The sad thing is, this is almost exactly the way these discussions go. We love our logo. It is awesome. It was expensive, and it was worth it. At one point, our color consultant/interior designer decided to get involved. Her input wasn't fruitful. Here is a direct quote: Our designer, ever gracious, responded withWe're quite averse to the red in the logo. We are not averse to it
as a color, nor for an interior accent, nor on principle - but it kinda says
"DANGER! BIRTH CENTER & NATURAL HEALTH!" which strikes us as imprudent.
Qualitatively, it isn't as nice as the slate blue we had for the subtitle.
Without the lighter tones in the swatches making it into the logo, XXXXXXXXX's
colors become pretty much the same as the Luftwaffe's.
Wah wahhhhh ;) I totally understand. I think the take away lesson for all of
us is that we want the graphic design palette to be bold and bright, but
that cannot exactly translate to an interiors palette because you will find
yourself delivering babies inside a highlighter.. and no mother wants that.
That response is amazing. It really does go like that. I send so many "Hey here's the first go...give me feedback" emails that my computer auto completes it now. Sometimes it goes great. Productive feedback, thoughts, honesty, more information about the business and marketplace, and I can work with that. I can take that and make the stuff work better for them because of this information. The worst is when it turns to "Can we make it this font and this shade of blue and move that letter over 10px." I just make the changes and don't try anymore. It sucks to say it, but it happens. Nothing productive can happen after that unless both the client and the designer can start fresh. No good design has ever happened when the client is dictating the design. The best message thread of the day goes to the epitome of an ignorant (and arrogant) client on the dev side of things. :-O Me: Talked with [old backend guy that quit]. Got another admin password from him. Honestly, this is over my head. All I know is there is an ISS server somewhere. We need like a sys admin or something. Server guy who knows all this stuff.
Him: Hang tight.
Him: Forget [old backend guy that quit].
Me: [Old backend guy that quit] knows how the servers are set up. There's like 5 pieces that he put together.
Him: How the servers are set up?
Yeah, there's no cure for stupid. Here was my take-away from the whole process: When we first started, she told us we'd probably be ten to fifteen hours into a logo. And we were like, naaah, no way. We aren't anywhere near that choosy. And then she gave us a couple first-runs and we were like I mean, dayum. Print that sucka. but there were one or two tweaks, and we talked about it. And we did "one or two tweaks" like four times, and then I asked "how many hours we at?" and she said "Twelve." And that's where you go "You know, we're working with a professional who has done this before, is intimately familiar with the process and has a firm grasp of what we need and how to give it to us. Let's pay her." ...or, you go "HOLY SHIT HOW DID YOU SPEND TWELVE HOURS MOVING PIXELS AROUND, WOMAN?" Because after all, you just get emails. It's easy to forget that there's work that happens between them, and you need to pay for it.
Don't designers usually show about 10 different rough logos to start out with? That way they and the clients can go through them, talk about what they like and don't like about each one, and go from there? I think if I were a designer and I spent half my morning working on just one, good logo, and have the customer reject it outright, I'd be a little miffed.
It doesn't really matter. A lot of clients have no respect for artists and expect you to pull the awful design in their head out through telepathy and magically make it not awful. The best is when you have to tell someone their idea is impossible or wildly impractical. That always goes well with this type of person
shudders Yeah, I had some ideas for a logo (I came up with my wife's last logo, and it's dope, and I'm still proud of it, and we had a talented designer clean it up and make it doper). Both of our designers disregarded it entirely. One came up with nothing as good, the other blew it out of the water within an hour. It would truly be an unpleasant slog (for everyone) if I were unwilling to let go of my ideas and surrender to the professionals.
This is our second designer. Our first designer was given one or two ideas we'd come up with, used none of them, and gave us two hundred alternates, all in pencil on paper. We narrowed the field to ten, then she gave us four more. None of them were good. Then we finally ended up with something "not terrible" and asked her to invoice us for work done. She invoiced us for more than her initial estimate for an entire branding project. Our second designer gave us one logo. And it was awesome. A few days later she gave us like four others, none of which were as awesome as her initial logo. Our logo ended up being a refinement of her first initial, monolithic sketch.
Wow. So I was curious to see if that was really his logo, it's that bad. I didn't find out, but I did find this after going to the url jebbushforpresident.com Interesting.
“It’s a piece of shit, and you can quote me on that,” says design critic Steven Heller, who has written dozens of books on everything from branding and typography to infographics and posters.
Actually, the problem is that they are aligned. If you measure carefully, you'll notice that the 'J' the '!' and the "2016" all have their bottoms on exactly the same pixel. The problem is that the heaviest part of the ! and the lightest part of the J both fall at the bottom. It creates an optical illusion that one is not on the same line as the other. That's the mark of a bad eye. Any asshole can have MS Word put two letters on the same line. Even attempting to move them manually (as one would have to do were the case what the quoted person says it is), at least shows that you know how to double click the Photoshop icon on your computer and that you think that Word might not be the optimal program for designing a font for a billion dollar campaign. It is a piece of shit, though. I don't think many would debate the end result, just the why.“The bottom of the curves of the “J” and “!”—the overshoot—almost align. But not quite. It confuses the eye.”
You don't take Gob Bluth seriously? As first discussed here by backtoyoujim (tagging you so that you may behold Jeb on a segway).
The first thing that the finished logo made me think of was old book covers--http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/81YS9egzy2L.jpg is an example (that I found after googling "book covers that 'Not That Kind of Girl' was mimicking.) I think the new one really (really, really) exaggerates the old-fashionedness of the big serif "Jeb" font, which makes a lot of sense with his being kind of a blast from the past. It still has the very modern "2016" but overall it looks much less modern and trendy than the designer's final draft. Given Jeb's target audience, I think that what they went with makes sense. /not a designerAwesome. Could you just make it a little worse? Thanks