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HTML5 Solutions: Essential Techniques for HTML5 Developers

HTML5 brings the biggest changes to HTML in years. Web designers now have new techniques, from displaying video and audio natively in HTML, to creating realtime graphics on a web page without a plugin.

This book provides a collection of solutions to all of the most common HTML5 problems. Every solution contains sample code that is production-ready and can be applied to any project.

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Design A Logo For Your Site

by Jeff Colburn

There may come a time when you, or a client of yours, will want a company logo. Logos are a good way to let people easily identify the products and services offered by a company. As soon as someone sees it, they know whom they are dealing with. Just think of the red "K" on a box of Kodak film, National Geographic's yellow rectangle and the bulls eye for Target Stores. These logos are instantly recognizable, and anyone seeing them identifies the company without even seeing their name.

But designing a logo isn't easy. It's best to have a graphic designer, or someone with graphic design experience, design a logo. You want to be able to draw on their experience with design, color and composition to have a logo that looks good. A well-designed logo will help a company, whereas a poorly designed one will hurt a company's image.

That being said, if you want to design a logo yourself, there are several programs you can use. The key thing is to use a program like Adobe Illustrator that will let you create a logo as a vector graphic. A vector graphic can be scaled to any size so that text remains easy to read and curves have smooth edges no matter how big or small the graphic is. Remember that the logo may be one inch square on a business card and ten feet tall on a sign or banner.

I just started using a logo for my company. Since I like the Celtic culture in my background, I've decided to use green and Celtic knots as my logo. I'm now using a green Celtic knot as a background for my business cards and some sticky notes that I just had printed. I've also used this same knot on the letterhead of my business stationary. I still have some tweaking to do with the exact color of green I want and the knot that I want to use, but I'm very happy with this first step, and people have made positive comments about the design.

There are also some websites that will let you design logos, that sell logo design software, that have logo samples, or that give tips on logo design. These are:

The Logo Creator
Logo Lounge
Graphic Design USA
Cool Text
Business Logos
The Logo Factory

When designing a logo, there are a few things to keep in mind.

The graphics should be simple and not busy or cluttered.
Text, if used, should be short and easily read, no matter how small the logo.
It's best to only have the company name, and maybe a two or three word tag line in the logo. It's also fine to have no text at all.
The design should be easy to see and understand no matter how small or large the logo is.
When used on a website, the logo's file size should be small so it will load quickly.
The design should be unique so that it's never confused with someone else's logo.
If possible, use only one color for the logo. Using too many colors can make the logo difficult for people to understand.