We congratulate Terry on the design!

From the contest brief, “I need a logo that includes the initials, EDS, from my company name, “Efficient Dental Solutions,” and also includes the name. I would like to see a couple variations of the logo…maybe a couple with just the initials and a couple with the initials incorporated into some sort of abstract symbol.”

We think Terry did a great job capturing the contest holders requirements.

What do you think about his design?

vbarnhart recently won the JustTemps logo contest.

From the design brief, “…need a strong, innovative logo to represent our company, which is a market leader in the industrial temporary labor field.  Would like one, identifiable color, preferably orange (like the traffic cones and work vests often worn) but open to other color ideas.  The logo needs the brand name “Just Temps” and “Industrial Labor” in it.  This logo needs to resonate with foreman and business owners in this very labor intensive field and should convey reliability, strength, and professionalism.”

Vince did a great job with this one! Congratulations!

What do you think?

]]> http://theperfectdesign.com/blog/recent-logo-designs/feed/ 0 http://theperfectdesign.com/blog/be-a-taskmaster-graphic-design-tip-97/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=be-a-taskmaster-graphic-design-tip-97 http://theperfectdesign.com/blog/be-a-taskmaster-graphic-design-tip-97/#comments Mon, 29 Nov 2010 15:30:49 +0000 Rufino http://theperfectdesign.com/blog/?p=2479 This post is an expansion of tip #97 in our post 101 Graphic Design Tips for Business Success.

Organizing Tasks

Do you ever find yourself overwhelmed at work not knowing where to begin? Have you missed a deadline because you simply buried a project in some messy notes? Clearing the fog before you begin designing will boost your effectiveness and the quality of your work.

In the early morning before you go to work, or preferably the night before, look over your list of tasks and prioritize them. Then, focus on the most important tasks until they are completed and move on to the next one. Learn to prioritize. The more organized you are the more profitable you can be.

Start your day with a clear plan of action to tackle your projects. You can start by creating a straightforward spreadsheet or task list with categories like:

• Project name and description
• Elements within the task (if it includes multiple pieces)
• Prioritization by deadline
• Roadblocks or pending information that need follow up

To Do List

If you utilize a time/project management software it may be helpful keep a printed sheet handy so that you can make notes and cross off items as you go. A visual reminder on your desk can keep you from missing target dates or forgetting tasks. Have your task list easily accessible at all times whether sophisticated or scribbled. A large object such as a whiteboard for your “hot list” can help you digest important tasks quickly. You will also have a wonderful mission accomplished feeling when you wipe these items off.

Being your own taskmaster isn’t always fun, but it is always profitable. Don’t be afraid to crack your own whip if it means more work will get done quicker.

Don’t Be Afraid Of Competition

Newsflash…you are not the only graphic designer out there. Just as there are multitudes of photographers grappling for professional gigs, there are a myriad of designers and “wanna-be” designers snatching up prime jobs. (Who can forget losing that logo design to the client’s 14-year old nephew?)

Here is the good news. Competition is a good thing. Competition only makes you better and can help drive traffic to your door. Having a fire lit under you feet will drive you to leap creative boundaries. It awakens the naturally aggressive design animal inside of you. Embrace the desire to go after business like a tiger pursuing a gazelle. Snatch those clients up if you can and don’t be afraid to face your rivals head on.

Be The Best Graphic Designer

When you duel with your fellow designers, always be respectful. You may be fighting over common turf but they are still your colleagues. Remind yourself that this really is just about you and your ability to achieve greater things. Set the standard by producing design that gets talked about while maintaining reasonable prices. Be honest in all of your dealings. And never intentionally bad-mouth or ultra low-ball your fellow designer. Fight a clean fight.

Competition will foster ingenuity in your work. It will help you set higher standards for yourself and create new goals to strive for. Your clients will naturally shop around and compare price and quality while searching for a graphic designer. Make sure that you are naturally the best selection for them.

We’ve been getting e-mails from graphic designers asking when the site would launch, but we don’t have to worry about answering that question anymore. It’s here! The site is up, it’s beautiful, and you can now sign up as a contest holder or designer.

In fact, we are launching our very first beta contests right now (logo and website). The contests are two week contests, which will give us plenty of time to test and receive feedback from those participating in these contests. At the end of these contests we will award the winners and the site will be empty of any new contests for one week, unless some unsuspecting contest holder launches a contest, which we don’t mind.

In three weeks, you will see more new contests and we will be moving forward at full speed. We thank you for visiting and welcome any feedback you may have for us. See the contests HERE. Please let us know your thoughts!

Chad, on behalf of ThePerfectDesign.com Team

Shyamal Das

I am from Kolkata, India. This is my place of birth and where I grew up as a child. I completed my education, profession all here. Presently I am also working in this city. The heart of Bengal in India.

Graphic design has been my interest since I was born. Even if I don’t have any Diploma or Certification from the Multimedia or any Graphics design / Web designs from any Institution I feel I am great. After completing my higher education (Bachelor Degree of Commerce in the year 1993) I searched for jobs but did not succeed. I started a Drawing School with children. After some years I bought my 1st computer around 2000 and start studying myself with some books. Now my Skills on computer applications includes some of the following shown below: 

Raster graphics: Photoshop, Fireworks,
Vector Graphics: CorelDraw, Freehand, Illustrator,
Animation and Editing: Flash, Director, Premiere, Sound Forge,
DTP: PageMaker, Quark Express, MS Office Applications (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Front Page.)
Writing Language: Dreamweaver, Edit Plus,
Web Design Technologies: HTML, XHTML, DHTML, JAVA SCRIPT, CSS,
Web Portal: Joomla, Liferay
Source Control : CVS, Subversion
Operating Systems: Windows 95/98/2000/NT/XP/Vista, Linux

And my inspiration was a couple things. I believe institutions can teach you the applications, how to use them and the tools needed for them. But no institution can give you a certificate or diploma on your ability to be creative and your sense/power. This is your own, and only you can judge yourself. So I have confidence that I can do this, and that’s why I am here.

Yes I do both Freelance and Corporate. I love these jobs with my heart and soul and there is a lot of regions to do. I love how some projects you can play with all the colors in the world  fulfilling your creative addiction, then turn around and do something new from others that you have learned from. You come to learn a lot of different cultures world wide.

I like all the parts of graphic design but if I had to choose I like “Web Design” the most.

If I had an opportunity to do graphic design work for anything, I will prefer the event “END OF THE WORLD 2012”. Because, I think it is a very HOT topic right now in the world. I did a lot of web design but I don’t think that they are noteworthy.

Advice for others would be don’t change your AIM or Target. Projects will always change per each client, including the time you have to achieve your goal. But you can always achieve your goals I have learn this first hand because I  started my career just as a computer operator and wanted to become an established Designer. Now I am working as a Senior Graphic and Web Designer in an IT Company.

No one has helped me to shape my graphic design career, this is my own decision. I know myself better and know what I can and cannot do. I feel very comfortable and satisfied doing this type of creative work and activities.

When I feel that I can’t reach the satisfaction level of the client then I stop the work and start to study. First with the help of great search engines, searching the similar topics. Typing in the top 10 designs preferred by the particular country and also preferred by the particular client. Sometimes trying to know the clients choice of color, style etc. And then restarting the work.

Life is a play ground, some we will win and some we will lose. As a designer, it is very exciting to enjoy the life. Every step you will learn something new about the world, about the people world wide. And how they differ country to country.

In the future I just see myself as an owner of a little design house where I will have alot of friends world wide. And we will work well together. This is my biggest goal. I am a very determined, peaceful, helpful person and don’t like to lie or liars. I always try to complete the word as I committed.

 
Thanks.

Have a great time…

Shyamal Das

Kye Pirrie

I then moved to O’fallon, Illinois and lived there for about 3 years. I then moved to Wichita Falls, Texas and lived on and off the base there, Sheppard AFB. I lived there for 6 1/2 years as well.

I then just moved where I am living now, Redondo Beach, California in August of this year. So that puts me at the age of 16.

I didn’t really get into graphics or work on the computer in general until 8th grade. I took a ‘computer programming’ class which was really just an HTML class. I also took a digital arts class which really gave me the push. The teacher was the same for both these classes and he really saw my potential so all I really did in those classes was play around making whatever my poor heart (at the time) desired. Looking back at my old work I think “Oh my God…” but you gotta start somewhere. I also took an art class for the first time in my life and that helped as well. I then progressed to my Freshman year and had a Multimedia teach er who was my art teacher as well and we really got along very well and so my graphics and artwork continued to fluorish. And then I moved to Redondo and sophmore year sucks big time… I have no creative classes except for Intro to Engineering but that isn’t quite the same… So I’ve been doing work for fun whenever I get some sort of break in my homework. Next year though… All creativity baby!!!

I focus on freelance really. I just turned 16 so I haven’t been able to do corporate stuff but really hope to maybe get a taste of it. I do really love my current position. I’m working with my dad right now to build up a graphic design business. It will be Wicked Rad Graphics so look out!!!

My favorite part or aspect of graphic design? Hmm… I’d have to say the creativity. It really has nothing to do with the digital part of it. Well, that is until I get my Cintiq. Should get here soon… But anyways, I really like the drawing process of getting thoughts onto paper and playing with different strokes and emotions of characters or random placements of shapes for the more abstract work. It’s the best.

I really wish I could work for Rob Dyrdek at Dyrdek Enterprises. I know, it sounds totally random but the whole aura the people there radiate is way “me.” The whole deal with that is that they are really cool people and I would just love to work for them.

NEVER, EVER take a job you *think* you can do. Whether you could do it or not, there is ALWAYS a time frame. Unless it’s for your own personal work, DON’T take a job that you’ve only experimented in.

One individual who has helped shape my graphic design career is Mr. Tommy Evans, my freshman art and multimedia teacher. He got me into various art competitions, which I entered only digital art and gave me a lot of ideas about everything. He had ADD which made things quite different but he was a great teacher and person none the less.

How do I spark my creativity? Oh man… I get desperate for new forms of creativity… The internet is my BFF and should be yours too. Check out Deviant Art, Threadless, ilikecharacters, and googles daily for new ideas. Go walk outside and look at the most random things. Trying to find things you’ve never seen before or never really noticed helps a lot.

People’s opinions are great for creative work (don’t really take it too much for business work though… go by what the client wants). Play lots of video games and watch TV! People say it’s so bad for you but as a designer (especially digital), you’re used to looking at a screen and probably have a higher tolerance for the screen than most people anyway. The screen can’t hurt you, just make sure to get some exercise and take breaks every once in a while. That’s usually how my creative juices get going. Oh, before the next question, a big thing to help you: people watching. I can’t stress this enough how important it is to people watch. It doesn’t matter if you even do character or draw people or anything human-like at all! It sounds kinda creepy to some people, but just pick a bench at a park or a mall, stop into Starbuck’s or something with a sketchpad and draw what you see. Their clothes give me TONS of ideas and their facial structures and expressions give you different feelings which translated to paper reveals very cool work.

I’m also passionate about Extreme Sports as the general population would call it. I raced ATV’s for quite a while and got pretty good, 4th in my first and only time at Nationals isn’t bad, eh? Anything crazy or what some people might say is stupid or ridiculous is what I love. So outside of art and graphics (and school…), you could say I’m an adrenaline junky.

I see myself building up WRG Inc. (Wicked Rad Graphics) into something pretty big. I’m going to go to a good college for graphics and art. I will meet up with all my friends from back in Tejas, and after that point, who knows? I want to have a small urban looking, two story studio type building that I will use as the home base for WRG and I will probably have a few great people in the business as well, not too many (max probably 5 others). I say so few because honestly, I don’t want to have to worry about a whole lot of people in my business. The few people would specialize in some task such as printing shirts or doing textiles, a Flash or Web Guru, people like that. And on that point, I have no idea where I’m going to go from there.

Thanks for allowing me to have this interview with you guys!

Kye Pirrie

Here are the top 30 entries for our $5,000 logo design contest! This list has similar details to our top 40 list that was posted on August 21st. If you’re not in this list, don’t fret! Please consider the following while you are viewing the designs we’ve posted here:

1. This list was compiled on Monday, August 31, at 6:00 pm Central Time (USA). Entries may have come in since then that would have made the list.
2. Order means nothing…we’ve posted the logos randomly.
3. This list is not definitive by any means. Anything can change. The winning design may or may not be in this list (there are way more than just 30 designs that we like).
4. We may have several favorites from one designer, but decided to post only one of our favorites from the designers listed.
5. Please, please, please understand that if one of your designs did not make the list, this does not mean that you cannot win this contest. There are so many great designers competing here that we could not showcase all of our favorite designs. We will be looking closely at every entry in the contest until the contest submission time ends.
6. Click on the images to view the thread for each designer, so you can see their other designs.

So, without further ado, here are our current 30 picks for the $5,000 logo design contest:

>> Enter Our $5000 Logo Contest Here <<

The contest rules outline what is expected from participants of the competition as well as the things that the participants can expect from ThePerfectDesign.com. The rules can be found in the forum at http://theperfectdesign.com/forums/showthread.php?t=6.

We will be posting the Contest Requirements (contest brief) in the forum tomorrow evening (July 17) at 11:59 p.m (GMT-06:00, Central Time, U.S. & Canada). This way everyone can get geared up for the competition and start submitting entries from day one (July 22).

We wish you all the best of luck in the competition and thank you, in advance, for your participation!

ThePerfectDesign.com Team

In case you’re wondering what the fuss is about: ThePerfectDesign.com is a site dedicated to building a community of graphic designers and people needing graphic design work, helping each find and build new business relationships. We know how hard it is to find the right design for a business and we also know how it can be challenging to find a steady stream of graphic design work for graphic designers. We hope to bridge the gaps with our site.

We want to help those seeking graphic design work, such as, logo design, web design, print design, t-shirt and other clothing design, marketing literature, and other design work, get the best design to match their current needs. We believe that when those needs are met, the perfect design is born. Again, stay tuned at ThePerfectDesign.com, and Graphic Designers, be sure to sign up for the $5,000 logo design contest! We need your help in creating The Perfect Design for us!

All the best!

TPD

Technorati Profile