I fully admit to being a paid up member of the simple club with regards to what I like in design. In my book you can’t beat a simple but elegant design solution be that minimal or not. The Design Observer logo is just one example of this in logo format. I personally love the logo’s colour combinations and simple type. It is a great example of branding and clarity and allows the message to come across without clutter or pointless frills.
The colours chosen are really effective and using the near slightly warmer hue to the dark background brings out the orange and ties the design in when if you used black it would not be as subtle. It’s hard to do a dark background that is subdued enough to not glare white on your retina and this I think succeeds. The site itself is far from shabby, but for me the logo stands out in the header side block as a great example of design.
This logo looks not only simple, it has been created in a very simple and fast way as well: It is just an uppercase Font with kerning, two different colors added with a scaled Tagline – and that’s it. I looks nice.
Perfect font choice and colors, I like it.
I agree it’s a perfect balance just like all branding should be.
Green is restful to the eye. On a traditional color wheel, based on subtractive color, the complementary color to green is considered to be red. And here, the Orange perfectly compliments the green. Very nice pick of shades !