Logos & Business Cards

Once you figure out your brand, name and have registered your website address, you'll need a logo. 

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What's a Logo and Why You Need One

Logos represent your brand and help you look professional. It's the first image website visitors see, and it's how your company or product is recognized on a store shelf. It's the first step in creating a consistent and integrated image for your company.

Logos consist of a font or typeface, at minimum, and sometimes include an icon or graphic, although this isn't absolutely necessary. It should be clear to the reader and distinct from your competitors.

Text treatment alone

Text treatment with graphic elements

At the very least, you should trade up from ordinary type to an interesting font. Individual letters can be manipulated to make it unique.

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Do It Yourself or Hire a Professional?

There are generally 3 ways to create a logo, from cheaper to more expensive:

1. Do It Yourself
   
2. Use an online provider, like 99Designs
   
3. Hire a freelance graphic designer

I don't usually  recommend the do-it-yourself option if you have no design skills. However, no matter what method you choose, the more you understand what you want your logo to represent about your company, the better the results. That's why we recommend putting together a Creative Brief (see right column).

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Do It Yourself

You could start by playing around with some ideas of your own with a tool like Dafont. Type in your name, select a font, and it will show you how your name might look. Be sure to try upper and lower case letters or a combination of both. You could stop there or have something to show a designer to give them an idea of what you're looking for. Learn even more about how to create a DIY logo from FirstSiteGuide.

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Online Services

These online services can be less expensive, although not necessarily better. Be sure to give precise direction about what you want for your logo. 

Warning: Watch out for "swoosh" type logos. They include some type of font with a common emblem, like a spray or line of color as the icon. These aren't logos really, because they don't represent any specific company. There are "designers" who will try to scam the system by providing these so-called logos. Your logo should be unique to your business.

99 Designs

Design Crowd

Hatchwise
You hold a "contest" and the designers get to play. Starts at $29.

Logo Mojo
They offer different packages, from concepting a new logo to revamping an existing logo.

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Hire a Freelance Graphic Designer

Before you even consider hiring a graphic designer, put together your creative brief. It gets everyone on the same page and will help ensure you get what you're paying for. 

• Design fees vary widely from somewhere around $400 up to thousands of dollars. In our experience, those who charge less than $400 (unless it's a personal friend), have little experience in logo design and want to beef up their portfolios. 
• Sometimes you'll run into illustrators who want to design your logo, but illustrators don't typically have a marketing background. An illustration can be part of a logo, but illustrations are not logos. 
• Not all graphic designers are good at logos either. Try to find someone who has expertise and experience specifically with logos. Creating great logos is a specialty; not everyone is good at it.

• Check out the designers' portfolios before hiring them; look for logos you like and be sure to tell the designer the ones you picked and why.
• Ask them about their process for creating a logo. See the logo design process at right. It's a good test to see if they truly are professional logo designers.

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Contact us if you have questions about creating your logo. If you're a designer, we may be interested in adding you to our resource list.

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The Creative Brief

You should also put together a Creative Brief. No matter who you work with, it will help them understand what your business is about and what the logo is supposed to represent. Remember, garbage in garbage out. The Creative Brief should include:

• Objective, i.e., I need a logo that will...
• Business description (attachments as necessary)
• Positioning/Messaging
• Style: tone, language (give examples of what you like/don't like)
• Required or excluded elements, i.e., images or words you don't want used
• Specific deliverables, i.e., due date
• Budget or “not to exceed” amount

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The Logo Design Process

There's a method to the madness when it comes to creating a logo. Be sure the person you work with is familiar with the method.

1. The designer should start with black and white roughs or concepts to see if they've nailed the idea. How they capture your brand is of utmost importance, and besides, you won’t always be able to use more than one color. 
2. Once the idea is fixed, they'll start looking at different fonts and variations on the theme.
3. The design should work in various sizes, both very small, like on a mobile device if applicable and very large, like on a banner. 
4. Color comes next and should also be representative of your brand. One, two or three colors is typical. 
5. Once everything is finalized, get the completed logo in a file format that won't get distorted no matter what the size. This is what is known as a vector -- common extensions are EPS, SVG and PDF. Also get a version in reverse; in other words, one that would work on a dark background. And in 1-color. If your logo has an icon, get separate files for the icon and for the font-only versions.
6. Finally, the designer should provide branding guidelines and/or a style guide on how to use the logo to ensure it is used consistently and correctly. They should also specify the color palette in: CMYK (print), PMS (print), HEX (Web) and RGB (online display). 

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Business Card Printers

Overnight Prints
This is the service I use to print the Blockbeta Marketing business cards. If you like them, you may want to give this printer a try.

Moo.com
More than just business cards, they offer some unique printed products.

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Brand Identity

It's incredibly important to stay consistent with all your promotional materials. Create a style guide to make sure you and whoever helps you create materials stay on track with these style guide tips from Smashing Magazine.

How to Write a Tagline

Combining a logo with a tagline can really set your brand apart on all your marketing materials. Learn how

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