Magic Bean Dip

Vertical lines in the background behind text will interfere with the natural flow of your eye as you read.

Lines that flow the same direction as the text don’t interrupt the path your eye follows as you read the text.

I was merrily surfing along one day and ran across yet another blog by Scrivs. It’s titled Big Money Tips and is about making money on the internet. With all the get rich quick hard sell propaganda out there, an honest no hype discussion of generating income from the internet is just what I was looking for.

Originally Scrivs had a simple patterned green logo that hinted of money. I like things simple, and his logo appealed to me. Then he changed the logo to this:

It’s a good concept, but the vertical light to dark transitions in the background (highlighted below in red), interfered with the text.

So instead of just bitching about it, I whipped up a couple logos and emailed him. After a little cleanup I ended up with these, which still follow the original concept of his design:

The images are from a $100 bill. By coincidence, I just happened to have one in my possession for a glorious 12 hours before Mona demanded I release it so she could buy groceries.

I tried to minimize the interference behind the text but still keep enough detail to make it interesting. Lines generated by the light to dark transitions in the image follow the flow of the text running horizontally.

Your eye naturally follows the lines that flow with the text, while a vertical line in the background will momentarily stop your eye as it travels along the text. A slight ‘drop shadow’ and ‘outer glow’ also helped separate the text from the image.

I like the simplicity of the top two logos. The ‘Independence’ and the clock hold good symbolism for the topic of Big Money Tips. I also find the third logo interesting because of the small dash of red at the right hand side of the image from someone stamping a mark on the bill.

Scrivs showed excellent taste by choosing the top logo with ‘Independence’ to use on Big Money Tips.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 15th, 2004 at 9:13 am and is filed under General, Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.