1.  What is your brand name, tagline and how much does the name alone contribute to the brand?
2. What doesn’t you do, or do well in comparison of other players your market?
3. Who might you compete with in the future? Please mention similar services, well-known names in your industry and who are the customer favourites.
4. Who are your ideal customers? What is their Age range, what do your customers watch, what do they read, and how do they find your business.
5. What restrictions for the logo (size, color, readability) Please specify your colour preferences, or existing brand colours, if any.
6. Do you want to suggest any inspiring visuals associated with the product/idea/location?
7. Some examples of best and worst logos you want to refer. If possible please specify why you liked or disliked them.

Few years back I used to ask many more questions which went unanswered most of the time, so I trimmed them to fit within 7. For the deadline and budget I get the idea from my hire-me form.

Photo: oberazzi

Art of staying focused on the work is equally essential as your skills on using pencil and artboard. Either you are a designer or a developer, concentration is always the vital ingredient of your every recipe.

Going to share you some of the factors relating to stay focused on the work. Each of them, I learned through my own trial and error process.

They say if you at least meditate for 30 minutes a day, you can spend rest of the day focused and calm. But you need to have quite a patience and routine to sit on a corner of a room, doing nothing for 30 minutes every day.

I used to listen to the same song repeatedly for thousands of times or more while working to cut outside noise and stay focused on the work. This process helped me to achieve some sort of concentration.

We must sleep at least 7-8 hours a day.

Create complete schedule for each day, where you can have at least 2 important works to complete beside checking email, replying and discussing with client over skype and phone.

Working offline can helps you to avoid minor distractions of email and social media.

We must avoid multitasking. If you are designing and talking over the phone at a same time, you’ll naturally turn rude either or miss some of the vital points on design. Better to stop your work till you complete your conversation. I believe using more than one thing at a time may ruin all your patience to stay focused.

Spend a day in a week with your loved ones or reward yourself by going out for a walk / long ride.

If none of the above worked, than you may look for better opportunities in life. Life is precious and beautiful and we should be enjoying it as much as possible.

Companies like Coke, Pepsi, Unilever etc are spending big money on advertisement over the 10-20 years to create an emotional connection between their targeted customer to their brands. Most of these multi national companies uses Social Medias, print medias and television to reach the mass. Slowly people are getting habituated with their products and dependability is also increasing  simultaneously.

Some of the companies are even taking shortcut to brand themselves by scratching an emotional weakness of their consumer and through tapping their consumer’s craze, e.g. every Indian parents wants their kid to be more intelligent  strong, and tall and every mother wants to be fair, white and youth looking.

Easiest shortcut they are using false claims in advertisement and exaggeration in packaging design. I noticed that the specialty exaggeration is selling high in South Asia.

Here are some examples:

“Complan” a health drink brand of Heinz Indian Pvt Ltd, Claims that it can help children increasing height twice as fast.

Multigrain noodles such as “Maggi” (Nestle brand) and Top Ramen (Nissin brand) claims to be healthier than the regular variety.

Some biscuits that claims to be digestive and helps us to loose weight and some other energy drinks that claims to make out children do better in examination.

“Fair & Lovely” a fairness cream brand of Hindusthan Lever Limited, claims it can help us to turn our black skin to white within 4 weeks.

Here is little more about skin whitening cream, excerpt from Guardian. 

“In the ancient scriptures, epics, or folk tales, the good character is always portrayed as being fair in complexion, suggesting that the fair are fair dealing and the dark complexioned has evil intentions,” explains Shyamala Bhatia, an associate professor in history at the Bharati College, University of Delhi.

Add to that a history peppered with colonization by lighter-skinned invaders from the west, inequalities introduced by the caste system and 200 years of British rule, and it becomes clear why the concept of fairness being superior is embedded deep within the Indian psyche.

“During the Raj, the idea that those with fair skin were superior came with the packaging. It was never spoken about and there were no propaganda campaigns – it was just understood. The very fact the you were being ruled by pale skinned people meant that they were superior to the natives – you looked up to the white man,” explains Dr Premen Addy, a senior lecturer in Asian and international history at Kellogg College, Oxford

Read more on Guardian.co.uk

As per some mainstream Indian news Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI) is planning to prosecute Heinz India, GlaxoSmithKline, AbbottIndia and other mega-companies in 19 such cases of false advertising.

Image source: flickr

I have recently brought a Wacom tablet, after using it for couple of weeks I found this one a must have tool for every freelance graphic designer. Below are the hand drawn arrows I’ve created with it.

If you want to download the Ai or PSD ( all arrows are scalable vector) of these file, you can simply get it below. Please feel free to download and use them commercially and personal projects, I appreciate your feedback and Social Share in return

There are plenty of project management & online colaboration tools out there. Wide popular are Basecamp, Assembla, Activecollab etc. But they are mainly designed to suit the requrement of larger agencies.

I’m a google apps user, and I use gmail.com to login my @kriszha mail. I believe most of the freelancer uses gmail either with @gmail.com or google apps like me. Here you go step by step how to productify your gmail inbox to manage your projects, setting up priority, adding to task, and segregate them in category.

Creating category and Multiple inboxes

Go to settings/labels to create different labels for each category, and use unique colors to differenciate each of the category.

From setting/labs you can enable Multiple Inboxes so that you can see all those categories next to main panel.

Marking and Prioritising

We can use starts to mark each of the email as per their status, e.g. for incomplete task I usually mark exclamation, and completed as tick. I use blue star for less importamt and red star for highly important. We can still use labels to as per the priority level.

Creating Task and full-screen view

We can create task simply by clicking More/add to the task. Task always appears on the right hand side of inbox. If you want to see whole task in a new tab, you can view that here.

There is option on task to create new list and check related mail.

Not Satisfied with thsese?

Find a list of 50 different third party apps to make your gmail inbox more productive here

Four years ago I’ve posted an article titled Logos and Designer of World’s Top 10 Most Powerful Brands, 2008. Post was based on the annual ranking of wordwide brands conducted by Millward Brown as part of the BrandZ Top 100 Most Valuable Global Brands study. It was become quite a sucessfull blog post because that helped me to find out the real designer behind the Marlboro logo, who is Allison Muir Severe.

Now going to post the Brandz Top 100 Most Valuable Global Brands 2012. See the difference after four years.

Check the top 100 chart  and Report here

Mosaic Leaf

Download Mosaic Leaf font here

Otama

Download Otama font here

Nomed

Download Nomed font here

RBNo2

Download RBN02 font here

QUB

Download QUB font here

Weston

Download Weston font here

Cabin

Download Cabin font here

Intro

Download Intro font here

Hagin

Download Hagin font here

LOT

Download LOT font here

Once again, please consider donating or buy them for commercial use. And share your thoughts about this roundup.

Here, I’ve summed up 10 mantras for a freelance graphic designer.

1.  Be an idea freak than a tool jockey.
2. Corporate style sucks, try something out of box.
3. Don’t write, illustrate, visual expression is even stronger then words.
3. Don’t believe in your fans and friends “LIKE” they even praise your cat’s picture.
4. Minor distraction is poison to kill major productivity, so use social media responsively.
5. Only your wife loves your hidden meaning inside a design.
6. Your design should drag a visitor to click so that your client can make more sells.
7. Consistency is the king.
8. Using beautiful girls in design was dinosaur’s business.
9. Map what you think… pencil papers still rocks.
10. Focus on your name before making it a logo.

The name is Relevance Path. The work we do for our clients is online marketing, search engine optimization, etc. Rather than Internet marketing or online marketing we use “Inbound Marketing”, which focuses on “getting found”. Our approach to marketing our client’s businesses is to “Attract, Engage, Nurture, Convert”. excerpt from client’s email 

This is probably the fifth logo design project I’ve handled for my Canadian client JP Obbagy & Keith Haberl.  This time, my Task was to create logo for Relevance Path.

As my usual logo design process, I started with pre-design reserch and gathering of ideas.

Here I made five different some design variations for the logo.

1. Using Funnel (As insisted by the client)

1. Using Graph

Google Analytics style of graph

1. Using Arrow

Two of the pointers facing different directions and another two towards same direction.

1. Using Ladder

1. Using Highway

Revision Rounds.

As client loved the idea of using arrow, so I created few more variations for the same.

Finalizing

Client loved the idea of using arrow in Negative Space.

Logo in Reverse and single colour.

Upcoming website design of Relevance Path.

Cover page of brand identity guideline.

Logo in backgrounds.

Space Division around the logo.

Dummy texts for paragraph formatting style.

Texture with the logomark.

Primary and secondary colors for the logo.

Client’s Testimonial:

“I have worked with Krishna on a number of different graphics projects and keep returning because of his creativity and skill. The latest involved creating a logo for our inbound marketing agency. Based on experience, I knew it was best to give some broad direction but let his creativity come out. In short our guidelines were:

clean, not overly busy,
very few colours, but not “blue chip” colours,
something that evokes trust, knowledge, modern
nothing frilly, dainty or complicated possible use of a funnel or arrow

Krishna delivered with enthusiasm and we found a match in the second round of design alternatives. We particularly like the combined simplicity and complexity of the arrow and have had many compliments. I highly recommend Krishna.”

JP Obbagy
Managing Partner
Relevance Path Inbound Marketing

Visit us: relevancepath.com

Follow us: twitter.com/JPObbagy

Do you think this is creative enough for a survey?