How Corporate Logos Evolve

How Corporate Logos Evolve, from The Logo Company, shows us how even iconic world-wide recognized company logos change over time.

We often get asked for a logo design that can stand the test of time. Something that will last forever. I mean, we look at all these “Mega Corporates” and their logos never change. Do they? Well, actually and surprisingly, they do….a lot.

This illustration depicts some of the biggest global brands and highlights the evolution of their logos from humble beginnings to the present day. It might strike you how some of the designs started out looking like their biggest rivals and others appear to of hardly changed at all. Timeless is certainly not the overriding characteristic of most of these early creations.

This is a perfect use of an informative infographic that ties directly into a company’s business, and makes for a great content tool for marketing.  The big challenge in the coming years will be the relevance of infographics to the sites that publish them, and this is the right way to do it.  Informative, entertaining infographic that is directly relevant to the hosting website without specifically being an advertisement for their business.

They should have included a copyright (or Creative Commons) license and the direct URL to the infographic blog post in the footer of the design.  That way the information travels with the infographic as it is shared and posted across different sites.

Found on Best Infographics

The History of Home Heating

Fun timeline of The History of Home Heating infographic by global home improvements. See how far we’ve come in home heating and the plans for the future. With the current heating technologies, we could reduce the harm that we are doing to the planet.

This is mostly a visual explanation using illustrations, but does a good job of clearly telling the story to the readers with the sequence of evolving heating images.  The isometric, video-game style illustrations draw in the reader and make the information more engaging and interesting to read.

Thanks to David for sending in the link!

The History of Prime Time Television

The History of Prime Time Television is a new infographic poster from HistoryShots co-founder and designer Larry Gormley.  Covering 70+ years of television history, the timeline plots out the most important/popular/trendsetting shows grouped by genre.

This graphic charts the history of prime time television from the origins of the industry in 1940s to the present day. More than 550 of the most important, popular, and trendsetting television shows are mapped into more than 20 genres. Shows selected have won critical acclaim according to recognized television critics or have wide audience appeal based on Nielsen ratings and awards won. The number of years each show has been aired is mapped allowing you to quickly see how long each show lasted.

This graphic was created by Larry Gormley. Reebee Garofalo’s Genealogy of Pop/Rock Music was a key inspiration for the design.

Compared to prior designs, it looks like this new project presented the additional challenge of visualizing multi-year television series, which were addressed with extended dotted lines showing the date range for each television show.

The design is available for purchase as a 41”x20” poster for $39.00 from the HistoryShots site.

Syria: The Basics, an infographic presentation

Syria: The Basics is an infographic slide show using the Prezi presentation tool.  It plays like a movie, and does a great job utilizing the new features of Prezi like Fade-In animation and Audio Overlay.

Designed by Lara Setrakian (@Lara), co-founder and managing editor of Syria Deeply, a single issue news website.  Fantastic design work!  The presentation utilizes data visualization design concepts including relative sizing to put the size of the country into perspective, a timeline layout of events, related news photos and world map information.

The History of Doctor Who Companions

The History of Doctor Who Companions infographic from mirror.co.uk gives us a guide to all the companions that Doctor Who has travelled with and a sneak peak on the newest one.  Along with the names and photos come statistics of gender, species, and who is the worst and the best companions.

It’s goodbye Amy Pond after Karen Gillan left in a tear-jerking mid-season finale, The Angels Take Manhattan. You can read our review here.

But how will Amy be remembered in the pantheon of best and worst Doctor Who companions? Did she hit the lofty heights of a Rose Tyler or a Leela? Or sink to the lowly lows of Ace and - Time Lords preserve us - Bonnie Langford as Mel Bush?

Take a look at the amazing infographic below and make up your own minds while learning all there is to know about the Doctor’s Tardis co-travelers…

I’m generally opposed to using photos in an infographic design because their full-color nature add a lot of visual complexity to a design.  In this case, photos work better than illustrations by making the different characters easily recognizable.

Thanks to Chris for sending in the link!

America's New Minority

The demographics of America are changing, and America’s New Minority from 59 Liberty shows us how far we have come and predicts the next 40 years.  

With the country’s changing demographics, whites will drop under 50% of the population in the 2040s. Every Republican Presidential candidate since 1968 has won the white vote, but with the population shift can the GOP compete?

This graphic simply presents the data of a changing electorate. We went through numerous iterations attempting to find something appealing that presented the data accurately.

We worked with Projects by Chi/Donahoe on concepts, Ripetungi on design, and Hustle Labs for PR support.

For direct access to the data used, please view the spreadsheet here.

I really like how simple and strong the message is with this design.  The data will be surprising to many people, so it should be popular with social sharing.

I LOVE that they include a link to the raw data in a Google Docs spreadsheet for anyone to get their hands on the raw numbers from the data sources.  The link is in the additional text on the infographic landing page.  It would be more effective if the URL of the infographic landing page and the Google Docs spreadsheet were both included in the infographic so they would be readily available to readers who see the infographic posted on other sites.

They also share some of the early drafts and other versions of the design they considered on the infographic landing page.  You can see a couple here, but there are more on the page at 59 liberty.

The History of Microsoft Office

Word, PowerPoint and Excel are the Holy Trinity of work productivity. This is the package that makes up Microsoft Office. The History of Microsoft Office infographic from Best STL (microsofttraining.net) highlights the history of past Microsoft Office releases and a preview of the 2013 version just released.

With MS Office 2013 launching soon (see below), let’s go back in time  to look at the Microsoft Office story so far.  When launched in 1990 it was called “The Microsoft Office”.

Which version was your favourite? Do you prefer an old faithful?

The design is great.  Easy to read and not too much information.  I’ve used every version of Office they have shown in the timeline.

At first, I thought this might have been an official Microsoft design, but it’s really from Best STL, who is a Microsoft partner.  It looks so much like a Microsoft design, they may be pushing the Fair Use of Microsoft’s trademarks a little further than I would be comfortable with.

Thanks to David for sending in the link!

James Bond: 50 Years of Movies

James Bond: 50 Years of Movies infographic from hrblock.com is all about Bond, James Bond. See the top grossing films, iconic bond accessories and more.

It’s been almost 50 years since Sean Connery first delivered those now-legendary words on the big screen.

And 22 films later (with #23 on the way in November), the super suave super-spy known as 007 is celebrating a half century of fast cars, money and martinis on October 5th. To mark the milestone, we’ve put together an infographic taking stock of all that is Bond.

Very nice design.  My only suggestion would be to visualize more of the dollar figures shown instead of just showing them in text.  I appreciate that all of the dollar values have been inflation adjusted to 2012 dollars.

Thanks to Jane for sending in the link!

LEGO Minifigs

The LEGO Minifigs infographic is a history of LEGO Minifigs (Mini Figures). The infographic designed by Hot Butter Studio for visual.ly includes the dates when characters were introduced or when a certain feature was added. An added bonus to the infographic is the information about female LEGO minifigs and the FRIENDS line that was designed primarily for girls.

This is a fun infographic with some interesting factoids that will keep readers engaged with the design.  LEGOs are cool right now, so the timing for this design is good.  It’s also a topic that has not been well covered in infographics, so it stands out as unique information.

I wish a few of the data points were visualized like number of minifigs sold each year or space events along an actual timeline visual.

Thanks to Karyn for sending in the link!

Brockhaus Encyclopedia Infographics

Check out the Brockhaus Encyclopedia Infographics, infographics and data visualizations in the new German Brockhaus Encyclopedia!  Designed by oberhaeuser.info, the design studio of Martin Oberhäuser.

Series of info graphics for brockhaus, a large encyclopedia publisher from germany. The info graphics visualize several statistics and informations of topics like: the worlds highest mountains and their first ascent, the languages of the world, comets close to the earth, world oceans, ecology, media evolution and so on. One graphic shows the evolution of the world population from 1950 to 2050. Six transparent pages (one for each 20-year period) overlap each other.

These are some beautiful designs.  I’m sorry an English version isn’t available.

Found in the Behance 100 Most Appreciated Projects of 2012