Sculpture/signage designed by Milton Glaser for the SVA Theater.

The new SVA graphic identity, also by Glaser, reflecting the sculpture above.

In an interview about the renovation, Glaser discusses his past architectural designs, the inspiration for his work with the SVA, and the challenges of working with space. It's worth a read to hear him talk about architecture with the same thoughtfulness he displays towards graphic and identity design.

1. iStockphoto to Sell Logos

Big news this week from iStockphoto: the site plans to offer logos for sale in the near future. Commenters on their forum seem to favor the deal, while designers are (not surprisingly) much less enthused.

To their credit, iStockphoto is trying something different with the logos they plan to sell. Logos will be unique items, only sold once apiece. In addition, they will cost much more than stock photos. Whereas a decent sized image might run $7-$10, a logo could run $100-$750.

But tell me, who is going to buy these things and who is going to supply them? Is there really such a thing as a stock logo? I think we know the answer...

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1. The 50 dollar logo experiment

Should professional designers be worried about crowdsourced spec design sites? Jim Walls spent $50 to find out.

His verdict: professionals have nothing to fear.

The "designers" he hired a.) failed to take into account his obvious pun (or perhaps did not speak English), and b.) never finished the job. You get what you pay for, I guess.

2. Pointing fingers at Wired

If for some reason you have not caught wind of this article on the possible demise of Wired magazine, you might want to check it out. The irony is thick: how could a magazine about the future fail to predict or respond to the impact of the Internet on its business?

The comments are the real meat of the piece. Past and present Wired editors, bloggers, print writers, ad buyers, and lookers-on debate what went wrong and what might save the day. Highly recommended if you're interested in the future of journalism and hearing the many, many sides of the story from informed parties.

3. "Apple is creating an ecosystem of the kind of customers I don’t want"

Garrett Murray believes that Apple's long and opaque approval process for iPhone application support hurts both users and developers. The ratings interface makes it difficult for developers to respond directly to complaints through the Apps Store. Furthermore, they have no idea when or if fixes will be approved. Murray says angry users are more likely to rate software than satisfied ones, resulting in lower overall ratings which can hurt sales.

As a user, I have found it hard to shop the Apps Store for this very reason. It's interesting to consider whether Apple's attempts to control quality may have in fact broken the user experience on another level.

4. Changing search trends say: invest in brands

Chas Edwards, chief revenue officer at Digg, offers this analysis of recent marketing data:

What's happening? "Total traffic going to websites via paid search ads is decreasing relative to traffic via unpaid, organic search listings."

The explanation? As users have gained experience searching, queries are getting longer, thus undermining the effectiveness of most ad buys which use only a few words.

What to do? “As we claw our way up from the bottom, expect that the recovery in online advertising will be driven by faster growth in brand-building activities over cost-per-click and other direct-response programs.”

I chose a few that I thought were clever, but you owe it to yourself to check out the whole site. Taylor has some very nice (and more recognizable) pieces over there.

Round out a rather light week for me at BlogLESS, look at this clever and restrained logo for St. Francis Hospital, a small church hospice in Budapest, created by Hungarian designer Robin Kosnas.

The pigeon is the attribute of St. Francis and of course, open hands symbolize mercy.

Sometimes less is just inappropriate. For instance, when you're designing death-metal logos.

Christophe Szpajdel is the creator of over 7,000(!) logos for black- and death-metal bands. In a recent (though disappointingly sparse) interview in Vice Magazine he reveals that despite his prolific portfolio, the logos don't pay the bills. He works a day job in support of his craft.

I am not a big fan of metal myself, but since I started watching Adult Swim's Metalocalypse, I am intrigued by the metal aesthetic. It's practically the opposite of what most designers aspire towards these days. Death metal logos are often very complex-- practically illegible. They are not at all simple, as we are taught logos and brands should be.

Rather than achieving this complexity through mere repetition, Szpajdel creates it by hand. As a result, it's noisy, but not random in an algorithmic way. Not to say that there is no craft in digital tools or code, it's just that here the craft is expressed differently.

Lastly, each logo belongs to a set. This is most apparent in the first image. There is a consistent vocabulary that makes each logo belong to a recognizable style, and yet this vocabulary is played with such that they are all unique.

That is not to say that most web and UI designers are not building from a consistent vocabulary (often Apple's). But looking over Szpajdel's logos, the contrast between death-metal and web chrome makes me wonder what else we could do with the medium. How could it look and feel different than it does now, instead of always drawing from the same playbook?

I love this logo for Rehabilitation Hospitals of America. Playing on the well known hospital cross symbol, designer John Langdon created a witty and austere rendering of the company's tagline: "We rebuild lives, step by step by step."

Logo for Rehabilitation Hospitals of America by John Langdon (Via)

Another clever logo that deploys a positive/negative space ambiguity to good effect is this one, for the Food Writers, by 300million.

Logo for Food Writers by 300million (Via)