Sunday, August 7, 2011

Interfraternity Council logo upgrade

I'm no logo guru, but I do enjoy using Photoshop to enhance, simplify, and upgrade images. A friend of mine was working on a header image for an Interfraternity Council website built with Google Sites.

I'm a big advocate for branding offices, organizations, and services with standard fonts and even logos to help students quickly recognize and identify what they see online. Even if you already have a logo for your college or department, it wouldn't hurt to come up with a standard font that you always use to refer to your office.

In this case, the IFC webpage already had a rudimentary logo. It was a pixelated GIF image, but there was an honest attempt to brand the webpage with a recognizable symbol of a laurel surrounding the IFC acronym.

Interfraternity Council logo

Simplicity is key on Google Sites, and I try to emphasize clean lines and plenty of negative space. I decided to try my hand at upgrading the header to give the site a more professional appearance. I found a laurel image that I liked online, and traced it with the pen tool to create a vector laurel outline. I incorporated the same layout, but dropped the solid white rectangle in the 'logo' image. Here is what the finished product looks like:

Interfraternity Council logo

There really wasn't much design that went into this project, because all the elements were already there. I made the entire image larger to make it more dominant as a header, added a bit of drop shadow to give it a little depth, and dropped in the vector laurel that made everything look much cleaner, and more professional.

What I learned: If a picture is worth 1000 words, a logo header is worth volumes.


Thanks to @ericteske for the help on our new website logo www.tinyurl.com/onuifc. Great ideas on branding via his blog http://t.co/11VSRLLless than a minute ago via Tweet Button Favorite Retweet Reply