Our mothers always told us not to play with our food, but perhaps she would sing a different tune if she knew that we could earn money by making logos out of food and posting the results to a blog. Although, chewing gum and spitting it out to make 8-bit portraits of Mario still involves playing with chewed gum, so maybe Mom was right after all.
Even so, it’s still fun to look at Foo-Gos impressive food creations, even if you don’t want to make your own food art after all. There are more behind the jump, but if you just can’t get enough, be sure to check out his extensive Flickr stream.
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How much of a brand’s visual identity is shaped by its biggest competitor? And how much does having someone to publicly play off of benefit them both? Those are the questions we’ve got on the brain after checking out the fantastic work in Stefan Asafti’s fascinating design project The Greatest Brandversations. The concept is simple, but effective; Asafti created new company logos for well-known brands like Apple and Coca Cola using the design elements directly associated with their rivals. “It is surprising how logos can influence other logos,” he writes. “The truth is that each pair of rivals has something in common, that something which has helped them to build one identity upon the other, this way becoming the biggest brands.” Click through to see the proof.
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We came across Fauxgo, a new blog by Tymn Armstrong dedicated to chronicling the fictional logos used in television and film, over at Swissmiss, and we’re not ashamed to say that after racing through it we’ve spent a significant amount of time thinking of all of the other “fauxgos” we’ve seen on screen. Logos are one of those things that you often internalize without thinking very much about, but they’re meant to instantly evoke the company they represent on sight, so it’s pleasantly confusing to be faced with a logo you think you don’t recognize but has definite sense-memory associations attached. And it’s even better when those associations revolve around Michael Scott. Click through to see some of our favorite fauxgos, and head over to the site for even more.
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Dorothy, a creative agency based in the UK, has created a series of paintings that simplify famous logos into their basic graphic forms for a self-initiated project entitled You Took My Name; the resulting acrylic on canvas pieces could almost be confused for abstract works of art. Click through to find out how many of the stripped down logos that you’re able to recognize, and highlight the black boxes to find out if you’re correct. Fair warning: You might actually be surprised to find yourself stuck on a few.
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So, Comedy Central has a new logo. They were certainly due for a makeover, considering how dated their long-running Earth/buildings icon feels these days. But, as Deadline points out, it also looks a hell of a lot like the “copyright” symbol. According to the network’s creative director, Bob Salazar, the new look “is the irreverent wink of Comedy Central.” The logo is part of a larger redesign project geared toward updating the channel’s look and integrating well with social media. See how the new logo compares with the current one after the jump and tell us whether you think it was an improvement in the comments.
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According to the Live Feed, this is Oprah’s logo for OWN: The Oprah Winfrey Network, which launches January 1, 2011. They call it, “Mighty Morphin Power Rangers meets South Beach nightclub.” While we’re too afraid of the all powerful Oprah to say anything that overtly negative (she has spies everywhere), we will note that it’s very, very bright, and that other than NBC, we can’t think of another network with a multi-colored logo. Also: It needs more Gayle.
What colors do Internet companies prefer for their logos? You might assume that they run the spectrum equally, but you’d be wrong. Colour Lovers took the time to collect the logos of the top 100 web brands and sort them by color. Attention marketers: looks like the pink/purple slice is wide open — the green space isn’t too crowded either. Further down they break the companies down into to category, and we notice that social networks seem to stick to the blue-green part of the rainbow. Whereas orange, Flavorpill’s color of choice, is all about blogging. Click through to check it out.
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For the past eight years Bill Gardner, the principal of Gardner Design and creator of LogoLounge.com, has filed an annual report on major trends in logo design worldwide for Creative Review. So what did he find this year? Transparency has become ubiquitous, as have brighter hues. Text is more important than ever. Color use is “more unrestrained now” — in spite of the economy. The Eastern Bloc is rocking it (“Designers there seem to have a freedom that some Western designers have lost.”), as is Scandinavia. Also spotted: lots of optimism, nested circles, “greenness,” and surface effects. Click through to view examples of five of our favorite trends from the 2010 report.
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Perhaps taking a note from AOL (nay, Aol.?), MTV is updating their logo for the first time in 30 years in the hopes of appealing to those pesky millennials. Frank Olinsky and his team at Manhattan Design created the original, which gave the network a lot of flexibility: they could play around with the colors/materials of the “M” while maintaining brand identity.
The new logo will feature revolving imagery housed within the iconic design — and drops the “music television” tagline altogether. [Insert joke about the last time you turned on MTV and saw a music video here.]
According to the press release:
It represents a new visually defined MTV, stimulating its past, present and future and embracing it’s diversity. Everything from Jersey Shore, to the VMAs to collaborations with the MoMA. The logo is part of MTV’s re-invention to connect with today’s millennial generation and bring them in as part of the channel.
So what do you think? Does this reboot better reflect the brand’s current identity? Or are they futzing around with something that was sacred?
Gallery exhibitions may be sexier, and museum patrons may be wealthier, but the government-backed National Endowment for the Arts is still alive and begging for your arts attention. The 2011 budget for the NEA was just proposed by President Obama at $161.3 million for the fiscal year, the same goal he set for 2010, which was ultimately increased by Congress to $167.5 million. (Some perspective: the Corporation for Public Broadcasting is slotted for $470 million, international disaster assistance for $860 million, and proposed military construction will net a staggering $18.18 billion.) What else is new?
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