What is the first thing that comes into your mind when you hear the words “Black and Decker”?

For me, and most people, according to a recently commissioned survey, the name conjures up images of drills, electric saws and the classic Black & Decker workmate bench – all branded in trademark orange.

In my home country, the UK – and I’m sure it’s the same in other countries too – there are a LOT of annoying TV advertisements. That’s not to say the ads aren’t effective, but there are just some adverts that get over-played, whose jingles get irritatingly stuck in your head, or that just plain don’t make sense. 

From my own travel experience, Cape Town is a city of contrasts. As a vibrant, modern city – the second most populated in South Africa after Johannesburg, Cape Town glitters in its sunny seaside position and is overlooked by the breathtakingly beautiful Table Mountain.

There is art here, and culture, music, museums, botanic gardens and entertainment,  a gaudy student drinking culture and backpacker scene, and the ramshackle yet colourful and lively township shanties. Diverse ethnic groups have made their home in Cape Town: Khosa people, Zulus, Cape Malays and white Africans of Dutch, German and British heritage to name but a few.

But Cape Town also has its dark side.

The decision to host this winter sporting spectacle in the Russian Federation has been well criticized, particularly by the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community and its supporters who are protesting over Russia’s strict and highly controversial anti-gay laws.

Unlike it’s country’s politics, and unlike the much-discussed and hotly debated logo for London’s 2012 summer Olympic Games, the logo for Sochi 2014 seems to have slipped under the global radar. Nothing much has been said about it in on or offline media – in fact the world seems to have collectively shrugged and given a unanimous, “Meh!”

What do you think of the logo design?

Bruce Yan is a graphic artist who takes familiar logos and icons and reimagines them with cartoon characters from our childhood. Sadly, you’ve just missed his first ever solo art show, which was held in Los Angeles on February 1^st, but he has been getting a lot of attention on the internet so I’m sure it’s not the last we will see of him!

In Bruce Yan’s world, the Playboy bunny, associated with the adult world of Hugh Hefner’s hareem of glamour girls, becomes childlike and innocent in the form of Bugs Bunny.

Squarespace has a great reputation for providing high quality websites. However, that reputation recently took a pounding from members of the design community after the web space company announced the launch of Squarespace Logo.

This tool, which seems quite similar to Canva – a service I have written about previously on the LogoBee blog – allows users to design their very own simple logos, and download these as hi-res Photoshop files for the bargain sum of $10 USD.

In recent years and months, the African nation of Uganda has hit the headlines for all the wrong reasons – its poor record on human rights, a discriminatory legal stance on homosexuality, and widespread Government corruption to name but a few sticking points.

But despite its dubious politics, Uganda wants to encourage tourism from within Africa and outside. To this end, the Uganda Ministry of Tourism, together with the Uganda Tourism Board, has launched a competition that invites professional or wannabe designers to come up with a new logo for Uganda’s tourist industry.

Away from the pomp and circumstance of well-known tourist sites such as Buckingham Palace, Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament, communities on the outskirts of London, UK, are suffering.

No thanks to the development of large, out-of-town shopping malls, and of course the recent economic downturn, streets in outer London districts that were once thriving with independent businesses and bustling with members of the local community are now quiet. Stores are closing and those that remain are run down and struggling to survive.

Hipster, artist, DJ and now fashion designer Heron Preston has been on the New York City scene for a few years now, and has recently been credited with starting a trend for wearing clothes emblazoned with multiple logos.

Happy birthday Canada! Well, almost. The independent state of Canada turns 150 years old in a few years’ time and Canadian Heritage has commissioned a new logo design to celebrate this momentous occasion. But how do you represent ‘Canada’ in a logo?

Like this, apparently.

I recently wrote about the innovative way in which the US state of Colorado crowd-sourced its new logo from native Coloradans – and the underwhelming response that the new logo receiveddespite its user-led approach.

Now it’s the state of Oregon’s turn to reinvent itself – but has it done any better than Colorado?

If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you will know that I am not a graphic designer. In the course of my day job I work with designers on a regular basis, and I have an interest in design and branding, but to be honest, my own artistic creativity in the logo world is pretty limited.

So the many ways in which logo designers can continue to come up with inspiring, innovative designs never ceases to amaze me.

The subject of this blog post is a company called Mesosphere, or rather the creative genius behind the company’s new logo concept.

There is no one true approach to logo design. A wide variety of design styles and techniques can be employed by designers in their efforts to create a memorable logo. In this article, we try to make an inventory of every different category a logo can fall into. You will notice that style, layout, form, technique and subject elements are all included. Logos typically fall into a combination of these categories - it is virtually impossible to see a logo fall into only one of them. For example, a logo can be a unique font with multicolored letters, a 3D graphic with gradients to spice it up, or an animal drawn in a childlike manner.

Some say that creativity consists in the ability to take several oft-used elements and to arrange them in a whole new way. This is certainly the case in logo design. Even though none of these categories individually is very original on its own, great logo designers will take a few of them and creatively combine them into something unique and outstanding.

1. Separate icon

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Recently, companies revealing their new logo designs have started to try and do so in increasingly innovative ways.

Social networking and ‘microblogging’ site Twitter has been around for just 7 years, and when it was launched many questioned whether it would take off given the huge popularity of Facebook.

Yet Twitter has become a social revolution. Via the main website, and various apps and clients, Twitter has over 500 million registered accounts and handled an estimated 1.6 billion search queries in 2012.