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In response to the newly designed delicious.com website:

11 Mac Apps and Design Resources for only $49

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World Media Awards

The World Media Awards exists to recognize and reward great contributions to media from bloggers and publishers. It will culminate in a 1 day event in San Francisco that will celebrate the best in blogging, forums, publishing and media from around the world.   So if you are a world class blogger, why should you enter?


1. Get Recognized - You Deserve It!
You put a lot of effort into making your blog incredible. You know it and your readers know it. The World Media Awards is a way for you to get authoritative recognition from other bloggers and industry experts. That recognition will help you build your readership, make new collaborative connections, and hopefully have great moments that make all the late nights even more rewarding.


2. Meet Other Bloggers Who Care
Blogging, forums and most other online media is about conversation and interaction, but sometimes it's easy to end up pecking away behind a monitor in your office or home all alone. Meeting other bloggers and publishers keeps the fire lit and the conversation going. When you enter the World Media Awards, you'll be listed alongside other bloggers and publishers who put the same level of pleasure, attention and work into making their blog top notch.


3. Expose Yourself to New Partners
If your blog or forum is part of your organization, being part of the World Media Awards will increase your exposure by putting your name in front of the thousands of visitors to our site and the award ceremony. That means you can find out who else is doing very good work, strut your own stuff, and expand your network of contacts and collaborators.


4. Make Yourself Irresistible to Clients
What helps your chances at winning that next pitch more than expanding your network? Telling that network that you are the winner of a World Media Award. Winning an award shines a light on your achievements, and it serves as an example of the commitment, engagement and exacting standards you apply to your work.  


5. Be Part of the Beginning of Something Big
Because 2012 is the first year for these awards, you have the one-time chance to be the inaugural winner and set the standard for the World Media Awards in your category. Getting in on the ground floor of these awards will open doors for you as a blogger and a publisher.   The bottom line is, the World Media Awards will shine a spotlight on the year‚ as most successful bloggers and publishers, and on the businesses that serve and interact with them.   Now is your chance to be one of them.   The sponsors include Growmap, Pace Lattin, VigLink and Trancos. World Media Award judges include Steve Hall, Sarah Austin, Chang Kim, Julie Wohlberg, Pierre Zarokian, Ivka Adam, Cheryl Contee, Krystyl Baldwin, Adrian Harris, Jeremy Wright, Rob Bloggeries, Dave Duarte, Tanya Alvarez, Dana Oshiro, Tom Foremski, and Judith Lewis. hashtag #wmads on Twitter. Media partners include Adrants, Bloggeries, MediaVision, The Affiliate Marketing Awards, Read Write Web, My Blog Guest, Web Traffic Control and FeedBlitz. Murray Newlands is author of How to Make a Blog Book and Online Marketing; a User Guide. He is also founder of the Affiliate Marketing Awards. Born in the UK, he now spends his time in San Francisco and New York. Murray works for Audience Mindshare and consults for Trancos Ins as well as being an advisor for VigLink. Actually he is working on his new book: The Email Marketing Book.

Wacoms Inkling: A new way take your sketches digital.

The Inkling sketch pen uses pressure sensitivity to capture a digital image of your work while you draw on any paper. This is ideal for making quick sketches or brainstorming, and best of all it finally gets rid of the scanner and tablet! The best part is it allows you to create layers with the touch of a button. It's small and portable, so you can take it anywhere. When you get home, simply plug it in and transfer your drawing to your favorite editing program.

I think I'm in love.

LogoGargen.com rips off world famous logos and gets away with it!

At first glance LogoGarden just looks like another stock logo farm out to scam small businesses with the lure of quick and cheap custom logos. But upon closer inspection we come to find that they're not ripping off regular joe logo designer, but are going after the big boys. They have stolen the intellectual property rights of some of the most famous brands such as The World Wildlife Fund pictured below.


To show how ridiculous this is, the following was taken directly from their terms and conditions.

LogoGarden retains the copyrights and all associated rights to the original symbols, but the license allows Users to use and display that symbol in the customized logo.

I find this more than a little ironic. LogoGarden has the nerve to steal other logo designs and claim full copyright to them, only to turn around and illegally license it to unlimited users.

The whole purpose of a business seeking out a custom logo is so that it can be uniquely identifiable to them, only used by them, and be copyrighted / trademarked so that if infringement occurs, they could take legal action and protect their brands value and reputation. Once a logo develops brand recognition, customers associate it with certain core values like trust, quality, reliability, experience, etc. All of which take years to develop and therefore has a priceless value.

What gets me the most is how the word custom is abused so much recently. If it is not created from scratch, it's not custom. Sometimes I wonder how people can fall for a scam like this, but that's what happens when you're looking for a quick solution. As a head's up some other "custom" logo sites that have been know to sell mass generic logos or just flat out rip offs include: logoworks, logoyes, quicklogo, and more. Basically if it says fast, cheap, and has a large selection of pre-made designs to choose from, RUN!

Moral of the story? There are no shortcuts in life. There is no such thing as do it yourself logo design service. There is only old fashioned, time consuming, do it yourself work. Or you could hire someone that creates logo designs for a living. Just an idea.

I first found out about LogoGarden from Jeff Fisher who has the misfortune of multiple instances of his logo designs being ripped off.

I hope it spreads that what LogoGarden and similar sites are doing is not only a scam, but also theft.

Why Microsoft a.k.a. Bing still Sucks!

No matter how many chances I give microsoft to redeem themselves I find time and time again that their products and services just plain suck. After buying Windows machines all my life I finally got fed up and bought a Mac. No problems ever since. I tried using Bing once and gave up because I could not get good search results. After being thoughouly disgusted with them, I thought why not give them one more chance and use bing's webmaster services? No need to sign up, just log in with Facebook and this will be quick and simple. Nope. Didn't work. Had to sign up for an account. After the signup form rejected my password several times I finally got an account and loged in. Bing! I get presented with this lovely message. Goodbye forever Microsoft!

Working your Life Away

* You will spend at least 2,080 hours per year working a full-time job in the United States.
* This equals 87 straight days working per year without a single break to eat, drink or sleep.
* If you begin working full time at age 18 and stop at 65 you'll spend 97,760 hours at work.
* Or we can look at this as only 4,073 continuous days without a break.
* To put this in perspective, at a child's eleventh birthday they'll have barely experienced 4,000 days.
* Factoring out sleep, we only have 242 days per year to be awake
* This means you spend greater than 36% of your waking time working.
* If we average 2 hours a day eating then we only have 212 days to call our own
* And this increases our time spent working to greater than 41%
* The average time spent behind the wheel each day for Americans is 87 minutes
* If we consider this part of your work day, then you are at work for 45% of your time
* 460 hours (57 work days) more then a peasant in 13th century England
* 716 hours (90 work days) more then an average worker in Germany
* 1456 hours (182 work days) more then the !Kung Bushman (a group of hunters and gatherers)

New Gap Logo Causes Fan Revolt

This article is a continuation of a recent rash of branding failures that include Bing, Pepsi, and now Gap's new logo. The backlash has been spread far and wide across the internet in news stories, design blogs, and even a make your own "crap" logo. Apparently the Gap changed their old logo online and replaced it with a new one because

"We’ve had the same logo for 20+ years"

Well, that may be true, but after having brand recognition and customer loyalty for over 20 years, why would you throw it all away on a whim? The president of Gap made an attempt to explain, but in the end admitted that

"we plan to ask people to share their designs with us as well"

So basically they have no idea what they are doing and are making a pathetic plea to the crowdsourcing community. After all, wouldn't you put your brand in the hands of people who know less about your company, have no point of reference, and may not even be designers or familiar with branding; what could go wrong? Well, it looks like we will never find out, because almost immediatly Gap listened up

"Ok. We’ve heard loud and clear that you don’t like the new logo. We’ve learned a lot from the feedback. We only want what’s best for the brand and our customers."

But has Gap really learned their lesson? This whole fiasco could have been handeled in a much more professional manner. I mean, if they wanted the opinoins of fans, why didn't they just take a poll? Companies stage controversy all the time to get more attention, but the question is did it work? And if so, are you going to rush out and buy Gap clothes?

UPDATE: 99designs held a contest to redesign the logo. The prize is only $500, but over 4600 logos were submitted. That's only $9.20 per concept and it shows. See for yourself >

100 Brands of Interest

Recently I was fortunate enough to have my logo featured on Dache - a blog by logo designer David Pache. The following is from his article 100 Brands of Interest II:

"It can be the easiest thing to create a logo for a client but when it comes to assessing what style of identity can best represent yourself or your business, this is a different matter altogether...

No matter what the style, I think it can be said that all of the 100 brands below have been executed successfully to create effective, professional logos which communicate well to their audience."

Thanks again David, for featuring my logo along with many other talented designers.

What makes the World's Largest Brands Logo Designs Special?

According to the ‘Top 100 Global Brands Scoreboard’ report the top 50 brands & logo designs in ranking order were:

Coca-Cola, Microsoft, IBM, GE, Intel, Nokia, Walt Disney, McDonald’s, Toyota, Marlboro, Mercedes-Benz, Citi, Hewlett-Packard, American Express, Gillette, BMW, Cisco, Louis Vuitton, Honda, Samsung, Dell, Ford, Pepsi, Nescafé, Merrill Lynch, Budweiser, Oracle, Sony, HSBC, Nike, Pfizer, UPS, Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan, Canon, SAP, Goldman Sachs, Google, Kellogg’s, Gap, Apple, Ikea, Novartis, UBS, Siemens, Harley-Davidson, Heinz, MTV, Gucci and Nintendo.

You would think that an analysis of this list should give some good commercial pointers to a good commercial new logo design. So here then is a description of a logo designs that conforms as near as possible with the emphasis supported by these top 50 brands (the (%) identifies the percentage of these brands that hold to this view) :

• The name does not describe the product sold (94%)
• The by-line tag is not included in the logo (90%)
• The font style is clean and clear (84%)
• The logo design uses one colour only (74%) (white & black not counted as a colour)
• The logo design uses letters only without the symbol (74%)
• The logo design is a made-up name or ACRONYM (72%)
• The logo design is rectangular in shape (66%)
• The logo design is one word only (62%)
• The logo design includes the trademark symbol (54%) and is placed in the top right (48%)
• The name is 6 letters or less (52%)
• The name uses upper & lower case (44%) (excluding ACRONYMS)
• The background is filled and solid. (52%)
• The pronunciation includes three sounds/syllables (44%)
• The predominant color base is blue (40%)

Originally published on: Knol by Peter Baskerville