Thinking about decorating your office? Check out this collection of posters by Frank Chimero aimed at designers. Some are simply inspirational or thought-provoking while others will make you laugh out loud.
(with thanks to Chuck Green for the pointer)

What's your favorite?

Jacob Cass has a nice list of things to avoid when seeking a logo design: How NOT to Design a Logo. Things like logo design contests -- a topic that generated a bit of debate several months ago when I quoted someone on who sees logo design contests as a good thing. What do you think of Jacob's list? (Check out the "Getting A Design Without Feedback" examples. Ooo. A very important don't.)

In reading through the comments generated by Cass' article I found "2 reasons why clients will always expect to pay R99 for a logo" which is about how most clients don't fully appreciate or understand what goes into a professional logo design and why they think professional designers charge too much. The author raises the question of whether or not designers should try to educate clients about the value of what a designer really does.

More Logo Design discussions:

• Riding the Wave of the New Swoosh in Logo Design
• Do You Follow Logo Design Trends?
• How Original is Your Logo Design?
• "Do It Yourself" Logos

Reader Shirley posted a response to an earlier discussion on the QuarkXPress upgrade asking for some help in making a decision between InDesign and QuarkXPress for "basically wicked fast desktop publishing." If you've used both or have some specific information you can share on shortcuts, version compatiblity, and the other issues she raises, please do. Shirley writes:

I'm looking for an objective opinion on whether switching to InDesign makes sense for me. I've read thru all the comments posted, but am still left wondering.

Here's my situation. I'm currently doing a tremendous amount of page layout design that doesn't require special effects. Just picture placement, text following style sheets, basically wicked fast desktop publishing. I frequently need to pickup copy from old Quark documents going back to Quark 4.0. Most of my layouts are produced in Quark 6.5.

I use InDesign for cover comps and ads, but not for the design of the body of my projects. I like the way InDesign prints a comp better and the quality of the way it displays images in comps on screen. However, I find the production tools frustrating in terms of doing things fast. I use many keyboard short cuts in Quark to format text and pictures and find all the many palettes in InDesign slow down my production (and I clearly need a bigger screen to display them all). My question is....

Does it make sense for someone who is not doing a lot of fancy design, but instead a lot of production to switch to InDesign?

Does production get faster the longer one uses InDesign?

Are there hidden keyboard commands I haven't found yet that would speed up my production? For example: an equivalent to Quarks command shift F, tab 5 times, enter field, for applying space after paragraphs. Or is Quark just more streamlined for producing tons and tons of pages?

Also, is there an easy way to convert the years of old Quark documents that I draw styled text from into InDesign?

AND...

Has InDesign fixed the problem of it being difficult to open newer version with the older ones. We have both InDesign CS2 and InDesign CS3 in the office and the CS2 version won't directly open the CS3 files. Has this been fixed in the CS4 version...is it downward compatible?

Lastly, I've heard that Quarks Customer Service stinks, but honestly, having used Quark since 1990, I've never had to call customer service, because I don't have any problems with the software. Worst that has ever happened to me is a handful of "end of file" errors where I lost a file and had to revert to backup. I guess I'm just lucky. I find InDesign crashes more on me, especially when importing large photos into a layout, but I don't know if that's an embedding issue or if I just need a system upgrade.

Your advice would be greatly appreciated since I have layouts to get back to and no time to research this. :) Thanks!

All you QuarkXPress and InDesign users, tell us what you think.

Still stuck for a business card design? Last month Toxel.com posted 40 Creative Business Card Designs. I've seen a few before in other lists but there are some that are new (at least to me). I'm loving #12 - Yuka Suzuki and #01 - Emerson Taymor is cute too.