Not Just Pretty | Building An Effective Small Business Brand

Creative Techs

If you're trying to figure out how to use Photoshop, Illustrator or any of those fancy design programs to design your own materials, here's a great resource with a free newsletter full of tips:

http://www.creativetechs.com/

Also, you might try the eLearning on lynda.com - if you want to learn a particular application in-depth (say, Dreamweaver so that you can do your own website maintenance)

Online Pantone Color Chart

Pantone colors are indispensible when you want to get accurate color on a print job - and using this online Pantone color chip book to communicate your color preferences to your designer (or, even just exactly what "lime green" means to you):

http://www.australiasigns.com.au/qsonline/PMS-color-chart.html

The 6 Jobs of Your Logo's Icon

Preface:

For reference, let's recap the basic rules of creating a small business logo:

1. The logo has 3 parts: the icon, the font, and the color palette.

2. These parts work together to tell your company's brand story and to communicate your Brand Definition to your best clients. They are never meant to tell the story on their own.

3. Each part of the logo has a specific job. Now, we haven't talked a lot about this yet, so let's get down to it.

The 6 Jobs of Your Logo's Icon

Many entrepreneurs think that the icon for their logo should be a picture that appeals to them personally. They go into the logo design process looking to create an icon with personal symbolic meaning, because they think that the icon's job is to appeal to them personally as well as to look interesting.

This is a case of the icon's job description not being well written. In a perfect world, entrepreneurs love their logo icons—and personally identify with their meaning. But, that's the logo icon's last, and least important, job. First, it must do several more important jobs for your company.

What could be more important than appealing to the person running the business?

After all, if you love your logo, there's a good chance other people will see it and like it as well—and you want your logo to get compliments, right?

Wrong. At least, partially wrong. The logo icon's main job is to tell your brand story through the visual meaning of the symbols it uses.

Your logo's icon is a drawing or piece of art composed of symbols that have visual meaning. This visual meaning is called symbology, and it can help your logo to communicate with your customer.

There are two major types of symbols: abstract and representational. Abstract symbols are drawings that don't necessarily look like a thing or object. They can be basic shapes such as circles, squares, triangles—even dodecahedrons—and swooshes. Representational symbols look like a thing, object, animal, or person.

An abstract symbol of a circle can be used to symbolize trust, completeness, or to highlight another foreground element. A representational symbol of a leaf can be used to represent nature, growth, health, or eco-friendliness. You can even layer these elements one on top of another—a leaf on a circular background, perhaps—to give your logo icon more visual meaning.

How do you decide which symbolic message your logo should send?

There's a good chance that your company wouldn't be best served by a logo that consists of a circle or leaf, but then, how do you decide what your logo should look like?

The message your icon communicates should tell the most important part of your business's brand definition story. Your brand definition consists of who you are, what you do, what makes you different from your competition, and who you work best with. Usually, when you put your thoughts about these 4 elements down on paper, you find that you have some simple but compelling ideas about these areas of your business. And one or two are truly interesting from your customers' point of view.

Those thoughts are the foundation for what you want your logo to say. Just which symbols communicate your story is hard to say without knowing it, but once you have defined your brand and know which portions of it are really compelling for your customers, you can do some symbolic research (and there are plenty of books and websites about symbols) or hire a designer to translate that definition into symbols for you.

You said that the icon has several other jobs. What else does it have to do?

Your logo's icon has a handful of other jobs. It has to be:

• Memorable — it should stick in your customers' minds. Your logo icon will become the face of your business, so you want to make sure it is easy to remember. 
  
  
• Unique — so that your logo doesn't look like any of your competitors' logos. You don't want to get confused with them—or sued for copyright infringement. 
  
  
• Scalable — so that you can blow it up to the size of a billboard or shrink it down to the size of a postage stamp. This will enable you to use it across all of your marketing materials, regardless of size. 
  
  
• Timeless — so that it doesn't wind up looking dated or "cheesy" in a couple of years. This will ensure that you don't have to redesign it just as your customers are getting to know and recognize it. 
  
  
• Appealing — so that your customers like it and are pleased when they see it, and so that you can tolerate (notice, I didn't say "love") looking at it for years to come.

If your logo icon can accomplish these 6 jobs—in this order of importance—you'll have a design that will work well for your company and help you connect with your customers. 

Wordle

I've seen these on several other blogs I visit, and figured that it was about time to create my own. Wordle.net is basically a site that takes the content of your blog and creates word art from it, that you can then customize the font and color palette on. Neat!

A shout-out to my printer

Jennifer Points at Allegra Print and Imaging is the best. Always getting projects done quickly, they look excellent and are always delivered to the client perfectly. All at a small-business-friendly price.

If you ever need 2- or 3- color collateral materials printed especially, she's your gal. She does a ton of other types of printing, but I'm especially impressed with her work in those areas.

Oh, and her phone number is 650-358-8685. Located in Foster City, CA.

Pig pirate flag

Some friends asked me about designing a pirate flag that involved bacon in some way.

If pigs had a pirate flag, then it would have bacon strips instead of cross bones.

And I'd call it the Jolly Porker.

Right?

Scribus.net?

Has anyone used the Scribus.net platform to design flyers, brochures, handouts or other print items for their small business? It looks like it might be a good resource for small business owners who want to make some of their own promotional materials to save money, but I haven't tried it out myself.

If you don't use that, but you do lay out your own materials, what do you use?

How often would you like to hear from me?

I asked this question in my last eZine, and figured I'd take a little poll here as well.

How many articles/ ezines could you tolerate from me in a month? 

I'm currently doing 2, but could step it back down to 1 if two is too much.

How much blogging do you want to see? Every business day? Every other day? A couple times a week?

Let me know in the comments, and if there's demand for it, I'll change my ways.

Recognizing change in yourself and your business

Sometimes you wake up and just feel like everything's different. That you've changed, and that in that change, your small business has changed as well. Just that in the space of living, and growing, that it's time to change everything

This snuck up on me - and once I finally realized that things had changed, I realized that it was time to remodel my business and change up the website to match. And, that means both redesigning the look to match my new brand direction (though the logo's staying the same - both because it's trademarked and because I'm not absolutely crazy!) and rewriting all the copy and content to explain my slightly-new focus.

So, I just wanted to say that if you look up one day and discover that your life has changed, you might look into your business as well. It's likely that the change would sneak across those lines and spread around a bit.

Give yourself a pat on the back

Or, better yet, a prize!

I've been going through this grueling website redesign/recode/rewrite project (redoing my own site), and it's really taking a lot of time and energy. I've been working on it full time for a couple of weeks now. 

About 4 days into the project, I found myself asking myself "Hey, it's summer! Why are you in here, coding HTML like a crazy person, when you could be in a chaise lounge at the gym by the pool, or off on a romp with the puppy? Are you crazy?"

That's when I realized that doing this project was extra-important to me, and that I had to keep going. If I didn't get my site updated, and the fall crush of business hit, then it'd get pushed back and back and back again until my business changed all over again and then I'd have to toss everything I've worked on and start again. Considering how much headway I've made, that sounds like a pretty awful idea. I could even go with "gross".

So, I decided that I needed to get extra motivated now that I could see the alternative to being cooped up in my office, typing away all day. (And that alternative seemed delightful!) So I gave myself a reward item. This works just like getting paid at the end of a professional project. Once the website is completed, I get to do something really nice for myself. It might be a spa day. I might go buy a new purse, or check out the fall fashions. Or go to the fabric store and splurge on craft supplies. I know I need to define the reward better before I finish, or I'll want all of the options to be the reward, but even just putting a prize to it is helping me to keep motivated on this beautiful weekend...