Posts Tagged ‘logo design’

Are you investing enough in your Brand design?

Consumer behaviour is changing and it is looking to stay that way for the foreseeable future. Throughout the boom of the last few years, we have seen very small business adequately competing with the bigger brands. Many of these websites have gone local to global in a very short space of time, thanks to their prices. People were willing to buy products and services from a company or website they’d never heard of, if the price was lower. But business are loosing the battle against the recession every day, many of them most likely leaving customer orders unfulfilled, thus consumer confidence is at an all time low. What does this mean? well it means that all of those bargain hunters are returning to the big brands that they recognise, even if that means spending more money, because they don’t want to take the risk.

With the recession causing people to loose their jobs, some have looked to the internet as a portal for their salvation, but starting their own business. But even in the recession, web business is booming, Barclays showed that even in the credit crunch 98,000 new business popped up over only a three month period. It can be a thankless route to success. Around the same number of businesses failed during that period too!

I believe that most new online business fails due to bad branding. You brand and logo are the first things that your future customers see. This is how you are judged by those who keep your business afloat, the people logging in everyday to buy your goods, that see you as a logo and that logo is critical to the process. But it’s so often the case that startup owners put off paying professional logo design in the initial stages. All to often its “Lets see how many customers we can get before we think about branding”.So what they do is, try to knock one together in paint or get a mate down the pub to create one. Many new companies unfortunately opt for cheap Vista Print Logos or free clip art to design their brand.

This isn’t acceptable for a Brand. All web business now more than ever, need to look much bigger and much more capable via good marketing, to retain customers and encourage new ones.  In these anxious times the image of stability and reliability is more crucial than ever. Very small businesses need to look like a much bigger business, its possible. As I’ve touched on above, people nowadays are more and more attracted to bigger brands and bigger companies. And finally, a good image will make it more likely for customers you do have to refer you to their friends and family.

The bottom line is this. Bankruptcy will hit around half small business very early on in their life, usually within two to three years. Badly planned marketing strategies are thought to be the main cause of most websites decline. A custom logo design helps you create the right image for this marketing to succeed. So do yourself a favour – start looking at some sample logos in your industry and see what the successful ones have in common.  Then get yourself a proper graphic designer to plan and create a great corporate identity that will help you not only stay afloat but truly stand out and succeed.

Will your Brand see the end of the Recession?

The current climate is causing a real shift in how consumers use the internet. Throughout the boom of the last few years, we have seen very small business adequately competing with the bigger brands. Many of these websites have gone local to global in a very short space of time, thanks to their prices. Before the recession web users searched out the best price for the products they wanted, now they look for the best brands that will still be there when they need them if something goes wrong. But business are loosing the battle against the recession every day, many of them most likely leaving customer orders unfulfilled, thus consumer confidence is at an all time low. What does this mean? well it means that all of those bargain hunters are returning to the big brands that they recognise, even if that means spending more money, because they don’t want to take the risk.

Although in times such as these when people are worried for their jobs or loosing them, some start to consider their dream business online and of being their own boss. Research from Barclays last year showed that there were 98,000 start-ups created in the UK within a three month period, despite the credit crunch. Yet it’s a tough road to go down. While nearly 100,000 new start-ups are taking off another 100,000 are crashing to the bankruptcy pile!

I believe that most new online business fails due to bad branding. You brand and logo are the first things that your future customers see. It’s crucial to what people use to judge whether you are trustworthy or not. But it’s so often the case that startup owners put off paying professional logo design in the initial stages. It seams to be a matter of “Lets wait and see what happens, then we will design something”.Then they design one themselves in photoshop and thinking that looks fine, load it up to the site. Many go for free clipart template business cards and stationery design from somewhere like vista print.

This isn’t acceptable for a Brand. All web business now more than ever, need to look much bigger and much more capable via good marketing, to retain customers and encourage new ones.  In these anxious times the image of stability and reliability is more crucial than ever. You also want to avoid looking like a very small business, even if you are one. So, these days online customers are looking back to the bigger brands or at least who they deem to be the big brands. And finally, a good image will make it more likely for customers you do have to refer you to their friends and family.

The fact of he matter is. About 50% of all new start-ups are forced into bankruptcy within only a few years. Experts agree that one of the main reasons for failure is poorly thought out  and shoddy marketing. A custom logo design helps you create the right image for this marketing to succeed. So do yourself a favour – start looking at some sample logos in your industry and see what the successful ones have in common.Find yourself a professional designer who can carve out a unique identity for your brand and ensure its success in such a stormy climate.

How to Make a Good First Impression in Business

Ensuring your brand remains consistent across the entire marketing mix and across every communications channel is essential to maintaining a consistent and coherent image in any competitive marketplace and should be the first consideration of your advertising agency.The variety of marketing channels available to any company today each have their own peculiar demands and their own rules. What looks good on your business card or letterhead may not have the same impact on a poster, tube card, direct mail piece, display advertisement or online in your website.

Print management with a view to not only cost effectiveness, but also how your brand is expressed to its maximum impact across all above, below and through the line channels is vital to effective communication with your target audiences. Central to all this is the initial corporate identity design, aside from its creativity and how it captures the spirit of your proposition, how effectively it can be translated across all those myriad expressions will determine its longevity and impact. There are some important things to remember when designing logos or corporate ID and here are some guidelines:

A logo designed in a vector based program such as Illustrator allows for much more flexibility in terms of colours and will give you a much clearer image especially if there is text in the logo and you want to use it in large format. With this in mind, it is often not a good idea to use photographs in a logo. If you can’t use a vector based program then make the design as large as you can!

Restrict your text to one or two fonts. Using too many fonts can make a logo look cluttered and unprofessional. Make sure that any text you want to use in a logo is clear and legible, or don’t use text at all.

You may need to use your logo for a variety of purposes. Remember that what looks good on A4 print materials may not be so wonderful after it’s been blown up to fit exhibition graphics or a billboard. Whatever you create should work well from the smallest to the largest of applications.

You might need the logo to work on black or white backgrounds or dark or light coloured backgrounds so the logo should work equally well as a stand-alone element or in a coloured box. Allow for the possiblity that your logo may be required to work in mono (single colour) as well.

You have probably seen some designs that you like but it’s important to try to make your logo as individual as possible. There is no reason not to incorporate aspects from other designs that you find appealing, but when it comes to it being original is what will get your logo noticed.

Marketing BS Tricks Pepsi into Spending $10m on Logo Design

Evolution of Pepsi Logo Designs on YouTube

It’s the biggest recession in modern history. Massive corporations previously thought of as indestructable are collapsing. The ones who remain are being extra cautious not to keep spending ridiculous amounts of money on things like marketing campaigns. Right?

Not for Pepsi. The soft drinks giant are reported to have spent an incredible $10 million for their new logo design. Yes, you heard me right. It’s just a fraction of the estimated $1.2 billion they’re spending on a global rebrand of all their products.Correct me if I’m wong here, but if I spent that amount of silly money on a logo you’d think I’d be getting the hottest logo EVER – correct? Erm, not quite. If you ask me, the new Pepsi logo is terrible. As a recent LA Times article put it, it looks like a fake foreign knockoff of Pepsi. To begin with the font they used has been revealed as being almost identical to one they used for Diet Pepsi back in the 1980s. Then we come to the motif of the logo. It’s hardly changed! And it’s hardly taken the design world by storm. In the words of design critic and editor of Before & After magazine John McWade, the new Pepsi logo is “static, empty and vaguely bland”. Let’s take a look see and try and find out what they spent all this money on for their logo?

The new design has been done by New York based branding agency Arnell. A mind blowing document got leaked on to Reddit by an anonymous mole, which was one of the things used to present the new logo design to Pepsi execs. The document, modestly named “A breathtaking design strategy”, is a 101 in advertising BS. According to this document, the new Pepsi logo has been inspired by the likes of the architecture of the Parthenon and the proportions of the Mona Lisa. The next step in this raving luncay compares the Pepsi logo with Planet Earth’s gravitational fields! There’s even a bit where it talks about “The Gravitational Pull of Pepsi” in the shopping aisle.

If you read this crazy document you will understand how this all happened. Pepsi came to this hotshot design agency and asked for a new custom logo design. The head honchos at the design agency heard cash registers going off in their heads.  First they got one of their graphic designers to throw together a few rough sketches and sample logos which eventually became Pepsi’s simple new logo redesign. OK so that was what, maybe a couple days work at most for a competent designer. At this point it would be laughable to have even thought about charging $10million for basically a two overlapping circles and a curved line, wouldn’t you agree? So they told their team to spend the rest of the time coming up with the most outrageous, masturbatory and extra-terrestrial justifications of the design. They cranked up the BS machine to the ‘it’s gonna blow!’ mark to show how this new logo is linked to THE ENTIRE HISTORY OF HUMAN ENDEAVOUR AND THE TIMELESS FORCES OF THE UNIVERSE. Now THAT’s worth ten million dollars! It would have been hilarious to have been in the room during the presentation. Pepsi, you got hustled!

Design Is Changing – Keep Up!

It is intriguing to see how web development has moved on over the past several years. The world wide web has turned from a niche for brochure-ware and intranets into one of the biggest software development environments in the market over just a few years. The web as a platform is a hollow dream no longer – you can now run and develop a web application without needing to host any sort of web page yourself and you can even get the data from a wide variety of other sources. Web development has created jobs around our country which is really helpful. Just watching the TV for five minutes these days is depressing enough – no jobs, un-employment crashes to a new high and the recession just gets deeper and deeper.

Moving web development on is a very tricky business. When designing a site you now need to consider cutting edge graphic design and logo design. Simply building some for the web is no where near enough anymore, people want the full package. Unless you have a very compelling product or idea most clients will already have something in place web wise and chances are they have already spent a lot of money on it. Maintaining a website is much more common these days than creating something innovative. Yet in today’s modern web society just creating a site is not enough. You want to able to get your site seen. How do you do that? Keeping on top of web trends is understanding the logistics of SEO (Search Engine Optimisation). SEO is fundamentally tweaking your website to be visible with search engines such as Google and Yahoo! If you can get your site seen by these search engines the amount of revenue and visibility you can get from these search engines is incredible and it can completely revolutionise a business.

So what about the future? Well if I knew that I would be on a hot beach somewhere soaking up the sun. However what I will say is that the way some web developers deal with market forces and business people is wrong. What matters these days is how fast you can do the project and how quickly you can get it to market. This goes against what I believe in as a web designer and I think businesses should stand up and fight against these ‘quick wins’. What do you think?

Creative Logo Design for the Entrepreneur

Every business should have a unique corporate identity, which is defined as corporate design, corporate communication and corporate behavior. Part of the corporate design aspect of corporate identity is embodied by a corporate logo, which is a graphical emblem that represents the company.

A lot of small business owners do not consider how important a corporate logo is to their company’s identity. You see a lot of logo designs that clearly had very little thought put into them, which is not a good thing.

Bad logo design can be understand when you understand that not every business owner can design their own logo, so they have to pay someone to do it, which can be an expense they think they can’t afford. Having a custom logo designed use to mean spending many thousands of dollars with a logo design company to design you might like. Now, any small business can afford custom logo.

There are some that would say you get what you pay for when it comes to cheap logo design. If you pay less than $200 for a custom logo, can you get anything of decent quality? You absolutely can. A cheaper logo design will usually be just fine for most business owners.

While it may be true that in order to get the best quality logo design possible, you do need to deal with a custom logo design firm that specializes in corporate branding. For what amounts to a small fortune they will go to great lengths to understand your company inside and out to identify what might be the best way to represent your business.

Spending thousands of dollars for a logo design is out of reach for the average small business owner. It is for these entrepreneurs that an online logo design website is the ideal solution.

You owe it to yourself to check out what is available on the Internet if you are in the market for corporate custom logo design. Many affordable custom logo design options are available on the Internet for the business owner.

Cheap Logos for the Small Business Owner

A corporate identity is something that every small business should have, and is basically the actions a company takes to control how it is perceived by the public. A business logo fits into the company design aspect of corporate identity and is important, as it visually represents your small business.

A lot of entrepreneurs do not consider how important a business logo is to their brand’s identity. Many logos you see obviously had little effort put into their design, which reflects badly on the business.

Bad logo design can be understand when you understand that not every business owner can design their own logo, so they have to pay someone to do it, which can be an expense they don’t want to have. Having a custom logo designed use to mean spending thousands of dollars with a logo design firm to design they might like. Now, any small business can afford custom logo designs.

Some would say you get what you pay for when it comes to cheap logo. If you pay less than $200 for a logo design, can you get a logo of decent quality? You absolutely can. A cheaper custom logo will generally be just fine for most small business owners.

It is most likely true that to get the highest quality possible custom logo design, you do need to deal with a custom logo design company that specializes in corporate branding. For what amounts to a small fortune they will get to know your company inside and out to come up with what might be the best way to brand your company.

Unfortunately, for the normal business owner, the idea of spending thousands of dollars for a logo design is enough to give them second thoughts. It is for these small businesses that an Internet logo design website is the perfect solution.

You need to investigate what is available online if you are in need of corporate custom logo. You will see that there are many affordable custom logo design options for the business owner.

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