Did you hear that Wal-Mart has a new logo? Here are the bullet points:

1. The name is no longer Wal-Mart. It is Walmart. At least they didn’t change it to Wally World, am I right?
2. Apparently the logo will be complimented by a burnt orange color. Nobody knows for sure how burnt orange is actually going to compliment light blue and yellow, but that’s beside the point.
3. The star separating “Wal” from “Mart” is gone and so is the blue and white. Patriotic colors are so yesterday.
4. No word on whether or not the yellow smiley face guy is gone for good or not. Cross your fingers.
5. To the right of the logo is a yellow starburst or sun or asterisk or something.

Here is a short video clip showing the logo from Fox News:

[Ok, I just can't let that last comment from the reporter pass. He says "How much does that job pay do you think? Coming up with a little sunshine?" Seriously? What an idiot! How much do you think that jerk makes to wear a suit all day and read other people's words? Moron. Moving on...]

My first reaction to the logo was, I have to admit, a little perverted. My problem is that ever since reading “Breakfast of Champions” by Kurt Vonnegut I have never looked at asterisks the same way. Google it if you don’t know what I am talking about.

I will leave it to the other blogs to dissect the logo more. Criticize the font. Question the color. Scream about the symbol. The usual. I guess my post is more about the positioning. Is this a step towards positioning the company as a more trendy or up-scale store? In other words a reaction to the success that Target is enjoying. Or is it an attempt at a facelift to appease the communities that object to the presence of the giant stores? That is too much weight to put on even a great logo, so they will have to have some incredibly amazing supporting design elements if they are going to pull that off.

If they can’t change their brand image with this new logo then what’s the point of a redesign? As bad as the old logo was (if you can call it a logo), at least it was honest. It was a generic warehouse sign. No frills. It made you think that the money they saved by not having a logo or nice signage was being passed right along to the customer. It may be design blasphemy, but I think there was some merit to that “lack of design” philosophy. It will be really interesting to see how the new identity works out for them.

Logo Design Love Awards is a competition that is going to recognize the best logos in the blogosphere. I was lucky enough to help with the judging, and I thought you guys would enjoy browsing through the logos as much as I did. There are ten categories of blogs and somewhere around 100 logos. Check it out, and cast your vote in the comments of their site.

First of all, I wanted to apologize to anyone who may have been on Adrian3.com yesterday (March 9, 2008). I have been playing with a new redesign and that always causes things to be broken and fixed here and there. I find it easier to just do a redesign and all the troubleshooting that goes with it on the live site. It may break things for a little while, but it saves time and gets my new design up before I tire of it. I still have some bugs and additions that I will implement in the coming days, but it is 90% there.

This design has a lot of white space, limited color, minimal decoration, and incorporates some of my more abstract photography into the header. I sometimes get into a habit of wanting to control every pixel of a site and while that is usually a good thing, it can result in a bit of a “heavy” design.

This design has a lot of white space, limited color, minimal decoration, and incorporates some of my more abstract photography into the header. I sometimes get into a habit of wanting to control every pixel of a site and while that is usually a good thing, it can result in a bit of a “heavy” design. For this one I wanted to let things breathe. Web typography is always a challenge and I feel pretty good about how the type looks on the page. The other thing to notice about the redesign that you will notice is that I added links to the social networks I use. If you are on one of those sites add me as a contact.

A couple notes about content management:
I was seriously looking at alternatives to WordPress for this site’s content management but ultimately decided against it. In my book, WordPress is firmly in the lead in the battle for best blogging platform. Movable Type slipped into second with there latest version (although I still use it for all my other sites) and it is just slow and clunky. It would be nice to learn Drupal for use on more corporate sites and I may take another look at it in the future, but for now I can’t afford the rumored “learning curve” that comes with it. Textpattern looks good, too, and I will test that one eventually. I also looked at Radiant and Mephisto because they run on Ruby on Rails. I have been teaching myself the basics of Rails and it seemed like a blog would be a good place to start improving my skills. While I was right about it being a good way to learn, it wasn’t the best way for me to run a blog. I liked the simplicity of Radiant’s interface. Mephisto is maybe a little better for blogs. Unfortunately, it took too much work to setup a server with Rails and all the hassle of installing them was too much. Once you finally get them installed they are still a little underdeveloped and lacking the database of user contributed development. WordPress and MT have been hacked and tweaked by their community of users so much that you can pretty much do anything you want with them. Maybe Radiant or Mephisto will get to that same point, but in the meantime you need to be a Rails whiz to customize it. For use on corporate sites I don’t see the initial setup time being worth the hassle. You can have WordPress running in under half an hour without any heavy lifting. I don’t usually have the luxury of a development team so the simpler the better.

My graphic design portfolio used to be powered by Flash. It was pretty slick looking but it was a pain to update and it didn’t provide much information about the work I was showing. Eventually I transitioned to a portfolio powered by the blogging software, Movable Type. It was perfect for managing my work. I simply made a new entry for each piece I wanted to show. I could categorize the entry so that my portfolio could be divided by print, web, logos, photography or whatever I wanted. I could edit, remove and organize my work quickly and easily. The only problem was that although it was extremely functional it didn’t have that impressive glossy feeling that you want a demonstration of your best work to have. In an attempt to compensate for the vanilla flavor of the site I worked on a new homepage this weekend. Now I have a Flash based front page while the guts are still powered by Movable Type. As always it is a work in progress, but it is working and you are free to check it out.

If this link hasn’t made it to your computer yet you need to check it out. There are 7 tracks for download from a mysterious “Dylan Hears a Who” album. Is it really Dylan’s lost record? No, but it might as well be. This is probably the best parody site you will ever see. Whoever they got to do the vocals has his Bob Dylan impersonation down to a science. The seven mash-up tracks take some obscure dylan songs (I can’t pin it down) over which the Dylan imposter sings Dr. Seuss lyrics. The production is seamless and I bet you could fool 99% of the people who hear this that they are actually listening to the actual Dylan. Whoever did this went all out with two tracks that last well over ten minutes! The amazing thing is that this music actually works! Dr. Suess has never sounded more profound. It almost makes you wish that this were real, and maybe, just maybe Dylan could have actually pulled this off.

If the music itself isn’t convincing enough there is cover art, an insert, and a cd label to go with it. The attention to detail on the design is as amazing as the music. This is as authentic as you could get without it being real. Simply amazing.

As I continue to develop Holy Gears, I am going to be using Adrian3 as the guinea pig. As I deveop new themes for Holy Gears I will be reskinning Adrian3 as a test. As a result, you may not recognize this site next time you visit!

One of the things that I think can set Holy Gears apart from other free blogging sites is the design of the templates. Blogger, Typepad, WordPress, etc. all offer a limited number of vanilla flavored templates. My goal is to give Holy Gears bloggers a wide assortment of unique design options and the ability to customize the themes if they can’t find something they like. I want a person that uses Holy Gears to be able to “skin” their site with something that reflects their unique interests and personality. If that sounds like you, sign up and start blogging!

I launched this site once I knew everything was working. It seems like that is how I have been designing websites lately. Get it working first, then clean it up later. Is that lazy? Anyway, I installed the first of many upgrades today. Most of them probably won’t get announced because they will be minor tweaks, but I wanted to talk a little bit about this one.

I added the hiding/revealing navigation on the top and bottom of the page. To make this work I slightly modified a javascript that was written by Shaun Inman. Thank you Shaun for being so willing to let people learn from your skills! Shaun is the father of sIFR, which stands for Scalable Inman Flash Replacement. sIFR is an amazing tool for anyone interested in expanding the typography on your website beyond the generic. If your browser has a Flash Player installed, sIFR will replace the text you specify with a different font. Since swf files have the ability to have fonts embedded in them, sIFR allows you to create headlines using any font that you own. It really is a smart way to bring rich typography to the web. So why am I not using sIFR if it is so great? Believe me, I want to. Unfortunately, sIFR still has a couple shortcomings that are keeping me from fully endorsing it.

1. sIFR doesn’t support transparent backgrounds.
Actually it can support transparent backgrounds on some browsers, but it isn’t recommended. I would be replacing the text on the wood textures, so it is a shame that the transparent background doesn’t work better. My workaround was to use the wood texture in the Flash file. I would have been satisfied with that solution if it weren’t for the other problem…

2. It doesn’t support letter spacing
I like to give Trajan a wide letter spacing in my headlines, and this just isn’t possible using sIFR. I tried setting it in Flash, since Flash 8 allows letter spacing to be set for dynamic text. Unfortunately, that variable gets lost by the time it is generated in the swf on the fly. Even if that would have worked, I wasn’t happy with requiring Flash Player 8 just to read my headlines.

So overall, sIFR was a series of compromises that I just wasn’t willing to make for this site. I am looking forward to using it in less demanding scenarios and I am hoping the bugs get worked out in the next release.