Instablogs and the Importance Of Branding
Tuesday, October 4th, 2005 by MR
The other day I discussed some random tidbits from the community and touched upon my reaction to the Instablogs logo. Today I wanted to go a bit further and talk about this whole weblog network phenomenon and how extremely important it is to separate yourself from the herd via good branding.
A quote from a recent commenter named Paul:
From the looks of the dot on the i, Instablogs was indeed trying to copy Agenzia’s logo. Whoever did the job was a lousy designer, though.
Agenzia’s is well designed and clever, with the “Ag” box subtly designed to look like the entry for silver on a chart of elements.
Instablogs can’t even get the fonts right. Why is the “Insta” in Gill Bold stretched out like that? Why is the s in “blogs” flush against the side of the box but not the b? Ugh.
I wrote in that entry how I thought the Instablogs logo seemed a bit hurried and partially influenced from Agenzia logo. I commented on the Instablogs site (sorry, they don’t like comment permalinks!) about the coincidence, and Nandini then had this to say in their defense:
I don`t think so that instablogs logo looks like Agenzia or some one other. We wanted insta and blogs to stand separately.
And we have done a nice job. Red (#ff0000) is a very primary color and square is also a primary shape, and both can be seen in lots of places.
Thanks for dropping by anyways.
If you compare the two logos near each other, you can easily see the similarities I spoke of:
The color, the red block, the red square used outside the block, they’re all basically the same. Except Agenzia took a lot more time when they did theirs, and as Paul noted above, they made their mark look like the symbol for Silver on the periodic table of the elements. Very cool.
Spending Money on Branding
It happens all the time — a company has a tight budget, needs to bootstrap in order to make things work, and the first thing they skimp on is design. This is not necessarily a bad thing considering paying employee health plans is more important than hiring Josh or Jon to design a kick-ass logo. In times of famine, it’s understandable that high-value design work is left by the wayside.
But Instablogs is hardly starving or bootstrapping. People are bubbling with rumors that Instablogs is loaded down with venture capital funding, and for good reason. They supposedly have 50 full-time writers on staff to hold down the fort on all their soon-to-launch weblogs, so wait a second here. If they have the money to pay all these writers, why not hire a design firm to work on their logo? Maybe if they did that, they wouldn’t have ended up with something that looks like an elementary school knock-off of a real design firm’s mark. Just an observation.
Competitive Branding
I wrote a few weeks ago about how weblog networks are “the new black”, meaning that they are springing up everywhere and are currently the cool thing to do. Weblog networks are so hot right now that there’s even a site dedicated to news about blog networks! So okay, there’s a bunch of weblog networks out there with basically the same ideals, how does one network differentiate itself from all the others? Well besides modifying the revenue split, or doing different topics, or whatever, the very first thing that separates one network from the pack is the design of their logo. It’s the first thing you see, and it has to be recognizable.
I did the logo for 9rules, and my buddy Peter did the logo for b5media. Whoa! Two designers being paid (kinda, Scrivs gives me coupons) to actually DESIGN the logos for two weblog networks. Here’s what Peter and I came up with:
You can tell both he and I took some time to design these, considering how important a logo is for a company. Hell, I even documented the process and asked for feedback.
Lesson Learned?
Branding is an important element of a company’s reputation, and if the funds are there to have a quality mark developed, then there should be no questions as to whether the money should be spent. Instablogs is getting a lot of hype right now for the sheer fact that they’re launching with 50 weblogs written by 50 full-time authors. If they only paid a designer to work on their logo and site, maybe they could impress people with quality in addition to the quantity they’re currently pitching.
Reader Comments
8 Responses to “Instablogs and the Importance Of Branding”
hmm…
I personally feel it is just the hype, and the blog according to me looks like another attempt to try luck at SEO and generate some revenue using ads…
And what I feel is, this will be like getting RSS feeds for 100s of sites and getting few people to write on the same thing…
About the logo, actually spending $200 can get them a great logo here in India..I do not know the cost in US (I think it should be around $1000) and I am not talking about some ripped logo or something but properly designed original logo…
Lets see what they come up to when they are on….
Deep
October 6th, 2005 at 12:28 am
I bet blogs about Muslim Wimmen will generate a lot of Adsense revenue.
October 7th, 2005 at 1:07 pm
I fully agree. The very first thing I noticed when arriving to instablogs was the poor logo. I thought the browser stretched it, or it’s not loaded properly, but unfortunately that’s just the way it is.
What bothers me the most is that the first letter i has a pixel perfect dot, but the rest is anti-aliased.
I hope they didn’t print many apparel with this logo, so that they can redesign it and replace it on the web site.
October 9th, 2005 at 1:24 am
My two cents - the instablogs logo may well have been inspired by the Agenzia logo, but that’s nothing of which to be ashamed IMHO. We all get inspiration from the things we see every day, and these logos are hardly identical. As has been pointed out, the Agenzia logo is MUCH nicer. Incidentally, I think it could look a lot better - too many little cutesy elements for me (two red squares, white dot, periodic table reference). I think it would look stronger without the red dot.
Anyway, I LOVE the 9rules logo and said so recently. I think the b5 is quite nice, but the low-lying ‘5′ is visually confusing - the rest of it looks as though it’s being reflected along a horizontal axis, but the ‘5′ forces a rethink (i.e. it’s like the logo is sitting on a reflective surface).
Time to wrap up a mammoth comment - outsourcing logo design definitely has its problems! This post has some much more blatant examples of logo thievery.
October 29th, 2005 at 5:23 pm
The fact that something new looks like something else that already existed has absolutely NOTHING to do with ‘being inspired’ or worse, having copied the original. People simply sometimes come up with the same idea. It just shows us that many ideas aren’t as unique as we sometimes think.
This very thing happened with the logo of a recently launched Dutch TV station named Talpa. They had a logo developed which turned out to look exactly like the Welcome Telecom logo which, in it’s turn, shows quite a lot of resemblance to the logo of this company.
The Talpa TV station is run by John de Mol (The guy who came up with the ‘Big Brother’ TV format), a very skilled TV producer who knows all about the importance of copyrights. De Mol ended up paying money to some companies that have logos that look similar to the Talpa logo because they just couldn’t completely restart the process anymore.
Lesson? People are people and it’s an illusion to think that stuff that comes up in our creative minds is always truly unique. You just never know whether there is / was someone else, somewhere far, far away who got the same idea as you. I believe Instablogs when they say they’ve developed the logo themselves and they weren’t ‘inspired’ by the Agenzia logo.
You’re right about the logo not being very refined but I believe the resemblance to the Agenzia logo is purely coincidential.
On a sidenote: The ‘mirror effect’ used in the B5media logo isn’t very original either. I’ve seen it a lot of times. Does that mean Peter is guilty of plagiarism? Of course not.
Think about it….
November 2nd, 2005 at 9:16 am
methinks the mirror effect in the b5Media logo is the one effect that you see on almost every photoshop tutorial website out there. In fact, I’ve seen innumerable do-it-yourself tutorials on this that teach you how to make such logos in a step-by-step fashion. That doest make the logo a “copy”.
It is the overall look of the logo that qualifies such a judgement, and as far as that goes, I do not think the instablogs logo would qualify as being a copy of the “original” (Agenizia) logo any more than the b5media logo is a copy of the hundreds of “mirrored logos” to be seen in the various photoshop tutorial sites out there.
hey, what d’ya think the yahoo and msn search portal pages have been designed to look like ? (Hint: google)
July 14th, 2006 at 12:39 pm
Saurab, the difference is that the effect b5’s logo uses is used everywhere. An effect is a simple design technique, like drop shadows, a stroke, gradient, vertical lines, transparency, etc. If I used the word “telephone” in a novel, does that mean I plagiarized every other novel that uses the same word? No, the word “telephone” is a building block of a sentence. If I stole an entire sentence or two from another novel, then I am guilty of plagiarism because it wasn’t just a building block I used, but someone’s creative work.
The Instablogs logo has many similar characteristics as Agenzia: the red block with white text in it, tightly kerned text, a red block substituting for a part of a type element, etc. They didn’t just use “an effect” used somewhere else, they used many similar elements already present. There’s a huge difference.
July 14th, 2006 at 12:45 pm
I’ve been professionally designing logos for 25 years. I’ve been involved in company and product branding for about eight years. In spite of this I have never worked with a big name company behind me. I’ve never worked for an Ad Agency (except my own), marketing company, etc. Even though I’ve had success with my designs (two logos to be published end of this year), since I design for small, usuall start-up companies, when the companies’ fail, the logo and brand goes, too. Never any fault of mine or my designs (knock on wood). Because I’ve never worked for a large ad or marketing agency, I’m considered an amature even with 25 years experience. It is fustrating to say the least. It is obvious to me the Instablogs logo is terrible (bad use of fonts, bad kerning and spacing, bad balence, etc.) and the others you show are very good. Mostly it is a difference of detail and polish. I would like to see the 9Rules logo as it will look in grayscale and black & white, however. Remember, fundementals of logo use which has everything to do with design. Regardless of the limited use your logo will have at the beginning, plan for it getting the exposure of Nike or Coke Cola some day.
November 8th, 2006 at 4:06 pm
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