It was a good process. My designer was quick, responsive, fairly priced, and came up with what I think is a great logo. I'm very happy with it, and I consistently get positive feedback ('cool robot'). What do you think: http://www.predictobot.com/ ?
I'm going to use your logo as an example of what design should be and why the author is on the right track.
Your logo looks good. Visually, it's fine...
But what's the point of having dual colored shapes? Why is there a circle behind the antennas? What does the robot represent? Why orange? If you showed the logo to someone, would they be able to think of a word that coincides with a goal/mission of your company? Why is it looking down? If you're looking to predict (keywords: future, time, ready, etc.) then why not make it look forward?
These are the types of questions that struck me first looking at the logo. It feels like there was more focus on how it looked than to what it represents. That's how Dribble designs feel.
They look good and they get the job done (i.e. you have a logo, a client gets a site, etc.), but when you combine functionality with design, that's a real home run.
Using logo design as the example, the first goal of the designer should be to understand the company. What does it want to do? Why does it exist? Like a person, you want to get to know it before you can label it. Once you have the part of what you want to symbolize, what you want to communicate, you can start sketching. Start trying to really capture the soul of the company and present it in an aesthetic and still functional way.
Having aesthetics without much focus on function, that's what I feel the author is categorizing Dribble designers as.
Having functionality without aesthetic, well, we'll use an automobile for that example. A functional without aesthetic car would be a garbage truck.
Having aesthetics and function, you get brands like Porsche, Apple, Lego, OXO...
I appreciate what you're trying to say. People hire someone based on something shiny they see on Dribble, and they get something shallow and shiny as a result.
However, in my case, there was actually a lot more thought about the feel I wanted to the logo to project than you give us credit for. My company is about making predictive modeling easy, for people who are non-programmers. I wanted a look that was friendly, accessible, futuristic and high tech. I did spend a long time explaining to Ty Wilkins, my designer, what my business was about, and the feel I wanted to project.
We eventually decided that's we go with a mid-century "Tomorrowland" version of futuristic, as a way of combining the friendly with futuristic. The robot came out of that line of work. Since 50's robots were intelligent, it gets at prediction.
I think if you showed it to people they would come up with words like friendly. Eventually, I changed the name of the website to be Predictobot, to have a stronger tie in with the logo.
I did try hard not to be a back seat designer, since that's why I was hiring Ty. So the overall form of the robot is entirely his. The circle behind the antennas is to echo the '50's TV antennas. The orange is a warmer, friendlier color than more typical logo blues and greens.
So maybe I'm being naive, but I do think that we went through a good process of thought, that led to a solution that fit the brief. It wasn't just "give me something that looks good".
People do seem to connect with it. I don't hand out a single business card without getting a comment on how they like my logo. It represents what I wanted to project for my one person business. And I found Ty on Dribbble ;-).
> A functional without aesthetic car would be a garbage truck.
Though a jeep looks great and is iconic. I'd argue that's because it doesn't have aesthetic applied but that it emerges from purely functional design (and by comparison off-road styling of city cars always looks lame). There are loads of examples of functional 'ugly' things that are yet design classics - e.g. adjustable wrench, Leica M6, Brompton folding bike, yellow school bus, band-aid, Lego, paperclip.
IMO: Considering its place currently in overall page layout, logo might be better simplified and with less contrast. E.g., take the favicon version—it's nice too, actually.
It especially concerns the application section of Predictobot: current logo will be too distracting.
http://www.docker.io/ is interesting: their logo looks good in ‘hero unit’ as it has the detail, and at the same time not bad in header because of more or less simple shape and not much contrast. (For favicon they've simplified it somewhat.)
Thanks for the constructive criticism. I'll try to tone it down a bit in the real site. I just did the teaser site quite quickly to collect emails, before a conference I was talking at.
Sure, glad if I helped. To complete my suggestion—you can also change landing page layout to make logo more prominent (something like http://docker.io/), in which case it doesn't need to be simplified.
Well I guess there's criteria for the process (quick, cheap, responsive etc) and criteria for the logo. Typically important reqs would be that it uniquely identifies your brand values/mission, that it 'reads', works well in all sizes (pixel and vector), works well in colour and mono - so I couldn't really say much based on this. Obviously you can't hate it but personally I'd be almost trying to push my taste out of the equation as far as possible and instead focus on a functional list of measurable criteria related to my venture. For the 1% left that is taste/magic/pixie dust, I'd defer that to the designer on the assumption they are highly visually literate and spend all day thinking about it. (I say that having once been an art student so quite a difficult temptation to resist but nobody does their best work with a back-seat driver.)
