Everyone’s crowdsourcing everything these days, raising money for community projects, taking part in charity events, funding scientific research – the list goes on. Crowdsourcing seems to have become trendy in the logo design world too, with a number of organisations using the method as a way to generate novel ideas, engage with members of the public or a particular community, and to kickstart a self-perpetuating marketing campaign.

In 2013 municipal governors of the Italian city of Florence decided to go down the crowdsourcing route to come up with a new brand identity for the city. The competition, open to both professional and amateur designers, encouraged entrants to submit logo design ideas, in sketch format, to rebrand Florence as an international tourist destination.

We recently reported on the underwhelming response to the announcement of a new logo for Canada’s 150^th birthday. Following this, Canadian national newspaper The Globe & Mail recently launched a competition to see if Canadian designers can come up with a better alternative to the existing logo for the city of Toronto.

You can view the eight logo designs shortlisted by visiting The Globe & Mail wesbite here. However, the one logo design that received the most votes from a public poll is this one, by Matthew Blackett of Spacing Media:

Australian winery Orlando Wines, based in South Australia’s Barossa Valley, recently announced that the Jacob’s Creek brand would be getting a new look after almost 40 years.

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.

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.

Oscar is the man that every actor wants on their mantlepiece. A gold statuette awarded by 6000 members of the Academy for Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is considered the top accolade for not only actors, but screenwriters, directors, producers, score composers, special effects teams, animators and more.

Ahead of the announcement of the 2014 Academy Award nominations on January 16, the Academy has also announced a new logo design.

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?

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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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.

There are few emblems that can divide nations and render a fully grown adult to tears, but the flag of one’s own country is one of those emblems.

Dreamers Ink Aesthetics, recently rebranded as DIA, could just be the epitome of New York City cool.

This Manhattan-based design agency, located in the trendy Little Italy district, has worked with some of the biggest names in the biz. Clients have included Google, Nissan, Nike, Nokia, Revlon, Kraft and many more recognizable brands.