Stefan's Naturally Aspirated Blog

Successful branding is almost always down to preparation and detail; very seldom is a logo or emblem plucked out of thin air. Before a Logo can be specified, a brief is required, and before a proper design brief is written, you need a detailed and well-considered Brand Profile. The Brand Profile sets down on paper all the necessary descriptive words and abstracts which fully represent the identity and personality of your brand. To get the best possible quality of results, you need to engage in ...

Branding is forever a full-time and a fully 360° vocation. It’s about seeing all the angles and dealing with them in a scientific and progressive manner. As with many task-oriented disciplines, consideration is everything, and every tiny detail can make a difference.

As both a University and Advertising Industry educated Marketing and Brand Specialist, I will always put the teachings of Abraham Maslow above those of Philip Kotler. The essence of Marketing is discerning and ...

There are several dimensions to marketing, and much like when you apply a paint brush to canvas, you use a variety of nuances in technique, touch, texture and detail to get your vision across fully dynamically. In marketing we talk about ’Push’ and ’Pull’, ’Leadership’ and ’Influence’. The classic push variety is a bold and brassy advertisement which hopefully visually punches the target audience right between the eyes - to make maximum impact. ...

As part of our Brand Profile exercise, I encourage our Clients to visualise their customers’ ecosystems - both their working and home environments and what influencers may be active in their lives. It typically falls under the ’Brand Relatives’ part of the process, but when considering a Target Audience, one must always consider the immediate environment/s they are active within. Both in terms of what touchpoints they access regularly, and also how these may instruct and ...

There’s over a billion websites in the world, shared by near enough 3 billion internet / digital media users - whether on desktop, laptop, tablet or smartphone. With such an incredible mass of properties, it is more important than ever to be able to stand out from the crowd. The transition to responsive design imposes certain limits on the framework of your interface, which means that your Logo / Brand-look-and-feel becomes more significant than ever before.

We see far too many ...

Here above is a collection of some of my favourite book publisher / imprint logos. Some of these have been nipped and tucked and evolved over the years - like the Ladybird Books logo, while others have been pretty much constant since their inception. I feel all the logos featured are great examples of how logos can really work for your business - both as a mark of quality, as well as a mark of category.

The first three idents - Ladybird | Usborne | Walker Books - are all Children&rsquo...

A big part of our daily operation involves design - designing logos, icons, screens, applications, infographics and interfaces. We spend many hours browsing through image, video, sound and font libraries - all in pursuit of the best possible results. The trickiest thing about design though is the language of communication and reference, maintaining objectivity and overcoming the challenges of singular perspective and personal bias. There is a subjective component to design for sure, but we try ...

Affino in name was born at the start of the year 2000. The platform it was made to represent started off a little earlier (1998) with a working name of ’Sunrise’. It was decided in 2000 to formalise ’Sunrise’ into a modular platform, whose main virtues were its comprehensiveness, interactivity and hands-on management and configuration abilities. You can read about the origins of Affino in my earlier blog post about its ’Pedigree and Provenance’.

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The perfect logos for me are the ones distilled down to the simplest forms, using the fewest of brush-strokes, and conveying exactly the right sort of meaning to the intended target audience. I have selected 25 of the best examples of this, where the brand values, history, mission statement etc. is perfectly encapsulated and communicated in a single symbol. Some of the symbols on this page are nigh on perfect, some only work fully within certain contexts, and others suffer a little from scaling...

Hieroglyphs, Pictograms and Insignia have been with us in some form from the earliest of our sapient ancestors, as featured in some of the earliest recorded cave paintings. They are an essential part of communication, used for marking territory and in the running of this modern world. We encounter them as a sometimes subtle, though typically an overt and constant barrage of marks, instructions, labels and alerts.

A cursory glance over the above sets of icons reveals a multitude of ...