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Flat design is a concept that was pretty popular a couple years ago and it’s back with full strength this year, causing some interesting buzz around the so called “flat design” trend. Flat design is not something new, something we created now as a response to other design movements. It is a concept that was around before, and now it is appearing everywhere. Flat design is pretty straightforward. It is flat. It’s a way of designing without adding three-dimensional attributes – no shadows, no gradients, no bevels, etc. It doesn’t mean flat design has no effects at all, it just means that it doesn’t use effects to create depth and dimension. Flat design focuses a lot on color (solid colors), typography and simpler use of UI elements.

The flat design trend causes a lot of debate and certainly deserves a more in depth article, which we are working on. While we finish our research to show you a complete look at “flat design”, we want to show you some examples of websites adopting the flat concept. Let us know your feelings about them and stay tuned for the next flat design chapter.

Friends of the Web

Etch

Crafting Type

vtcreative

Flaticons

Build 2012

Profound Grid

Wistia

Mark Simonson

William Leeks

The Ecology Center

SpellTower

OnSite

LayerVault

It’s a Shape Christmas

oak.is

Werkpress

Happy Studio

Coloured Lines

Bob Galmarini

Foundation

Lorenzo Verzini

Sumall

You can also find a lot of flat design inspiration on Dribbble, Pinterest and Behance.

Personal projects are the best way for a designer to learn because it’s much easier to try different things. It’s just about making decisions and building them. With Abduzeedo we try to keep it as personal as possible, at least when it comes to changes. We redesign it at least once a year, not only the overall site design but the brand identity. Things have been a bit busy however and it’s been over two years since the last time we designed a symbol for the site. With that in mind, here’s a start on the 2013 symbol for Abduzeedo.

This post we will show you the idea behind the new symbol. It’s still a work in progress but we’d love to know what you think about the symbol and the creative process behind it.

Old symbol

The old symbol was created in 2009 and used for 2 years. The idea was basically a triangle with references to the letter A of Abduzeedo.

References

The first goal for the new symbol was that it had some similarities with the old one. The idea of a triangle and the letter A were the guide points. This time however, I wanted to make it super simple, no colors, just black and white and no effects.

Triangle
Letter A
Simple
Space theme
Star trek

Here are some images that inspired me.

Sketches

Starting out with some basic sketches trying to get a simple “A” based on the references. The main inspiration comes from the Star Trek logo and of course the old symbol.

Digital Sketches

After a few sketches I went to Illustrator to translate the idea into something digital. Below you can see the basic construction of the symbol.

Final

After a few iterations I got to a symbol that I really like. I was really indecisive about the shape I would use to frame the logo. In the end I went with the circle because it’s more flexible for the applications I have in mind.

There are still some optical adjustments and adapting the typography to the new logo, however you can see some examples of the final symbol below.

So that’s pretty much it. Now I will work on some stickers but before that I’d love to hear your opinion about the new symbol. Do you have any feedback or suggestions? Share your thoughts with us and you may be the lucky recipient of a sticker or poster 🙂

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