Thanks to all that offered suggestions for my new logo.
Here it is on the site.:
http://www.caughtinmotion.com/
I hadn't read much of this thread till just now, so I expect I will be
repeating a few things that others have noted. That said, I have a lot of
comments. I am a designer and thus a pretentious know-it-all, so feel free
to ignore any of the following.
First thing's first: 411kb for a logo is WAY too big for a simple website.
It took a long time to download even on my broadband connection. No casual
visitor is going to care enough to wait for it to load. I just noticed that
you're using a GIF that is 1463x640 pixels and manually resizing it via
HTML. Bad idea! Take your original image, shrink it to the desired size
and save a compressed JPG instead. The file size will be a lot smaller and
viewers won't know the difference, guaranteed.
Regarding the images, there are two things that really must be changed to
make your logo pleasing to the eye: make all the photos the same dimensions
and position them in a way that has better symmetry. Right now the images
look chaotic, like they were thrown together haphazardly. The first thing
I'd do is crop all the photos to the same aspect ratio and size. The
resulting equal spaces between photos will help the viewer's eye move among
them more easily than varied spaces. You may have to make some small
sacrifices to achieve this, but remember that this is only your logo, not
the actual photos. Your viewer won't notice or care if they're slightly
different from the large versions. Next, move the cat to the top right to
echo the horse on the left. Replace either the flower or the three horses
with a black & white photo and put it where the cat used to be, OR lose one
of the current building photos and replace it with a color photo that echos
the flower or horses. I realize there is color in the top left building
photo, but it looks black & white at this size and this makes the center of
your logo very grey. This is not really a good thing, as a logo that is
weak in the middle is a weak logo in general.
I'd suggest using upper and lower case letters in your logo text, rather
than all caps. All caps is more aggressive than I think you want to be,
and, for instance, "www.CaughtInMotion.com" is much easier to read and
remember than the all caps version. Try it and see what you think.
Lastly, you could make the logo much more versatile if you make it using
HTML, tables and small thumbnail images. If you make a table that is
800x300 (the size you have the logo scaled to on your page), you could
easily manipulate the contents to look almost exactly like what you have in
your current gif. Better yet, you can make it easy to change the images as
you see fit by putting individual thumbnails in each cell. This would allow
you to change photos as you take additional noteworthy shots in the future.
You can also easily add to or reduce the number of thumbnails. Finally,
assuming you're using small, compressed JPG thumbnails, you can make your
logo load VERY quickly using the table method.
I hope this helps,
John
--
http://www.neovenator.com
http://www.cafepress.com/calemp
http://www.cafepress.com/neovenatorphoto
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