features, and corporate information like stock quotes.

The Work: The focus here was on highlighting the content, rather than creating a full multimedia presentation. This site includes a stock quote module, several discussion forums, and a news page.

The Result: A great looking, informative site that offers up-to-date information on research, products, and company issues.

What’s Cool: This is a site for every audience. Customers, investors, and researchers can all see where they need to go, at a glance.

(source: laszlo-photo)

This is a continuation of yesterday’s blog post - reviewing travel sites. Today we’re going to look at some travel sites that need a little help.

1. AffordableTours.com

This site offers an excellent service. As a user I was able to find and compare special travel offers from a very wide breadth of sites, ranging from Viking River Cruises to Contiki. The problems, however, are many: endless lists, seizure-inducing color combinations and an excessive number of sections leaves the user feeling dizzied. There are a couple of hidden  diamonds in the rough elements (for example, their phone number and hours are found on the top of every page – excellent!), but the feelings of claustrophobia are practically unavoidable when trying to navigate this labyrinth of a website. It’s amazing that you can browse tours, cruises, river cruises and resorts, but the way it’s laid out is overwhelming!

Layout/Navigation: Everything is everywhere. The home page contains multiple links to the same sections, which can be confusing and it also adds to the clutter. Bold red text is sprinkled liberally throughout the site, meant to grab the user’s attention. It ultimately backfires, however, because it’s overused. The point, of course, of using highlighting styles is to make only certain elements stand out. When overused it defeats the point.

The navigation suffers from the same problem that the entire layout suffers from – the choice paralysis. When the user is confronted with too many choices, paradoxically, the user is more likely to just give up and go elsewhere without choosing. There needs to be some serious simplification.

Colors: Not only are way too many colors needed, almost none of them are nice colors. Furthermore, they don’t work well together. Orange and green and dark blue and lighter blue and neon blue . . . it’s all too much. Deciding on a sensible color palette is a very important step in design which doesn’t seem to have been taken with this site.

Photography: The only photographs that seem to be present (and not taken from featured outside sites) are tiny employee profile pictures with a 90s-tastic background gradient. There’s just way too much text.

2. EuropeanDestinations

This site is nowhere near as difficult to manage as AffordableTours, but I find that it’s still a bit overwhelming. There are dozens of links on every page and they all look practically the same, blending into a blur of color.

Layout/Navigation: The Layout and navigation is actually not that bad – it’s well-organized. This site also has its number and hours on the top of every page, which is great. Additionally, there’s a convenient albeit unruly Destinations dropdown in the top right which lists dozens of possible destinations throughout the world. There’s also a nice use of AJAX drop-downs in the middle column of every page to save space and expands specific offers with more detailed information while everything is collapsed.

Colors: The color palette used is almost entirely a monochromatic collection of blues, making everything blend together. Fortunately, the sparingly-used highlight colors are well-chosen: prices are in orange, which makes them stand out nicely, and the search module on the home page is a bright yellow. It doesn’t exactly match, but serves its purpose.

Photography: There is very little photography to be found on this site. The photos that are present are nice, but the excessive text tends to drown the pictures.

Let’s review the primary rules designers should keep in mind when working with travel sites:

• Quality Over Quantity – Make sure not to overwhelm your users!
• Organization and Consistency – Users should be able to find what they’re looking for easily. Don’t make drastic layout changes from page to page.
• Communicate Visually – Give the user a taste of their potential destination through photography they can’t resist.

(source: serdir)

Today we’re going to look at some good design in travel sites, and tomorrow we’ll continue the series with some that need a little help. Let’s get started!

1. TrueGreece.com

TrueGreece, as the name implies, is a site dedicated to Greek vacation packages. It does a good job of putting the user at ease with nice use of appropriate colors and photography.

Layout / Navigation: TrueGreece’s layout is simple, functional and intuitive, which is very important. The left navigation makes sense and the icons used as links beneath the main picture are subtle and unobtrusive. The phone number and addresses are present on the left of every page. Another excellent point to note is that the layout is very consistent from page to page. If a site’s layout changes suddenly from one page to another, the user can get disoriented and annoyed, unable to find what they’re looking for.

Colors: The use of a relaxing blue-to-teal gradient evokes a feeling of being by the sea, which is a nice touch. The black body text is bold and easy to read, but it might be improved by lightening slightly to a dark gray. A warm orange is used to effectively draw attention to specific areas or titles, and offsets the cool tones nicely.

Photography: One of the most engaging parts of TrueGreece’s website is the use of beautiful photography, which often plays an important role in design; it can separate a good design from a truly engaging experience. This is especially crucial for a travel site – it’s imperative that the viewer gets a sense of what it could be like to travel to the featured destination. The photography used here is crisp, with bright colors and nice cropping.

Critiques:

After a quick review, I see three issues with the site.

First of all is the left navigation. The gray behind the links is drab and doesn’t fit with the rest of the site’s bright look and feel. I would leave the background white. When the user is viewing one of the pages linked to in the left navigation, that page’s link acquires an orange background and white text, which looks great.

Second of all, though related, is the use of drab gray backgrounds in their Travel Questionnaire form. I much prefer the cleaner style used by the Contact Us form.

The last thing I’ll mention is the large expanse of white space in the lower-right quadrant of the background, as well as the upper-right area next to the top navigation. It’s clear that the gradient in the background of the right side of the page is supposed to align with the main picture, but it throws off the site’s balance in a big way. I’d recommend using the same gradient background from left side, minus the flower, so as to let that element maintain is uniqueness.

2. Travel2Greece.com

Travel2Greece is of course another Greek travel site. The home page gets a bit crowded due to its lack of content, but once the user enters a subpage, a nice layout is adopted. I don’t know why the home page is left-aligned while the rest of the pages are centered, and that’s something I’d rectify. Travel2Greece also has a lot of beautiful photography, which really helps the user visualize what taking these trips would be like.

Layout / Navigation: The homepage aside, Travel2Greece’s layout is consistent and simple. The header features a main page picture as well as preview photos for the other main pages. The right column is filled with stunning views to entice further research while the main content area is filled with information, and often additional photography.

Colors: The colors are bright, modern and consistent. The body text color is a nice gray while the headers are lime green and links are a light, slightly unsaturated blue. To enforce the branding, even in HTML text, the site name is written in gray, very light blue and then a sky blue.

Photography: Travel2Greece makes abundant use of a variety of photographs, all professional quality. The multitude of breathtaking scenes shown on the site offer a spectacular tour of the country and, as I already mentioned, there’s nothing more helpful to a travel site for getting leads than the photography.

Critiques: My first critique is of course the randomly inconsistent homepage. It should be centered like the subpages. Another problem with the homepage is how crowded it feels. This is because the homepage consists only of the header and the footer, the latter being way too crowded for my taste. Reorganizing or reducing the content in the footer would help improve both the home page and all of the subpages. Additionally, the homepage should contain calls to action, as well as content similar in style and layout to the subpages.

I also have a problem with the sudden and harsh black dividers used to break up tables. These lines should be lightened, replaced with more subtle dividers or removed.

Lastly, the subpage headers have a style that doesn’t fit with the rest of the site’s design. These should be redesigned so as to make the site more uniform as a whole.

3. Bahamas.com

Layout/Navigation: Friendly and modern are the two prime adjectives that come to mind. It’s very clean and well-organized with lots of white space and uses of gentle color for area separation. The best part, though, is the branding. The interesting shapes and colors used in the logo are repeated throughout the site to tie everything together and maintain a fun feel throughout.

Colors: A lot of saturated, playful colors are found in the Bahamas logo. Fortunately, the user isn’t bombarded with all these colors all the time. If that were the case, along with the mass amounts of content present, the user could feel quickly overwhelmed. Instead, a nice dark, saturated blue is used for headers and a dark gray is used for body content. Besides that, various other colors are primarily seen in the awesome photography throughout the site.

Photography: Myriad fantastic photos are seen on practically all of the many, many pages that make up the Bahamas website. Again, this is what will really impress most users.

Critiques: This site is incredibly well-executed. This makes sense, as tourism is the country’s primary economic activity, accounting for about two thirds of the GDP (according to Wikipedia). The website is also amazingly vast and features countless sections containing staggering amounts of information. What would I change? Well, the last word in the navigation at the top of the page (My Bahamas, Bahamas Directory, etc.) shows up on the next line in Firefox for some reason. It works fine in Internet Explorer, Safari and Chrome, though. Other than that, I’ve got nothing.

Feel free to download the wallpaper here and make sure to stop back next week for more.