Just Creative Design

Jacob Cass Named #8 Top Young Blogger Under 21

Ranked #8 Top Young Blogger Under 21

I was recently ranked #8 in the top young bloggers under 21 over at Retire@21. I think I am far from retiring but sure it was a pleasure to be ranked there.

Want to guest write on Just Creative Design? Now is your chance!

A guest article has not yet been published here on Just Creative Design but now is the time. As previously mentioned, I will be traveling around to 14 different countries in Europe (and Hong Kong) in June/July and I will need some articles to be published during the time that I will be away.

I need to get all the articles in by May 21st at the very latest so I can proof read them, add images (unless you provide them) and time schedule them to post during my time away. If you got some in even sooner it would be appreciated as I am in the process of moving house as well and it is a bit chaotic.

And for a little enticement you will get a link and a brief intro about you and your blog at the top of every article that you submit and it will stay there for the life of this blog. Oh and just so you know, we have been averaging 11,000 visits a day and have 1700+ subscribers - who ever thought?

What To Post About?

The underlying focus of any post has to do with design however it can vary… Think along the subjects of logo design, print design, advertising, web design, wordpress, social media, typography, inspiration, photography, poster design, creativity or maybe you could write a tutorial or a review of your favourite product - be creative. You could also check out the Ultimate List of Blogging Templates and Headings for some ideas.

You may submit as many posts as you like but please remember all posts will be subject to quality standards, so as a guide try to make each post around a page long.

How?

First let me know now that you are going to write one in the comments below and then after you have finished writing your post(s) when ever it may be, please email it to me in a HTML or Word document to jacobcass AT justcreativedesign DOT com. Don’t forget to replace the appropriate symbols.

Looking forward to reading some of your quality articles!

Just Creative Design Now Using Full Feeds. That cool?

As many of you have probably noticed we are now using full RSS feeds. I have never been able to offer full feeds but I finally figured out what the problem was.

In my feed burner profile I had my feed address set at ‘http://justcreativedesign.com/?feed=rss’ instead of ‘http://justcreativedesign.com/feed. I changed it and it fixed itself 2 days later.

Oh and sorry about the extra 30 or so full articles that appeared in your feed reader, that is what happens when you change the address of your feed.

Are you guys happy with the full feed? It was done for your convenience however if there are many that do not want it I could possibly change back.

Logo Design Process for Just Creative Design’s Award Winning Logo

In this article I will talk about how I came to the name for my freelancing business ‘Just Creative Design’ and also the logo design process that I used to design the award winning logo that you see above.

This logo has won 3 major awards:

• Wolda “Best of Continent” 2008
  
• Wolda “Best of Australia” 2008
• The Logo Design Love award

The process I used was somewhat disjointed and a very long one at that… mainly because I was designing for myself and I had no idea what ‘brand’ I was after, but this is it. Enjoy.

What will be my business name?

Believe it or not but this was one of the hardest parts of the process. Before I had JCD I was freelancing under the name of ‘JackCass Productions’ of which you can see above - this was when I was 15. This was a clever pun of my name Jacob and Cass. I get called ‘Jack’ and ‘Jake’ quite a bit for my nickname instead of Jacob and when you combine the nickname Jack and my last name Cass… well you get JackCass or jackass if you will.

I actually got about very mixed feedback about this name ‘JackCass Productions’. About 50% of people loved it, and were actually quite envious of the name and then about 50% of people would say “why would you want to be called that”? There were pros and cons for both however in the end I chose not to continue using this name and I think I made the right choice but in saying that I still have the domain jackcass.com just in case.

Ok, so now I had the problem of choosing whether to brand myself as my name ‘Jacob Cass’ or another name. Obviously I went with the latter however I still bought the domain name jacobcass.com. But now what to choose for my business name? I decided I wanted something unique, I wanted the word design in the title but I also wanted it to include my initials in the name if I could - ego I know.

I had a million ideas, as you do… Jucy, Jaycii, JayZee, JayCee, Jaci, Jaysee, JayCee, JaySee, JaiSee, Juju, Juca, Joco, Jluc, Jaco, JC, JLBC and I won’t bore you with the hundred more that I had.

Sketches

I couldn’t come down to a name I liked so I just played around with my initials to make a logo and you can see the sketches (to the left) of me trying to get J and C to work together. There were six A3 pages so I had to take a photo of it… it is 2mb if you want to look at it full size. Just a word of warning, I am no Picasso.

From these sketches I had the idea of trying to make the initials JCD into a pencil and after a bit of experimenting I got it to work.

Throughout the whole process I was up in air about the name of the business so I played with the names JackCass, Jacob Cass and Just Creative Design.

Illustrator

After getting the initial idea I had some fun playing around in Illustrator (the program you use to make logos) with different typefaces, sizes, proportions etc which you can see in the pictures below. I did this to see what typefaces worked and what line widths and combinations worked best together.

More play with the pencil idea…

The Final Two Concepts

I then finally came down to two styles, one which was the led pencil style and one which is below.

At this time I received feedback from peers and from forums and many people told me that there was so many logos that incorporated the Fibonnaci Swirl. After a little research I found this was true and this meant that my logo would not be unique so I went with the led pencil idea. It was here that I tried to get the best size for the pencil to show off the JCD initials as well as making sure it looked like a pencil.

Font Change

I ended up choosing the third size down from the top however something was not quite sitting with me and I narrowed it down to the font. I changed it to the font I used in the other example which was the  font Delicious and that solved all my problems - I was happy with the JCD initial, pencil and the font. It was a great black and white logo, that was scalable, memorable and effective.

Colour

After having an effective logo in black and white, it was time to add colour… I narrowed it down to the blue or the pink that I originally had in mind and then I chose out of these four colour combinations. I felt pink had more energy and was not so corporate and this was the decision I made. Pink black and white were my colours and my brand.

Award Winning Final Logo

Above you can see the finished logo and I couldn’t be happier with the feedback I have received from everyone on this logo. At least once a week I get someone complimenting it which gives me a warm giddy feeling inside. Oh, and it incorporates my initials into it

Adrian Hanft , co-founder of Be A Design Group had this to say about my logo when it won the award.

So often logos fall into cliché. This is usually a danger to avoid, but if you can put a new spin on an overused idea then you actually benefit from people’s awareness of the idea. You can turn a negative reaction into a positive one, and that has impact. The idea of using a pencil and sketching to represent creativity could be cliché, but this logo overcomes it. The JCD are just imperceptible enough to let the viewer feel rewarded for finding them. Same with the pencil. The typography is understated and it matches the humble positioning of “just creative.” They aren’t trying to be too clever, too flashy, or too self-important. They’re just creative.

Well there we have it, the logo design process I used to create the logo in my blog header. I hope you enjoyed it. Comments are always appreciated.

Do you need to brush up on your logo design skills? You may want to know how to design a logo or you may want to know the logo design process of top graphic designers. You can find even more logo design resources here.

Changes to Just Creative Design (now using Comic Sans MS)

You may have noticed some changes to Just Creative Design over the past couple of days…

• We have added a new sideblog to the right side of Just Creative Design as previously mentioned.
• We have changed our base font to Comic Sans MS due to popular demand. If you have not seen the changes you must go to our style sheet and click refresh and then come back to this page and click refresh again.
• APRIL FOOLS! In case you missed it, check out the image of JCD with comic sans. Sorry to the suckers that fell for it, no hard feelings. Did you fall for any other April Fools jokes? Just so you know the rest of the stuff on this page is the truth!
  
• We have also made the front page a lot cleaner by using only post excerpts. This was done using Daily Blog Tips, home page excerpt plugin. We also removed all social media buttons from the front page as well as all clutter such as the Google Adsense ads as well as the related posts section.
• We have also added a new sponsor, Studio 7 Designs. A green graphic design company.
• We have added OpenID to our comments. Read about OpenID here.
• I am now using Twitter. You can follow me here.