Whether your company has been around for over twenty years or just two, redesigning your logo can be a tricky task. Companies that have been around for twenties years hopefully have a logo that has reached a level of being easily recognized by their community. Companies that have been around for only two years are still working to reach that level. Reaching this level can take years – but sometimes a redesign needs to happen.

Companies in the position of a logo redesign need to remember a couple key things:

•  Don’t lose your previous brand entirely
•  Remember who your audience is

Check out this gallery of “60 Recently Redesigned Corporate Identities”. See how other companies did when making the decision to redesign their logos. There were a couple of great changes, and a couple of misses (needless to say, Gap, you’re one of them).

What sets Fortress Builders apart? Their un-tiring focus on the customer. Period. The owners of Fortress Builders want to put the customer first. That means:

• giving them AWESOME standard features like granite countertops, hardwood floors, termite warranty, and much more…
• being there for the customer when they call whether it’s by their 24/7 phone number or website live chat
• working with the customer to get their dream home just the way they like it down to the tiniest detail

Fortress is a locally owned new home builder in Columbia, SC currently building in Farrow Pointe of Northeast Columbia and Wellesley in Lexington. Check out their new website for more information! Of course their awesome new website was designed and built by none other than Lenker Design & Marketing!

There’s one thing designers can love about Halloween – anything goes! Everything comes out for Halloween designs: eerie glows, pumpkins, ghosts, and crazy fonts you’d never even consider using on any other design project. We love when we have a client who wants to do something festive for the Halloween season!

Every year Essex Homes of Columbia, SC holds their Spooktacular Haunting for Realtors and Sales Agents. The concept is simple: give realtors all the information they need, be spooky, be engaging, and be FUN.

For their Spooktacular event we always design flyers, postcards and an e-blast that goes out to their mailing list. However this year held one change. Essex Homes really wanted to do a graveyard theme, so instead of the typical 4×6 postcard, we designed a longer, landscape postcard to really make their graveyard scene stand out.

We’re not the only designers who love Halloween marketing. Check out this gallery of Spooky Halloween Flyers!

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Today’s design freebie is from a design blog called Arbenting. Arbenting offers several design freebies on their site from textures and brushes to wallpaper designs and icons. This one really caught our eye and we wanted to feature it as this week’s Freebie!

Arbenting presents a pack of 10 Pantone’d Swirl vectors free for commercial and personal use with no attribution necessary. This set uses Pantone colors including 5 Pantone Metallic Coated and 5 Pantone Pastel colored swirls.

Visit their blog to download this design freebie and view more!

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When we think of typewriter fonts, the first one that comes to mind is usually Courier. Courier was designed in the 1950′s and since then, several other typewriter inspired fonts have been created. Here are three free typewriter fonts that caught our eye. Download your favorite or all 3!

Sloopy Ink

Designer: Mortal Turtle Foundry
Source: DaFont

Secret Typewriter

Designer: CPR.SPARHELT
Source: Font Squirrel

RM Typerighter

Designer: Ray Meadows
Source: DaFont

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Realistic textures are a favorite amongst designers everywhere. We’re always searching for new textures to work with on our design projects. One of our favorite blogs, Lost and Taken, is a great source for free textures for personal and commercial use.

This week they posted 42 Free Vintage Paper Textures! These textures were scanned in by Caleb Kimbrough – he found these paper textures by going to a used book store and buying books from the late 19th and early 20th century.

Check them out – you can download a single high-res version or download the entire zip file containing all 42 free textures!

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Anyone else feel this year is flying by? Today’s already the last day of September! The good news? A new month means a new set of free desktop wallpapers to choose from Smashing Magazine!

Smashing Magazine was created in 2006 and serves as a great source of inspiration for graphic designers and web designers. Their monthly desktop wallpapers are even designed by their readers!

If you’re tired of your current desktop wallpaper, go to their site and view all the new designs for October! A perfect way to be inspired everyday.

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We’ve been extremely busy the past few weeks working on new graphic design and web design projects! However, we’re never too busy for the featured fonts of the week! This week we’re featuring “Retro” fonts. Whether it’s the 1920’s, 1950’s or the 1980’s… Retro fonts are the most successful when they have the characteristics and charm that captures the era they represent. Below are three of our favorites this week.

Riesling

Designer: Bright Ideas
Source: Font Squirrel

Airstream

Designer: Nick’s Fonts
Source: Font Squirrel

Kelvinized

Designer: Majik Mike
Source: DaFont

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Texture can have a strong impact when incorporated into a design, whether it be for print or web. Not only does texture create visual interest and detail, but adds great depth to a piece. A notable trend in modern web design is the use of high resolution images of everyday objects such as wood grains, stained paper, cracked stone, etc. in the design layout. Adding such images can take a minimalist design and turn it into a visually stunning piece of art.

The ultimate designer challenge is finding a texture that matches the tone of your work. A great resource for this is Lost and Taken, a blog that gives away free, high resolution textures. One collection that is quite impressive is the 10 Free Tree Bark Textures, all with incredible detail.

There are a boatload of free textures on this site, so take the time to browse through them and there is sure to be one that completes your design!

Need another script font option other than Zapfino? Script fonts are ideal for achieving an elegant, feminine or hand-written approach to a design. Check out these 3 free script fonts we found:

Black Jack

Designer: Typadelic
Source: http://www.fontsquirrel.com/fonts/BlackJack

Porcelain

Designer: Misprinted Type
Source: http://www.dafont.com/porcelain.font

Ballpark

Designer: Mickey Rossi
Source: http://www.fontsquirrel.com/fonts/Ballpark

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