Jim Krause - The Logo Brainstorm Book: A Comprehensive Guide for Exploring Design Directions

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If you are anything like me, then one of the first things you want to know when you pick up a book about a well-covered topic (such as logo design) is this: What makes this book different from all the others? Its a fair question, and let me begin by answering it. The Logo Brainstorm Bookunlike the vast majority of books on the subjectis not filled with samples of logos. Granted, this may look like a book full of logo samples, but dont let appearances fool you: This is a book of suggestions, or, to put it as accurately as possible, this is a collection of idea-starters meant to help designers brainstorm their way to unique, attractive and effective logo solutions.

To understand how The Logo Brainstorm Book works, it helps to understand the degree to whichas well as the ways in whichdesigners are susceptible to the power of suggestion. What were talking about here are the ways in which designers readily absorb ideas and inspiration from the things they encounter in everyday life: things like the swooping curve of sports cars fender, the expressive structure of a modern office building, the communicative conveyances of a signs lettering or the muted hues of a woven scarf. Designers look at these things and, as long as they are paying attention at all, they can hardly help but be influenced by the visual, communicative and aesthetic suggestions of what they seeespecially if those suggestions can somehow be applied to a creative project that is currently in the works.

Given this healthy propensity to draw ideas and inspiration from their surroundings, The Logo Brainstorm Book aspires to aid designers in the conceptualization and creation of logos by putting before their eyes page after page of logo-related aesthetic, stylistic and thematic suggestions. For example, you may see a bunch of different renderings based on the human head, along with captions and text related to the images. The renderings could be used in all kinds of logo-developing ways. For starters, a designer might look at the pages and suddenly realize that a human-based icon might be just the thing needed for the logo shes working on. A designer could also use the spreads images to help brainstorm for different ways of stylizing a logos iconregardless of whether the icon is supposed to depict a human head or a head of cabbage. The spreads captions could be consulted for additional insights into the thinking behind the images or they could be read as stand-alone brainstorming prompts and melded with whatever ideas the designer already has brewing.

These are only a few ways that designers might use The Logo Brainstorm Book. The real point is that when designers open this book, engage with its content, blend what they see and read with their own ideas and preferences, and set about to develop concepts into presentation-ready material using whatever skills they possess and whatever tools they prefer, good things are bound to happen (and never more so than when the designers who use The Logo Brainstorm Book push hard enough to develop their ideas into finished designs that bear little or no resemblance to whatever images or words played a part in launching their creation).

The Logo Brainstorm Book is divided into seven chapters. The book opens with a chapter called Beginnings and this section covers three stages that can be used to get logo projects off to an efficient and well-targeted start: a stage where information is gathered, a stage where ideas are generated and a stage where visuals are developed and prepared for presentation. The next five chapters, Symbols, Monograms, Typographic Logos, Type + Symbol and Emblems, deal with different kinds of logos and logo elements that can be explored en route to coming up with finished designs. (If you are aiming to produce a particular style of logo, consider beginning your search for ideas in the chapter that best fits the description of what youre working on, and then be sure to move on to the books other chapters: You never know when, for instance, a sample of a typographic treatment might spark an idea that leads to an effective symbol or monogram design. The books final chapter, Color, provides information and ideas about selecting and applying colors to logo designs.

A quick word about tools before wrapping up this introduction. You will notice that this book often refers to three Adobe products: Illustrator, Photoshop and InDesign. Why include so many references to these particular products and so many tips related to their use? Its because these programs are, by far, the most commonly used logo-building tools on the planet, and to ignore the way that they can be used to create logos would be like trying to describe how to bake cupcakes without mentioning flour, sugar or ovens. If you use other kinds of software for your work, then feel free to adapt the Adobe-specific information to fit the capabilities of the programs you employ (and know that the ideas offered through the books text and images have much to offerregardless of what digital or hands-on tools you use to produce your work).

Thank you for picking up a copy of The Logo Brainstorm Book. I hope its content will help streamline your creative process while enhancing and expanding the range and quality of your work.

Jim Krause, WWW.JIMKRAUSEDESIGN.COM

Building a house is important business. Houses are meant to appeal to buyers through their aesthetics and functionality, houses should resist the forces of nature and houses ought to be constructed so that they will last a long time. A wise builder would never begin construction on a house without first looking into the tastes of its potential buyers, without coming up with a solid blueprint and without taking stock of all the materials and supplies needed for the project.

Logo design, as it turns out, has a lot in common with home building: Logos should be aesthetically appealing and functionally capable, logos need to attract the attention of their target audience and logos ought to be resilient against the winds of fad and fashion.

Do you want the logo youre about to build to appeal, function and last? Do you want the construction process to be as efficient, enjoyable and on-target as possible? Then youve got to prepare for the work ahead by gathering insight into the tastes of the people who will be paying for your design, the preferences of the audience who will be viewing it, the ways in which it will be used, the environments in which it will appear, the materials and tools that could be used to produce it and the means by which it could be constructed.