The colour wheel and logo design

Colours play a very important role in logo design. The colours that you use in a logo design help to give your logo design character while also helping it to stand out from its competition. The colors of your logo design can accentuate your brand identity or if they are used improperly, they can work against you and hinder your brand identity. Having a good understanding of colour and which colours work well together is essential when you are working with colour in logo design.

Last week, I wrote a post explaining the individual colours and their meaning in logo design (click here to view this post). Today, I am going to elaborate on this idea and further explain to you the relationship between colours in the colour wheel. By examining the colours in the colour wheel, we can learn how to create beautiful color schemes and harmonious designs.

The colour wheel is a valuable tool that helps us to better understand the relationship between colours. The colour wheel is made up of twelve colours: three primary colours (red, yellow and blue), three secondary colours (orange, green and violet) and six tertiary colours which are the colours created by mixing a primary with a secondary colour. The colour wheel also gives us some clues as to  several basic colour schemes found throughout the world around us.

Complementary Colour Scheme

Colours that are opposite each other on the colour wheel are considered to be complimentary colours. For example, red and green are complimentary colours as well as blue-orange and yellow-purple.

Many famous logo designs use a complementary colour scheme. The Visa logo, for example, is one of these logo designs. Its logo design uses blue and an orange-yellow. These colours are perfect for VISA as they represent authority, stability, security, loyalty, trustworthiness, quality and professionalism, all qualities that people look for when it comes to their finances.

The LA Lakers logo design also uses a complimentary colour scheme. This too is perfect for the LA Lakers as purple represents royalty and superiority whereas yellow denotes energy, vibrancy and enthusiasm.

Split Complimentary Colour Scheme

Obviously a slight variation of the complimentary colour scheme, a split complimentary colour scheme is made up of one colour plus the two colours that are on either side of its direct compliment.

There are a lot of logo designs that are created with a split complimentary colour scheme. These logo designs visually contrast and easily capture the attention of passersby.  Both the Firefox logo and Taco Bell’s logo use this colour scheme.

Analogous Color Scheme

Colours that are next to each other in the colour wheel are analogous colours. For example, red, orange and yellow are analogous. Blue, purple and magenta are also analogous. Many famous logo designs use an analogous colour scheme. These analogous logo designs match very well and are usually very pleasing to the eye.

The BP logo design and the Red Bull logo designs are both examples of analogous designs.

The McDonald’s logo design and the Fed Ex logo design also loosely use an analogous colour schemes.

Triadic Color Scheme

Combining every fourth colour in the colour wheel forms a triadic colour scheme. For example, orange, purple and green make up a triadic colour scheme. The famous Burger King logo design uses another triadic colour scheme of the primary colours, red, blue and yellow. Triadic colour schemes tend to be quite vibrant.

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Impresion digital 4

Inspiration and Everything Design

The internet is a designers dream, a virtual playland, a tantalizing maze of untainted treasures. An extension of our beautiful world into a vast abyss of the unknown. A magical world of astonishing and majestic beauty. A land where ideas and inspiration abound. Stumbling through the internet shows you just what we are made of, what is possible and just what in housed in the deepest corners of the human psyche. It is a world of discovery where you never know what might just be lurking around the next turn.

As a designer myself, there are a few sites that I absolutely love and constantly go to for inspiration. Of course, there are the classics such as ffffound, Trend Hunter and the Cool Hunter. Then of course, there are also an abundance of designer specific websites such as Smashing Magazine,  psdtuts+, abduzeedo and so many more. Everyone has there favourites and there are thousands upon thousands to choose from. One of my personal favourites these days is Behance. If you haven’t heard of it, visit it now and watch as your eyes slowly gloss over and the next four hours of your life melt into one. Showcasing the work of millions of the world’s best design professionals, Behance is an awe-inspiring site filled with art, illustration, design and everything alike.

Just to spark your interest, here are just a few of the amazing design masterpieces to discover on Behance.

Peter Jaworowski

Peter Jaworowski is an amazing Polish designer that is a partner of the Warsaw-based creative agency, Ars Thanea. He has worked with some of the world’s most heavy hitting brands such as Nike, Discovery Channel, Ubisoft, Nokia, Visa & Nissan.

Lichtfaktor

Lichtfaktor is a collective of artists that “use light to give expression to their creativity”. Based out of Cologne, Germany, this collective has worked with some big names.

TalkTalk Brighter from LICHTFAKTOR on Vimeo.

Adolfo Correa

A Chilean designer, Adolfo Correa specializes in digital art, illustration and typography.

Luke Lucas

Luke Lucas is an Australian typography genius that does unimaginable things with type.

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Impresion digital 4

How to create an argyle pattern in Illustrator

Do you love argyle patterns? Have you ever wanted to know how to make them? Today, I am going to teach you just how easy it is to create an argyle pattern in Illustrator. This is an intermediate Illustrator tutorial where you will learn how to add a custom argyle pattern to the swatches palette. The steps to follow are outlined below followed by an instructional video.

Step 1: Creating a diamond shape

Open a new Illustrator file that is 1200px by 900px. The first thing that you want to do is to turn on the smart guides. This will make creating your argyle pattern a whole lot easier. With smart guides, you will be able to align everything easily. To turn on the smart guides, go to View -> Smart Guides in the main menu.

Choose the Rectangle Tool (M) and draw a square on your stage that has a fill and no stroke. The fill colour should be one of the colours that you want in your argyle pattern. Convert your square into a diamond by rotating it45 degrees. In the main menu, go to Object -> Transform -> Reset Bounding Box. Squish and stretch your diamond shape until you get a diamond shape that you are happy with.

Step 2: Creating the basis for the argyle pattern

Choose the Rectangle Tool (M) and while holding down the alt key, click and drag out a copy of the original diamond shape. Repeat this step 6 times until you have aligned 7 diamonds together to create the shape below. Change the colour of the top and bottom 2 diamonds so that they are different from the middle three diamonds.

Step 3: Adding stitches to the argyle pattern

Choose the line tool and draw out a line from the center of your pattern to the center of the bottom right diamond. Change the stroke of the line so that it is white, 0.5px and has a dashed line of 3pt-1pt-3pt-1pt.

Create another line just like the last one only this time from the center of your pattern to the top right diamond. Select both lines and choose Vertical Align Center from the Align Palette. This positions your two lines so that they now form an ‘X’. Group the two lines (Object -> Group). Copy this ‘X’ and add it to within each diamond.

Step 4: Adding the argyle pattern to the Swatches Palette

Select the Rectangle Tool (M) from the toolbox to the left of your screen. Make sure that your rectangle has no stroke and no fill. Draw a square in the middle of the argyle pattern. With the rectangle still selected, go to Object -> Arrange -> Send to back. Now, select your entire argyle pattern plus the rectangle that you just created. Drag all of it into your Swatches Palette.

Delete the argyle pattern from the stage so that the stage is blank. With the Rectangle Tool (M), draw out a rectangle that covers the entire background or wherever else you may want to add your argyle pattern. Make sure that the rectangles fill is selected and select the argyle pattern that you just created from the Swatches Palette. This will fill the rectangle with your custom argyle pattern.

, How to create an argyle pattern in Illustrator, http://blog.pixellogo.com/?p=1583, http://blog.pixellogo.com/?feed=rss2, The Pixellogo Blog, ,
Impresion digital 4

What are the most viewed brand logos today?

A study has been released that gives us some of the logo stats that we have always wanted. This study gives us some valuable clues as to which popular logos have the greatest influence on us.  Commissioned by MyVoucherCodes.ca.uk, the study asked 1,654 participants “which logo do you see the most during an average day?” and “how often do you see each of the following logos on a daily basis?”

The results show that Google is far ahead of the pack. The Google logo is presently the most viewed logo with 47% of the studies participants claiming that Google was either set as their homepage or the first page that they went to upon launching the browser of their choice. The majority of these participants reported that they saw the Google logo over 50 times a day. Participants claimed to be using Google mostly for searches and as a spell-checking tool.

Microsoft and Facebook take up the number two and three spots with 15% and 11% of participants saying that these were their most viewed logos.

This is their list of the top ten most viewed logos:

1.         Google – 34%
2.        Microsoft – 15%
3.        Facebook – 11%
4.        Apple – 9%
5.        Coca Cola – 8%
6.        BBC – 7%
7.        Sony -5%
8.        Sky – 4%
9.        Twitter – 3%
10.      Blackberry -2%

These results come as no real surprise to me. Google has become such a household name these days that ‘google’ has even been added as a verb to the Oxford English dictionary. I, for one, definitely use it at least 30 times a day, if not a lot more. Google just seems to be everywhere and it is such a valuable tool. I too use it for all of my searches and spell-checking as well as for their calendar, webmaster and Google translate tools. I just don’t see this changing anytime soon.

I’m also not surprised that Microsoft and Apple are up there are well. With our constant use of and reliance on computers, of course these two brands are constantly battling for our attention and thus, doing everything that they can to thrust their logo designs into the limelight.

Facebook and Twitter both made the top ten as well clearly demonstrating the increasing popularity of social media networks in our every day lives. I would expect to see Twitter move up over the next few years.

This is a study conducted amongst British citizens. I wonder how Canadians and American’s differ? I suspect that the top 5 most viewed logos would be the same as it was for the Brits. I would be very interested in finding out who would fill the 5-10 spots. Surprisingly enough, there are no fast food chains in the top ten. I hate to say it but I think that at the very least McDonald’s would find itself among this top ten in North America.

The study results published in the above article were found here.

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Impresion digital 4

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