Blogcritics The critical lens on today's culture & entertainment
This review covers two separate videos training courses from Lynda.com. The first, Hands-On Workshop – Designing A Business Card, is a very short course on how to design a business card and the total time lasts just over 30 minutes. The second, Hands-On Workshop – Designing A Logo, is a longer two hour and 58 minute course, and covers what it takes to design a business logo.
Hands-On Workshop: Designing a Business Card
A successful business card design must be functional as well as professional. Because it is usually one of the first things that someone sees relating to a company, it must also make a positive impression.
In Hands-On Workshop – Designing A Business Card, you will walk through the fundamental decisions that are needed to accomplish creating a business card. You will see what constitutes a successful business card, how you should create one, as well as many of the other considerations you should take into account.
To create a business card you first need to determine what to include, how to set the size, and what orientation it needs to be. Then you must make some other decisions so you can set up the template you will use. You next need to determine the type of card that is needed, choose the alignment, and determine other features, such as if you want to use color.
Finally you need to select the paper, and prep for print. This includes layout considerations for sending to the printer. You will also examine some extra things that you may want to consider such as raised printing, foil stamping, specialty inks, lamination, and rounded corners.
Hands-On Workshop: Designing a Logo
A successful logo is an important part of the branding of your company. While the business card may be the first thing that a client sees, if your logo is on it then that will also be one of the first things that they see. A good logo can be more memorable than even the name of the company.
If I say the name Coca-Cola, FedEx, Nike, or even Lynda.com, chances are it is the logo you see in your mind first. It is important that your logo design is well constructed and in this video Nigel French will take you through the concepts of good logo design.
He begins by examining what is a good logo and then moves to showing you how to define the parameters building your design. There are a lot of questions that have to be answered before getting into the design. The more prep you have on the front end, the better the results will be in the end.
In this video he takes you through the design of a logo for a company called Deep Green Designs, a garden design company in Brighton U.K. Throughout the video he explores different variations of the logo such that by the end he comes up with a finished workable logo.
Overall I really liked both courses. I thought that the business card one could have gone through more examples and fleshed out what works and what doesn't work, but by the nature of the simplicity of what a business card is, it was still very useful.
Designing a Logo is very informative. In this course he does go through the examples much more thoroughly. I really liked the detail of the steps and the logical examples and the thought processes that were use in making the decisions.
Granted, because the videos are relatively short, they are only available online, but I am really glad that Lynda.com is making these types of videos available as I think that they a good service not only for designer and illustrators, but for business manager who is in charge of making these kinds of decisions and needs to be able to understand the process better. I can highly recommend these videos.
Hands-On Workshop – Designing A Business Card and Hands-On Workshop – Designing A Logo are only available as an online training course and you can get it one of three ways. Monthly at $25 USD/month gets you all of the videos that are available online (approximately 38,002 videos on 598 topics at this time). Annually at $250 USD per year or Premium at $375 USD per year gets you all the videos as well as all of the exercise files. Take note that the exercise files are not included with the monthly or annual subscriptions. They are included with Premium subscription.
