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| All companies have their own value proposition - the unique reason for their existence - which is why customers should take their business there. While you’re busy running your business, you probably don’t have time to spell out what yours is. However, a company logo and marketing program aren’t enough. Your value proposition needs to be loud and clear.
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| The first time you meet your customer, it might be through letterhead and envelopes. Everyone knows first impressions are important, but even your regulars need to feel that your business is still a quality place to take their money. The look and feel of your stationary, including the graphic design and the company logo, can have a hidden effect on the kind of message your letters carry. Not everyone knows that having a professional and attractive company logo can actually increase business by retaining customers and generating referrals.
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| With the right company logo, your brand and image could stay in the minds of potential customers long after they’ve seen it. But you have to have a professional-looking design. It’s all part of the impression you make in the few seconds a customer sees your logo or other parts of your image, like your marketing messages and business name, or when they hear about your company in their community.
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| So what is all this fuss and bother about ‘corporate identity’? What does the term corporate identity mean and how does having a well designed company logo and value proposition, set your business apart from other businesses within your sector?
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| Branding identity and a strong company logo is an essential piece of the marketing puzzle, but finding and using the right company logo is often misunderstood and even implemented poorly or incorrectly. Seeing your own marketing strategies over and over again may be boring to you, but your clients don't see them nearly as often as you do. In fact, the more you repeat your message and your company logo, the more effective it becomes in the marketplace.
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| You may already have a great staff and a snazzy building, but if you don’t have a strong corporate identity, your business is missing something. People are important, but creating the right impression is also about letting your stationary and cards speak for your business’ image. Even when your customer is not within reach, they get impressions about you and your company. The more they like your logo and identity, the better it is for you.
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| There are few arenas in the world as competitive as the business world. There can only be so many sales, so much profit, and only so many customers. That means that all businesses who want to have continued success have to focus their energy on creating a corporate image and identity that will attract customers. Your corporate identity is the first impression your customers will have on you. It can either make or break your company.
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| One great benefit of marketing is that on an ongoing basis it allows people to give you feedback about your business and what you offer. Through your marketing activities and a strong corporate identity you will be generating feedback from your customers they will either support you or they won’t. |
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| White space is nothing. White space is the absence of content. White space does not hold content in the way that a photograph or text holds meaning and yet it gives meaning and yet it gives meaning, through context, to both image and text. In fact, white space can make or break the effective transmission of image and text. This would be an effective experiment: find a simply presented fashion shot, preferably in black and white and compare its presentation:
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| A paradigm does come to mind that puts into relief technological issues. It is typography or more specifically the design of letterforms. The design of letterforms is part of a long humanistic tradition stretching back to the Romans. At least one author attributes the rise of western civilization with its codified laws and spirit of scientific inquiry to the invention of the phonetic alphabet. Letterforms are frequently quite beautiful but they are largely out of the public’s awareness.
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| Suddenly legibility is under siege. While printed text, just like God, has been declared dead a few times, legibility, until recently, was still considered sacred. However, during the past few yers, many doubts have surfaced. In trade magazines, panel discussions and in the hallowed halls of graphic design, new interpretations of legibility are being considered. Wim Crouwel (graphic designer and director of the Museum Boymans-van Beuningen) was recently quoted as saying that everything we knew about legibility twenty years ago is now invalid because the notion of legibility has been stretched so much since that time. We are inundated with so many different texts in such varied manifestations that we have become used to everything and can read anything without difficulty.
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| Web sites are magazines. They are brochures. They are entertainment and they are informational. They are interactive. Designing Web sites is becoming easier and more efficient on a weekly basis. But in any area of design, and any other era of design , understanding present technological limitations leads to creative new solutions. The problems today is that the technology changes so fast, and nowhere is it changings as fast as in this paperless medium. Fortunately, the design and typography truisms that were applicable in the predesktop years, which remained true after personal computers became more common, are also true in web typography and design today. It is comforting to know that good design is still good design.
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| All typographic decisions - the choice of the type, the choice of size and leading, the calculation of margins and the shaping of the page - involve assumptions about the printing. It is well to find out in advance whether these assumptions stand any chance of being fulfilled. Good printers have much else to teach their clients, and the best typographer can always find something to learn. But the path from the editor’s desk to the press-room floor remains a journey often fraught with danger and surprise. The reason is that it is frequently a journey between economic realms. On the one side, a singular thing, a manuscript, moves slowly through the hands of individual human beings – author, editor, typographer – who make judgements and decisions one by one, and who are free (for a time at least) to change their minds. On the other side, an immensely expensive commodity (blank paper) passes at great speed and irreversibly through and immensely expensive machine.
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| Your fist impression on a customer might be through a phone conversation, a meeting, an ad, letter, or even word-of-mouth. Whatever it is, you only get one. From that instant, the customer will start to form opinions about your company based on what he or she sees and hears. That’s why it’s so important that the impressions you give on paper need to be just as good as those you give in person or on the phone. Any materials associated with your business, such as ads, business cards, and letterhead, need to have a professional image that will stick in the minds of potential and current customers.
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| On the screen, color contrasts come across with greater intensity than they would in print format because the colors consist of light rather than material. The eye has grown used to seeing in traditional print format, black type on a white background, a color scheme of limited suitability for use on the screen.
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| If you want to know if your logo is a good one, you first need to realize why you need a company logo in the first place. Of all the things you do to create a brand image, creating you logo is one of the most important. Your logo is the key to building the identity of your company. That's not all it's for, though. It should also communicate a powerful, positive and enduring message to your current and future customers.
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| Believe it or not, the most important part of logo design happens before the designer even starts to sketch. The power of any logo comes from the original logo concept. This concept is the image you envision the logo representing for your business. First, think of a simple thing that relates to your industry. It may be a computer for a software company, or a vacuum for a cleaning service. Or it could be more abstract, like a blurred image for speedy service.
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What's in a color? More than you might think.
Since you're more likely a businessman than an artist, we're here to give you some helpful tips on picking the right palette for your logo.
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