BrandCrowd Blog

Today at Apple’s Music Event in San Diego, among the announcements of a completely new lineup of iPods, updates to iOS, Apple TV and so on, Apple announced an update to the logo for iTunes. This change seems to come from necessity more than a desire to rebrand since the logo has grown rather archaic, having included a depiction of a compact disc all these years.The new logo retains the familiar music note and encloses it in a gradient circle of shades of blue. It’s enough of a change to…

In Upstack’s pursuit to bring positive change to the graphic design industry, we took a long, hard look at our own process and came to a conclusion. We know our ideas and hearts are in the right place, but something wasn’t quite right with the way our clients were communicating with our designers at the outset of projects. We needed to do something different and something special for the way clients made their creative briefs on Upstack.Today, we’d like to share with you what we’ve been working on for the…

Before you skim through this guide, I feel like it’s necessary to explain the reason for writing it. (Side note: I said “skim” because we both know you’re not going to study this guide, in fact that wasn’t the intention). When we first built Upstack, I spent a lot of time talking to experts about their design process. I was intrigued by the depth in which they would learn their clients’ businesses and how that research would translate to a beautiful brand or website. It amazed me to learn about…

Becoming a better graphic designer is something you can’t do completely on your own. Think about it. If you were to design within a vacuum, you would not know what is current and what yields results, so your developing skills would not be relevant. In a subjective realm like graphic design, your work must be informed by other people. Therein lies a problem. How informed is too informed?You probably always hear the axiom that there is nothing in design which hasn’t already been done, and that may be true. What…

With the dawning of the age of contest sites and crowdsourcing in the graphic design industry a concern over plagiarism has grown as a result of the speed at which ideas get around.But before we go casting stones, we should understand what constitutes plagiarism and what doesn’t. Within the community at Brandstack, we’ve addressed this issue before and we’ve found the best way to explain what it is to make the distinction between concept and execution.There is nothing wrong with doing a logo which has a dog in it when…