Starting a new design project can sometimes be a little intimidating.  Here are some tips to help take the mystery out of one of the most important team members on your project and make sure you get the most out of their experience and expertise.

Who’s In Charge?

Before the initial design meeting, your company should appoint one person in charge of all communications with the designer.  Having one gatekeeper to funnel all the opinions of your company’s decision makers saves a lot of time and production hours.

One danger: make sure  you don’t have too many final decision makers! You’re familiar with the term “too many cooks in the kitchen”? The same applies when it comes to websites.  Get everyone’s input during the proposal phase on the major functional components and goals of the website, then assign the handful of people who will approve the design and content.

Be Prepared

While this may seem obvious to you, make sure that your designer has a clear understanding of your business, and what exactly you want the website to accomplish.  The more a designer knows about your business and goals, the better results they can deliver. The following is a list of very common questions that are asked at initial design meetings, and are important to focus a website’s direction:

Business Info

• What are your main products or services?
• Are you national or international? Or do you focus locally?
• How is your company perceived? Is this accurate? Do we need to correct an inaccurate customer perception?
• How many employees are in your company?
• What words or phrases best represent your company?

Target Market

• Who is your target market?
• What state / country / city is your target market?
• What is your brand image with your target market?
• Are you targeting different customers with your website than you traditionally serve offline?

Competition

• Who are you major competitors?
• What sets you apart (competitive advantage / unique selling proposition)?
• Are your offline competitors different than the major online competition?

Marketing Materials

If you have any marketing materials like business cards, brochures or pamphlets, make sure your designer sees them. Having an established visual identity is a great starting place if you want to continue with the same look, or change it completely.

Additionally, does your company have an established brand style sheet with defined colors and usage rules for your logo, tagline and trademarked images?

Designs You Like

Look around at other websites that you feel are well designed or express a company image similar to your own. Having a common visual to discuss and dissect will help the designer understand your thoughts and style. Think of words like clean, minimalist, edgy, grungy, regal, serious, etc… that describe your company or how you want your company to be portrayed online.

Designs You Hate

Is there a color that you cannot stand and should never appear on your website? Are glossy buttons too gimmicky for your company? Let your designer know of anything that should absolutely not be on your website along with websites that you find awful. Having an idea of what you do not like also gives a window into directions that should be avoided. But always remember, your website is not for you, but for your target market.

While this article is not exhaustive in what will be covered in an initial design meeting, it should prepare you to discuss the basics that are needed to effectively brand your company online.

Viral videos are one of the mysteries of social media marketing; most people assume “going viral” (getting people to share and view your video online, creating buzz) is pretty much luck or the domain of Fortune 500 companies with large ad agencies working for them. Steve Strauss’ article tries to present some concrete steps to help you plan and execute your own viral video.

Read it here: 7 Steps to Creating a Viral Video

Business cards are an extension of your branding, lending potential clients your information in a memorable package.  While business cards are usually an afterthought for conventions, business cards should be seen as small, personal advertisements for your company.  I believe that an effective business card clearly answers the following three questions in order:

1. What do you do?
2. How do I contact you?
3. Who are you?

What Do You Do Exactly?

The main focus of your business card is to quickly (think a millisecond glance) communicate your company’s service or product.   While an effective logo and/or descriptive company name can help with recognition, a name like “SunTech” does little to elicit a core purpose. Since most company names do not fully communicate their core service, these three devices are usually employed to help with recognition:

1. Taglines add a creative summary of your core services
2. Photography / Illustration of your core services for a fast visual comprehension
   

   An Illustration helps make the core service apparent along with a fun tagline "Tame Your Technology" instead of "We Fix Computers"

3. Media changes from the standard sized paper card can add instant appeal and create a memorable business card.
   

   Changing the media to an electrical wire made this business card memorable while advertising their core service

   A note on changing the media – while it makes your business card stand out, it also limits the use as the 2.5 x 3” business cards are standardized to fit into wallets and Rolodex for later retrieval.

How Do I Contact You?

There is a wealth of contact information that you can present to a viable customer including phone numbers, toll free numbers, cell numbers, fax numbers, physical addresses, emails, websites, and social media accounts. Unfortunately, business cards are small and space is precious. Usually a main phone number (local or toll free) along with an email address provides the two optimal venues of communication.  Contact information should be legible (larger than 6 point type) and easily located.

Who Are You?

With business card in hand, your potential client is looking to contact YOU, and probably needs a little memory jogger as to your name. Your business card should clearly display your name along with your position within the company for reference. Some industries, like real estate which depend on personal connections, also include portraits to aid in further visual recognition.

Other Design Considerations

While a business card is a great place to showcase creativity and design, keep in mind that the three main questions must be answered legibly. Black text on a white background has the highest contrast. Also san serif (no feet) fonts reproduce better at smaller point sizes.

Finally, the back of your business card can be seen in one of two lights:

1. A blank space to write notes or leave a personal message
2. A venue to review services or have larger graphics

How you decide to use the back of your business card will have more to do with your particular business and contact goals, but keep in mind that the back of your card can also reinforce and answer the three questions addressed above for maximum effectiveness.

Logos are everywhere working 24 hours a day, 7 days a week to brand items for easy company recognition. But creating an effective logo is not easy. Below are the five main criteria to keep in mind with any logo design. In order to illustrate these points I have created two different logos for a fictitious Leaf company.

The "Good Logo" (left) was created in Adobe Illustrator and follows the below principles, while the "Bad Logo" was designed in Adobe Photoshop and ignores the below rules

1. Scalable

Your logo needs to be flexible enough to support just about any media at any size (think tiny business cards through massive billboards). This is why photograph based logos are not the greatest choice, at some point the pixels that constitute any raster image will enlarge enough into recognition and become “pixellated” or grainy. In contrast, quality  logos are created by utilizing vector images, which are based off of mathematical equations that define shapes and display crisp and clear at any resolution. Raster graphics are typically saved as .EPS or .AI (Adobe Illustrator).

Both leaf logos magnified 500%, notice how the "Good Logo" (left) is still crisp while the "Bad Logo" (right) has become "pixellated" or grainy

2. Recognizable

Logos end up being reproduced in many different formats, the least common denominator of which is the fax machine. While your logo may look amazing in full color with glares, reflections and gloss, at some point it will be faxed in only one color, black.  Your logo should be consistent whether it is reproduced in one color, two color, or full color, and should be attractive and effective whether it is embroidered on a shirt or printed on your outdoor sign.

In this fax simulation notice how the "Good Logo" (left) is still recognizable while the "Bad Logo" (right) has become a large black blob with only the word LEAF recognizable

3. Expressive

Template logo designs fail in the aspect that many other companies (possibly even major competitors) could be using the same exact logo template. This makes your company look generic or contrived instead of unique and innovative. Your company offers customers a unique product, experience, or other service, and your logo needs to communicate this.

Sumpter & Gonzalez LLP (left) and Stylegala (right) used the similar fonts, positioning, and letter treatment resulting in very similar logos

4. Dependable

Reflections (2000), swooshes (1999), and starbursts (1998) are all graphic design fads that have passed. Your logo should not be visually stuck in the past with them. Design trends come and go every year, and affixing your company’s look and feel to the latest and greatest trend will only date it later in life.

The John Deere logo has stayed true to it's original form for over 133 years

Conversly, Pepsi has changed it's logo with different fads over the years with no similarities between the original or the current iteration

5. Memorable

Can you describe your logo over the phone? Does your logo require a fact sheet to decipher it’s visually cryptic metaphors?  The point of any logo is to give your company a visual for clients to recognize and remember easily. Simple, intuitive marks should visually leave behind your one (and only one) big claim to clients.

Even without colors, names or captions, I bet you can name the famous brands behind these logos

Your logo is your company’s identity, the face presented to the crowd.  A good logo will go along way toward building trust, brand integrity, and customer recognition. Will your company make a good first impression and stand out from the crowd?

Empty plastic bags roll through a cracked and patched pavement parking lot. Shopping carts are scattered about… some maneuvering themselves unmanned through the rows of unpopulated parking spaces of the Electronics-O-Rama. The store signage is in disarray, and the glass of the storefront is fogged and dirty. The color scheme of the decrepit building is like that of a circus tent, plastered with fliers and promotional signs made with poster-board and Sharpies. However, on the inside of this dilapidated place of business is the brightest team of individuals ever to be in customer service, and their product is one in a million. No one comes close in either quality or customer satisfaction, but few customers have even thought twice about giving them the chance to prove themselves.

Electronics-O-Rama suffers from poor perceived credibility. The surface of their business, the “visual handshake,” is lacking a quality that the competition offers, though the competition can’t offer the same quality product or service.

Just how important is perceived credibility? Many small retail establishments have faded over the years to flashier, bigger, chain retailers providing the same products with worse customer service, or in some cases worse products (and customer service). What makes Best Buy more credible than Joe’s TV’s? The answer…

Perception:

A Stanford University study found that 41.6 percent of people from a total of 2684 surveyed stated that design was of high importance when related to perceived credibility. Something interesting to note from the study is that  your users will judge a website by its design. Even though the old saying goes, “You can’t judge a book by it’s cover,” it just isn’t true for the web because the internet is so much more visually rich than books.

Layout, color, consistency, and style all play a major role in the  image you portray to your users. Your website shouldn’t just be a beautiful image, but the right one to represent your company. And while image and style are important, they aren’t the only factors that play a part in your user’s perception. You must also carefully craft your website’s content for quality information, keep your content fresh and relevant with updates, make sure it is easy to use, and keep errors in check. The study discovered looks matter; this of course varied based on the type of site, with banks and financial institutions having the most design importance and reviewers of blogs and opinion sites not placing as much emphasis on design. Users directly relate your credibility to the look of your website. Just as much as you would not have stepped foot into Electronics-O-Rama, your users won’t visit or remain on your site if it doesn’t look credible, regardless of how good you are.

The next highest area of perceived credibility was information architecture.  Your customers need to get around your site too, without becoming frustrated with poor navigation or illogical information flow. It is these things that added up to the two major slices of the credibility pie. Other important factors to remember are information focus, information accuracy, as well as usefulness and clarity. Your information needs to be straightforward, unbiased and accurate, your users can quickly discern the difference between being flashed over with fancy talk and receiving the real deal.

Ballpark

I know nothing of BallPark (image to the left), the quality of their product, or customer service. What I do know is that they appear extremely credible. Their website has a very well laid out and beautiful user interface with easy to find and understand information. It all helps to make a great first impression and this site is a breeze to explore. Take a look for yourself. If you were in the market for a similar product or service they would seem very worthy of your attention. Isn’t this the image we would all like to present? Beautiful, professional websites that make users want to stick around for more and leave lasting impressions.

Give your users engaging visuals, well crafted content, and world class usability, and you’ll have more and more of them in no time at all.

Favicons (condensed from  “favorite icons”) are extremely small, 16×16 pixel graphics that help support your online branding in a very large way. Favicons function as an important visual reminder of your brand for users both on and offline.

Favicons are Everywhere

In all modern browsers (Internet Explorer 7,8, FireFox, Opera, Safari) your single favicon is used in a myriad of places.

Address Bar - Favicons appear in every modern browser’s address bar to reinforce on each and every page that visitors are still on your site.

Tabs - When a user opens a new tab, your favicon is displayed above your page

Favorites - When a user creates a favorite of your website, your favicon is displayed next to your link in the favorite’s panel.

Favicons are not limited to online internet browsers. When a user drags your website onto their desktop, your site’s favicon becomes your offline “application” icon or short-cut.

Favicon as a Desktop Icon.

Designing Favicons

Unfortunately, favicons are difficult to design because of their extremely small size. The usual practice of taking a logo and shrinking it to fit the sixteen pixel square area can result in an undecipherable mess of colors. Instead, having a designer create a new design pixel by pixel produces a much sharper and memorable icon. Some company logos do not lend themselves readily to favicons. Logos that are just text or have large complicated graphics usually need to be interpreted into a new design that features the color scheme or style of the company.

Case Study: Connecting Point Church

Connecting Point Church's Logo

Fig. 1 - Logo shrunk to fit

Fig. 2 - Favicon Optimized

Connecting Point Church’s logo features a four point graphic that was the logical choice for their favicon. When the four point graphic was brought into Adobe Photoshop and shrunk to fit the space, pixel definition was lost with the result of a blurry image (figure 1). To achieve the optimized image (figure 2), I had to manually manipulate the pixels that made up the four curves resulting in a much sharper depiction of their graphic.

With multiple avenues of continued branding at stake, not having a favicon or having an undecipherable favicon places your website at a disadvantage. To maximize your online exposure even the smallest details like favicons should be optimized to make you look your best.

This has been a busy year so far for companies trying to get noticed. Now I can understand with the recession that there is cause for concern and more reason to bring attention to your business. But attention alone doesn’t make a customer suddenly what to do more business with you. There is something to be said about familiarity too as well as what kind of attention you bring to yourself.

Original and now new again Tropicana packaging on the left, new but now old generic branding on the right.

Eariler this year Tropicana brought attention to itself by switching it’s packaging. A whole new look brought much attention for this orange juice icon. However, the attention was not positive. Amazingly, Tropicana was not able to have the foresight to realize that trading in a premium branding campaign built up over decades with a generic branding campaign anyone could have come up with wasn’t a good idea. It makes it harder to justify a premium price too if your branding reflects a generic brand. Customer outcry made them realize the mistake and a few months later, and a bunch of marketing dollars shorter, and the original branding is back.

I’m driving to work and pass by the local Wal-Mart Super Center – what the heck is that funny new logo? Oh my gosh, did they paint over the trademark blue on the outside of the building? I just can’t help thinking this is a change for the sake of change without any business reasoning behind it. I’ve never seen a shortage of cars in their parking lot and I’ve never stood in line for less than 30 minutes just to buy a pack of batteries. Love ‘em or hate ‘em, the new branding is just going to further irk detractors and alienate core customers, in my opinion. Wal-Mart is too much of an institution than a store – maybe more of a tradition as generations of families have been brought up under it’s roof. You just don’t mess with tradition. I’d love to see the price tag for this re-branding vs. how much more it actually adds to their bottom line.

How about that new Pepsi logo? Kinda weird, huh? Ok, they have always tended to market mostly to a younger demographic, so I’m not going to be too critical of their new branding. It may not appeal to me, but then again, I haven’t had a soda of any kind in about a decade or so. I’ll remain neutral on this one.
Even Maxwell House!

Even Maxwell House can't resist a major tweek to their branding.

I dislike their overpriced coffee and over-sugared specialty drinks like Frappacinos, but have always loved Starbucks coffee-flavored ice cream. I mean, I really love the stuff. But Starbucks has played musical branding with it’s packaging – each time getting more generic in appearance and each time I end up seeing less of it being stocked in the ice cream isle at my local supermarket. Hmmm…. Then, about 6 months ago it disappeared altogether from the shelves for a few months. I must have bought every other coffee ice cream brand known to man when magically Starbucks coffee ice cream reappeared on the shelves with what’s that, yet another packaging design (and what I swear is a different taste too). Why can’t they just leave well-enough alone – all these improvements are making it worse.

You’d think I was an anti-new-brander by this blog post so far, but I’m really not. I love pointing to the rebranding that UPS did a few years back. They took their tradition with them, enhanced their logo and made the color brown kinda cool. There was no re-adjustment, no “that’s weird” stage – everything was the same just better. You didn’t feel like you were doing business with a different company – they maintained their identity.

Now these are big multi-billion dollar corporations with established identities at stake, but what about the small business owner? What is the identity of your brand – do you have a brand identity?

Usually small business owners start on a small budget and logos and branding tends to be at a lower importance level than other factors in getting the business up and running. But as your business grows, the importance of your branding grows. As you become more established in your field, your premium rises. Just as Tropicana can charge more money for their better known, premium orange juice, your rates for your products or services will increase too. As your rates increase your customers will expect your branding to reflect this new premium. Tropicana spent a lot of money learning this lesson – don’t expect a premium while presenting in a generic fashion or stripping away your established identity.

If you are new to the game then you are in a good position to start off on the right track. Working with a good design team you can establish the look of a premium brand before you really are one. Upfront costs in this case are more, but you can save yourself a lot of retooling of your brand down the road.

What does your brand say about you? Are you a generic, a premium, or somewhere in the middle?