LogoInstant is a design service that creates a new logo almost every day.

According to their web site, they create logos when they’re bored and share them freely with the rest of the world.

You can use all the logo design accessed from this website as inspirations, using it on your website or your project or even using them for your clients. You don’t have to spend big bucks anymore for designer, because this service is 100% free.

So basically, the logos are completely free for both personal and commercial use. Best of all, they come in a layered Adobe Photoshop source file (PSD) so you can edit the name or make more advanced changes.

So whether you want to use their service as inspiration or if you don’t mind having the same logo as several other companies, check out some of their logo designs.

When I read Kevin Hale’s article “Calculating Color Contrast for Legible Text” yesterday, I was reminded of the fact that some colors just don’t work well with other colors.

It might just be me and my old age and the fact that I’m male, but there’s something very disturbing about the new “orange links on green background” in Monster.com’s newly re-designed HTML e-mail for job search results.

This is not the first time, of course, that we’ve seen clashing colors on the web. And it certainly won’t be the last. Moreover, you would think that some of the accessibility hype of late would translate into better designed web pages & web components for everyone. Sure, the links are accessible and even underlined (and I’m fairly positive they work just splendidly in a screen reader for end users with vision problems). The problem is that there’s not enough contrast between the orange and the green.

Much to my dismay, even one of my favorite webmaster resources, VisiBone, can display some very disturbing color combinations on their Webmaster’s Color Laboratory: 

That just goes to show that hard-coding orange, pink and brown text could get you into a bit of trouble, if the background can be randomly changed to orange, pink and brown as well.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not knocking the hard work of others; I’m merely contemplating on the challenges that web design has to offer, even in 2008. (Either that or I’m getting color-blind.)

In all seriousness, though, even if you’re under deadline pressure, or if you are a one-person web shop, run your work past a couple of co-workers and see what they think. Make it easy for them to comment on any spect of your work, without getting defensive or cynical. In the end, everybody wins.

Additional Resources:

A Guide to Combining Colors & Color Schemes for Great Web Design

Eric Meyer’s Color Blender

Simply Graphix Color Combinations

JavaScript Color Picker

Tags: zebra+stripes, tables, color, legibility, colorblindness

Good Gravy! How did I ever miss this awesome web site?

At any rate, aside from its content, the web site itself has been carefully crafted, featuring a very intuitive and visually appealing collapsible & expandable navigation bar on the left side.

The icons are organized by such categories as Art Icons, Business icons, Computer Icons, Phones, etc. By and large, the site makes heavy use of Google AdWords and seems to belong to somebody who’s not necessarily a native English speaker (so be kind when you encounter typos and obvious misspellings).

Most of the icons in which I was interested were available for download in a number of sizes (such as 32×32, 48×48, 64×64, 128×128 and 256×256) as well as in a PNG and ICO formats. Typically, the free high quality icons that I downloaded were all licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

By the way, if you are an icon designer and would like to submit some high quality icons on IconsPedia, you can submit your icons (or at least some of them) on the web site, too.

This free Web 2.0 web application does thing, and it does it really well: It generates a web page ribbon for you. You know, one of those slanted graphics that shows up in the upper right corner of a web page.

According to the QuickRibbon.com web site:

“QuickRibbon is a completely free Web2.0 tool, a website ribbon generator which lets you create a custom ribbon, insert a link in it and place it in the top right corner of your website.”

“It will take you less than 5 minutes to generate your own website ribbon with this trendy widget and add a stylish Web2.0 look to your page – it’s quick, easy and fun. We recommend using our QuickRibbon tool to attract your site’s visitors attention to new features, announcements, sales, etc. Get rid of the boring banners and make your news stand out with a style.”

I found this extremely useful for a couple of web campaigns, where we needed to draw attention to a new service or a special promotion.

The text, font, size, colors and style can be selected and auto-generated. And when you’ve generated the ribbon, you even get a code snippet that you can insert into your web page to display the ribbon. Additionally, you can add links to your ribbon and specify whether to show them in the same window or in a new window.

How cool is that? Oh, and did I mention that you can also use this tool for BLOGs (WordPress, blogger, etc.), MySpace, and LiveJournal?