Wow. I for one learned a lot from John's discussion of the logo. Dan
On Thu, May 28, 2009 at 10:17 PM, John Celio <[email protected]> wrote: >> 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 > > -- > PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List > [email protected] > http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net > to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and > follow the directions. > -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
