K Logo Design by A. Micah Smith

You’ll need to view the larger size so head over to BayerBerg’s Flickr stream to see sizes of Life & Career of Your Average Designer Infographic up to 2620px in width. Plenty big enough even for you poor designers with poor degraded eye site as a result of too many hours staring at that pixel.

Whilst you’re there add it as a Favourite.

K Found on Thisisn’thappiness

Fascinating look at how some of our beloved cereal brands—mostly references US cereal brands, but many have reached UK shores—have evolved over the last 50 years.

Really astonishing to see how little many of these cereal brands have changed over the decades: consistent use of brand mascots, colours and often times similar typography styles.

Really fascinated by these. You can see many more on Retronaut as well as on the original website The Imaginery World for an exhaustive collection.

K Found on Retronaut

That stunningly gorgeous colour with the pure white label containing that clean—and clean is the first word that came to mind, and being soap bar that’s pretty logical—word mark: I would buy this if I saw it on a shelf.

K Found on Doobybrain

Amazes me that people will actually spot these subtle differences in the first place, assuming they didn’t get a special tip-off.

I read in the comments on FinerThingsInMac that the new Iconography for Mac OS X 10.7.3 are quite the Micky Mouse style, but with 5 fingers instead of the cartoon 4 style.

K Read more FinerThingsInMac

Utterly intrigued by these specialised typefaces being developed to help bridge cross-culture typography. Collator, designed by Vince Lo, is a bilingual typeface designed to achive greater harmony between Chinese and Latin type forms.

K Find our more, and download Collator on CreativeRoots

Astonishing and captivating photographs (all photographs by Alfred Eisenstaed) of Marilyn Monroe at home. Loving the set of her lounging on her sofa with a book scribbling away.

K Found on Retronaut

FedEx Brand Identity Quick Reference Guide is a nice little PDF covering the most basic of brand guideline advice for the FedEx range of logos.

What I do find most interesting is finally being able to nail down what version of red, blue—I mean purple—are the official FedEx colours.

K Download FedEx Brand Identity Quick Reference Guide

Justin Halpern’s logos to be taken with a healthy dose of not-to-be-taken-seriously. I don’t understand or follow NFL so can’t really assess how appropriate or inappropriate any of these are.

Take a look at a truck-load more on Thesefriesaregood.

K Found on Thisisn’thappiness

I may have the opportunity to work on a nice identity project with a client based in Dubai, Saudi Arabia, and with this possibility I need to brush up on certain skills: namely how typography, visual brand imagery and the actual finished logo design will need to translate to Arabic whilst keeping a clear brand link between the two.

This potential new client sent me some homework to absorb: examples of famous brands that have been translated to Arabic including the Arabic FedEx logo.

I was also passed some interesting information on the how-to of Arabic logo translation:

It is explained further, thus:

Just to make it clear that the image of the Arabic FedEx logo above in this post is NOT the official version. It is vector version I tried my best to recreate from the photographs to hand.

Now I know the Arabic version of the FedEx logo is not new, but I think this is one of the few times I have actually seen it and paid attention to it. There are a few smatterings of the logo around the net, but finding a half decent image of the Arabic FedEx logo has been a fruitless task. The only versions I have found are photographs of the logo on the side of vans, and even then they are of questionable quality.

You can see the official Arabic FedEx logo on the website (below).

Sidenote. The FedEx logo has to have the largest selection of inaccurate colour versions of any brand I know. There are 4 just on this page alone. Bloody nightmare.

The few existing blogs that have referenced the Arabic FedEx logo have pointed out the implementation of the negative space arrow within the Arabic version.

Given Arabic is read right-to-left it then makes sense that the negative space arrow follows this same reading direction as well as the design logic of the original FedEx logo. It’s a heck of a loto easier to spot the negative space arrow in the Arabic version due to the typography constraints, but it’s still a decent translation/conversion.

Surely not an envious task to have been responsible for the Arabic version of the FedEx logo? Let’s hope expectations were suitably realistic.

Interestingly there is a unofficial version of the Arabic FedEx logo on Behance and Deviant Art (above). As far as I can tell is a reimagined idea of how it should look like according to this particular designer.

The important distinction is that the original version has the infamous arrow located entirely in the red type, as it indeed should be? The concept version has the arrow sandwiched between the Fedex Pantone Purple 2685 and Pantone Red 186 letters for some reason I can’t fully grasp.

I ‘m certainly not in a position to make any kind of judgement on this version given my total inability to read Arabic, but I would be interested to know the rational behind the positioning of the negative space arrow.

Know Your Onions: Graphic Design, written by Drew de Solo, looks great especially as it’s designed more like a notebook: enabling you to add your own notes to the supplied blank pages as you go along.

Know Your Onions sounds like it is aimed at the novice-intermediate level from what I can tell from the summary and table of contents.

Know Your Onions (BIS Publishers, IBSN 978-90-6369-258-2 , €17)

From the Publisher

K Found on GetAddictedTo

Archive, a free font download by Slava Kirilenko, has some real interesting letter forms for you to play with. Download link found on FontFabric.

K Found on FontFabric

Could this ongoing and seemingly relentless Pantone-ify (term nabbed from ColorCubed) of consumer products possibly make the Pantone name bor-ing in the not-to-distant-future? Or, if not bor-ing, then a fate worse than that in the guise of  cliché-rism of the Pantone name?

I, for one, feel I am thinking way too hard about this so just going to enjoy these lovely Pantone Universe placemats for what they are.

K Found on NotCot

The research part of a logo/brand identity project can be a thoroughly rewarding experience: you can unearth things you may have never had a reason to unearth upon in a regular day. The research phase is often a part I relish, and damn it, so should you!

My current identity project has lead me to this lovely vintage 2-page spread entitled “A Quick Guide To Motor-Car Badges” from an English publication “Modern Boys Book of Hobbies” circa 1937.

K Found on Automobilart

These business cards for Juan Madrigal are just special. That blue, that thickness, that edging… hmmmmm. More lucious photographs on FPO.

) Found on FPO