Design Rangers Camp Blog

I just came across this great article from the “biz ladies” of design*sponge. I have found so many articles by the biz ladies to be inspiring and informative, including: how to form successful biz partnerships, organizing your biz income + expenses, starting a business in tough times, and I actually included this one in a weekly round up blog post from August of 2009 – a very informative article about advertising 101 for small businesses.

To quote the article’s author, Meg Mateo Ilasco, “…an amateur logo design could only hurt your business. Just because you’re an artist, craftsperson, or designer doesn’t make you a skilled graphic designer. Designing a logo takes experience. It’s no easy task to take everything a company stands for and bring it down to a single graphic representation or symbol.”

Meg hits the nail on the head – your logo is everything! The Design Rangers believe it should be clean, have good contrast and be simple. Our professor in college once said “a good logo can be drawn in the sand with a stick”. Think Nike, McDonalds, Mercedes, Apple. The greats ARE clean and simple! Here is a previous blog post that talks briefly about our logo process and what it take to get some pencil marks on a paper to a logo that has impact.

We are passionate about logo design and we love a well designed, thoughtful logo! Here are a few of our favorites: Endurance Army, Property Army, Bottle Rocket, Love Yarn, Women’s Bike Challenge, Lyric Quotes, Beer Garden, and idea couch. What are yours?

Last Spring our good friends, Jessica and Christian Seybold, purchased a little soap and lotion business named Jinny Crickets. Jinny Crickets was founded about 5 years ago in Hays, Kansas. Jessica and Christian wanted to give Jinny Crickets a new name and a new look to better fit their vision for the business. They chose the name Bearski Bath & Body (after their sweet daughter’s nickname and Jessica’s Polish heritage) and then promptly turned to the Design Rangers for the new logo, website, and product label design.

Bearski’s skin-loving products are high-quality, handmade, yet affordable.  Jessica and Christian were looking to give Bearski a hip, cool, and fun personality.  They gave us a lot of great input and ideas – bubbles and lower-case text were kicked around – then… they let us have at it!

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I have decided to quit calling this the “Weekly” Ranger Round-up, simply because I cannot guarantee you that I will get to it every week! I’ll feel a lot less guilty about not getting it done every Friday if I give you the disclaimer – “I cannot guarantee that I will get to it every week.” Oh, and I used to number the Round-up. I think I’ll nix that too. I’m just going to cross my fingers that on the days that you have the time, you’ll check out our blog. Maybe you’ll be pleasantly surprised, “Hey, bonus! A Ranger Round-up. Mid-week even. What a surprise!”

I really enjoy writing the blog and doing the link round-up. Does it put food on the table? In most cases, no. So of course I do the work that pays first. My favorite quote, that I believe I made up, is “Life gets in the way of my life.”

Without further a due, the Weekly Ranger Round-up…

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TGIF Readers and Happy 3-Day Weekend!

Here are a few things that caught our eye this week:

1. Yes, we are procrastinators… but at least we are self-aware. Check out The Now Habit, maybe we can overcome procrastination together. But, we’ll have to put it off until mid-October.
2. On the same note – we came across this site on a great blog we follow. Yes, life is busy and we are still learning to keep it under control. But it’s always nice to know you have lots of company.
3. Well, enough of that – let’s get to the fun stuff! We LOVE logos. We love to look at logos. We love to read about logos. We love to design logos. As designers we do lots of logo research, always wanting to be hip to the newest trends – good or bad. We learned a lot from logo trends of 2009. We are looking forward to 2010!
4. Design Rangers love boy scout merit badges. I wonder if you can just buy the entire set for like 50 bucks? They are all great, but I think this is my favorite!
5. You know that song you love – well, you know how you REALLY love minutes 1:38 – 1:52. These guys feel the same way! It’s about a 30 minute podcast – make sure you hear the first 6 1/2 minutes and the last 1 1/2 minutes (the remaining minutes in the middle are for more mature ears – parents out there with young ones, be warned). This is the spin off site from that podcast – songparts.biz where you can buy you favorite song parts – for cheap! Hear the song part before you buy it if you click on the gray “click to play” bar. Joni Mitchell spazzes out and fake laughs(?) at the end of “Big Yellow Taxi” $.04 - DEAL!
   
6. On a more serious note – our hearts go out to our friends in California. All the talk about the forest fires there reminds us of our good friend, Smokey Bear. What a great guy! (A blog devoted to Smoky and his 65 year campaign coming soon…) Remember, Only YOU can prevent forest fires.

Hope you have a great weekend and as always, Happy Trails!