Logo Design and Branding

Why image IS everything …. just like Andre said.

Wordmark Logo

The most widely used of all logo types, the wordmark focuses on text and typeface but can incorporate other elements as well. A wordmark may be best suited for companies whose name effectively describes what they do (Office Max, Home Depot) WIthout graphical elements to convey that message, a literal interpretation of the words is often necessary. (For example, we know that Gilmore & Rey are accountants because the logo literally tells us so.)

A wordmark is often text only with unique typographic treatments (Microsoft, Sears, Yahoo). Most often however, the company name is incorporated together with simple graphic elements to create a clean, simple identity. The representation of the word essentially becomes a symbol of the company. See Typographic Considerations for more information.

Choose a Wordmark When:

• Communication funds are limited and should be focused on name recognition. • Your name is reasonably distinctive but not (yet) a household word. • You want to associate products or subsidiaries with the parent more clearly and directly than a symbol permits.

Lettermark Logo

Similar to a wordmark, a lettermark is a wholly typographic mark, usually involving initials or abbreviations. Monograms and anagrams are lettermarks. The representation of the letter(s) essentially become a symbol of the company. See Typographic Considerations for more information. You should consider a lettermark logotype only when: • Your initials translate graphically better than your actual name. • You need to link subsidiaries to the parent and can’t easily use the name. • You can afford to teach the public what the lettermark means.

Brandmark Symbol

A simple but strong graphic symbol, often abstract, that complements an aspect of a business or service and represents a company by association. (Think of NIKE or Apple Computer.)

You should consider a symbol only when:

• You need an emblem on a product.

• Your name is too long, too generic, doesn’t translate well globally, or has no personality. • You need to link subsidiaries to the parent and can’t easily use the name. • You can afford to teach the public what the symbol means.

Iconic Logotype

Iconic logotypes are also referred to as combination marks. An iconic logotype generally combines a brandmark symbol with a wordmark. The combination can be loose or integral (as in the Jesters logo above) . With a loose combination, the elements can be used together or seperately. A well designed iconic logotype can communicate what a company does as well as reflect the company personality.

Since Iconic Logotypes communicate more readily than other logotypes, less marketing is required for the logo to be effective. Therefore, iconic logotypes are the most cost effective type of logo design available and are ideal for statups or small businesses with limited marketing budgets.

Choose an iconic logotype when: • You are a startup enterprise or small business with limited funds. • Your name is reasonably distinctive but not (yet) a household word. • You need an emblem on a product, but want more than just a symbol. Author Name: Kelly Dailey Author Email: kellyd@logosharx.com Author Website: http://www.logosharx.com

Tags: best, create a logo, corporation logo

Many people are using Cell phone cameras today and the quality is improving daily. Have you ever thought about taking some of these digital for a personalized business card? Some of your best picture are on your phone but appear dark out of focus. With practice you can pull off high quality imagery, but don’t drive yourself crazy. You can get special software that will allow you to transfer you images to your computer for viewing and editing. One of the most common editing practices is cropping. It is use frequently because it is useful in eliminating parts of an photo that are undesirable. It is usually performed by making a square around the area of the image you would like to keep. Pick the best of the best, clean em up in Adobe Photoshop and send them to your printer for quality reproduction of CMYK printed business cards.

You are limited with the amount of enhancement you can with digital imaging but much of your originality will come from the unadulterated version. So, the area you really want to work on is light. The intelligence built in to your phone takes a measurement of the light at the time and the information from that second to the second you take you picture could change or the position of your phone will likely change. If you are shooting for printability your are best to shoot LOTS of pictures and pick the top 5>3>1…get second opinions will also help.

Here are a few tips to help you with colors schemes

Inside of physics color patterns is well-resolved as an attribute of an object or individual item that results from the light that is reflected. Colour light is channeled in abnormal wavelengths that are pictured by a viewer as distinctive colors. The easiest characterization of coloration physics is to transmit an atomic ray of white light (sunlight) through a prism and see how the white light is refracted and assorted into anomalous frequencies. The frequencies are communicated through the other view of the prism used for a spectrum or band of colors, from red, the most lengthy wavelength, to violet, the shortest.

Seven colours are as per usual distinguished within a spectrum

1. Yellow- signifies depth, joy and has a genius effect. A Yellow flower: motivates and relieves spiritedness.
2. Green- helps people suffering from depression, anguish and anxiousness.
3. Blue- Blue symbolizes youth, spirituality, truth with amity. Blue flowers are relaxing and calm nerves.
4. Red- Tropical and crimson colours, like red, reach outward and get attention. The color red is a very powerful color. Red is analyzed as achievement, confidence, courage together with vitality - it is the color most appointed by men.
5. Indigo- means extrasensory perception, deep study combined with deep-down foreseeing- it has negative impact when used during physical activity.
6. Orange - An Orange flower empowers with elates feelings. expresses anxiousness together with indulgence
7. Violet- shows royal personage, bewitchment with mystery and is the color for people that seek attention

In the prism and the spectrum Newton discovered that sunlight (white light) is assorted into colored components when put through a prism.
Newton observed a sequence of colors varying from violet around indigo, green, yellow, blue, and orange to red. This range of colours is the visible spectrum.
White light is also be diversified into colours when it is reflected from paper thin films or layers.

What some of the Common Everyday Colors Mean

The world of color has a vocabulary of its own. Just as spoken or written words announce shades of significance, colors we see are constantly emitting effect on moods and daily life.

• Pink may conveys delicate, non masculine while blue is factual as well as cool;
• Red can be hot as fire/ alarming on the other hand yellow is optimistic as well as bright.
• A professional can mark a scene of action much as an x-ray machine can
• An artist has the absolute privilege of choice to call upon any coloration to get across ambience and feelings
• Coloring will accent a feeling or attitude.
• A painter will have comprehensive control over a palette to officer emotion present-day a firm’s technical know-how.
• It is an emotional communication tool, colour is noteworthy for philosophical reasons.
• Coloration is employed to communicate to folks directions on what to do and what they should not do: red stop; green, go; yellow, caution; red, again, danger; etc.
• Coloring can tell you what does what , plus what goes where: green wire to earth, red wire to live. Color is widely used for a code to impart as well as order information as well as to give instructions.
• Colour is used as a function in the year diagrammatic design
• Coloring as communicator- Color patterns has a delegated authority to instill images; it is a great communicator.
• Color patterns as communicator- When we be at a map, we can interpret the printed colours to imagine the busy highway as well as quiet minor road.
• Color patterns as communicator- We build a picture in our mind’s eye of roads, lakes while mountains as well as visualize what to.
• Manipulating mood as well as atmosphere- A subject matter greatly influences the distinct moods, too - moods that are again reinforced by proportions of certain colors
• Simple uncomplicated coloring application conveys brightness with warmth
• Artists will lay down colors using colourized pencils, pastels, acrylics and gouache with lively coloring experimentation.
• Experiment with how you look at colours in nature, colors are rarely like you think they are.

Related Links

Cell Phone Pictures album I Camera Phone - Wikipedia Make 3D Pictures With Any Camera Cell Phone I Cell Phone Pictures and Photos - Home I Send pictures to cell phone, and create free cell phone wallpaper. I Universal Cell Phone Picture Software Software List

Tags: color mixing, color, sweet emotion

Creating A Quality Web Site Design!

By: Martin Lemieux

In this article, I will attempt to cover the basics of creating a great quality web design template for your site. Now it’s a known fact that the layout or “eye candy” as I put it will determine whether your visitors will stay more than 15 seconds or they will just become another statistic.

In this article, I will attempt to cover the basics of creating a great quality web design template for your site. Now it’s a known fact that the layout or “eye candy” as I put it will determine whether your visitors will stay more than 15 seconds or they will just become another statistic.

That’s right, if you don’t catch your visitors attention right away, statistics shows us that your visitors will come and go within 15 seconds or less.

That doesn’t leave you with a lot of time to grab someone’s attention!

Some of you may be asking yourself: Well why does this happen????

See when you think about it, 15 seconds to the “browsing eye” is like an eternity. In other words, it takes about 15 seconds for the average person to browse your main page and determine whether they will explore your site further!

So with that being said; How do we grab your visitors attention????

Every new client of mine is asked to perform the same tasks. I ask them to explore their competitors web sites and look for specific triggers that would make them want to click on or buy right away. More times than none, my clients will notice specific “Headlines” or “Graphics” that really peek their interest. In doing this, you’ll have 1st hand knowledge on what you expect your visitors will see and possibly expect themselves.

Step 2, I’ll ask my clients to do one more process just like the previous one. I’ll ask them to make a list of all the “eye candy” that really caught their attention and write me a little note as to why it caught their attention. In doing this, it will give your web designer a 1st hand knowledge on what to implement within your site!!!

With these great tasks, you’ve made your job and the job of your web designer a lot easyer to target your audience.

Sites that sell “Web Site Templates” :You may have seen some sites that sell your the right for a specific “Template Style”. There are 100’s of resources out there. I need to clarify something for you, these templates are targeted at web designers only!!! Reason being, the files that you recieve will no doubt require some expensive and time consuming software just to open them.

Now being a designer, i’m not about to “knock” pre-made templates but there’s a couple of things you may want to consider:

1. Although the templates you may encounter are very impressive, you will be sharing your layout template with 100’s, maybe 1000’s of other sites. The reason why they are so cheap is because those “specific templates” are sold and re-sold as much as possible!
2. I’ve noticed that many template examples out there on the web are extremely “Graphic Driven”. This will result in “slow loading times”. I’m sure we’ve all come across a site that seemed to take FOREVER to load!! How long did you actually wait for the site to load????
3. The best way to get a template is to have someone professional design your web site layout for you! This will ensure that your template is uniquely deisgned for your business. It will be easyer for you to make changes in the future. Typically, a template may cost you between $0-$500 depending on the intensity and added features!

Now, we’ve talked about “Slow loading pages”. I’ve found a good “norm” to stick with when it comes to size and speed: Web sites are compiled of 2 elements:

1) Graphics & Layouts

Programming & Pages

Both of them require memory from your computer when downloading them. If one or the other is too large then this may result in negative results for your visitors.

Here’s a good norm to stick with, either you or your web designer should stick with these specs:

1) Graphic Design Layout: Should be no more than: 30-50K in size

2) Programming Pages: Shouldn’t be more than: 10-30k in size
Giving your entire web page no more than 40k-80k in size. Anything drastically more will result in the loss of many visitors from slow downloading pages.

Animation: Last but not least, making “some” aspects of you page stand out by adding small size animations. PLEASE NOTE: DO NOT overkill your site with graphics and animation!!! I can’t stress this enough, your visitors will most likely get a head ache from it and won’t be coming back very soon.

Instead, try targeting specific promotions or services you wish to attract your visitors to right away! Many sites exchange “animated banners” with other sites to exchange traffic. I personally NEVER take part in adding ANY banners on my site. I honestly feel that banners only take away from the design, not add to it! A typical “Banner Dimenssion” is 468px x 60px.

There are many other sizes!

What I will usually take part in, if any, is smaller, more unique banners that are gueared to complimenting an article or text with it. This is much more effective because study shows us that “Content (text)” accompanied by a “graphic image” is more likely to be read by our visitors than just text on it’s own.

That about raps it up to having an effective web site template. Please look for my “continued” issues related to this article.

———————————————————–About The Author:

Martin Lemieux
Smartads - President
Martin’s Weekly Marketing Tips: http://www.smartads.info/newsletter
Daily Web Marketing Tips: http://web-marketing.smartads.info
Entrepreneur Help Site: http://mindpower.smartads.info

Tags: html web design, web designer, web design services, web design companies, free web design, creative web design, web design magazine

Build Your Business Through Brilliant Branding

by: Wendy Maynard

Branding is more than product recognition or a simple logo. It is the overall intellectual and emotional impression people have when they think of your company and its product. It is a strong and consistent message about the value of your business.

A memorable and trustworthy brand reinforces customer loyalty. It helps them remember that your business provides the perfect solution to their problems. Therefore, to succeed in branding you must understand your customers’ needs and issues.

Brand building is an ongoing business strategy that has an easy-to-measure cost in time, money, and effort. Its value, on the other hand, is harder to establish because it involves measuring emotional associations that may not immediately translate into revenue. Branding is an essential element of success, however, and it should be reinforced during times when business is booming and when sales are slower. You want customers and potential customers to maintain a positive association with your company and its services.

You control the messages you send out through marketing, advertising, customer service, and your Internet presence. Branding is a combination of everything your company uses to present itself. Here are a few key elements to analyze and enhance in your branding strategy:

1. Professionally designed marketing materials (logo, stationery, ads, and the like): These tell customers your company is strong, confident, and credible. Your marketing materials should reinforce your company’s image and positioning over and over and over.
2. Consistency in advertising: Develop a tagline to succinctly describe your company - and use it! Develop a campaign that can provide different messages, but it recognizable as your brand.
3. Excellent customer service - always! Make sure your entire staff positively represents your business image.
4. A strong and professional website: It must be easy for viewers to navigate and understand. It should let visitors know what your company does and why they should care. Provide compelling, easy-to-understand, and interesting content. Make it easy for visitors to make purchases.
5. Differentiate your brand: Make sure your customers and potential customers understand why you are different from the competition. You want to establish a superior benefit with you target audience that encourages long-term loyalty.

Branding is not what you say about your company and products; it’s about your customers’ perception of your company and products. To strengthen your brand, make sure you can answer the following questions: What do you do that is different from anyone else? Why do you matter to your customers? If you can’t answer these questions, you don’t have an effective brand.

ACTION ITEM: Take a good look at your company and product/service strengths. Determine your primary strengths and benefits and then make sure your branding strategy (marketing materials, advertising, sales, customer services, logo, etc.) reinforces this. Simple, eh?

About The Author

Wendy Maynard, your friendly marketing maven, is the owner of Kinesis. Kinesis specializes in marketing, graphic and website design, and business writing. Visit http://www.kinesisinc.com for more articles and free marketing wisdom.

Want to harness the power of kinetic marketing? Sign up for Kinesis Quickies, a free bi-monthly marketing e-newsletter: http://www.news.kinesisinc.com.

Photography- Special Requirements

Certain earrings, for example, would not be clearly understood unless they were shown on an ear because of the way that they hang. But be cautioned that a close, tightly cropped shot of a portion of ear and side of face may reveal imperfections and blemishes… even on the best skin. Retouching will be necessary (and that adds an extra cost) to remove the imperfections and tiny facial hairs that will be captured on film. A ring might be shown from a more attractive angle when photographed held between manicured fingertips. The traditional ring shot on a finger can look flat and unappealing, especially if knuckles are showing. (Even a hand model has wrinkles in this area.) Some necklaces will display better when shown around the neck of a model, rather than flat. More…

Tags: branding strategy, what is branding, custom branding, branding and design, corporate branding, global branding, retail branding, history of branding

Children Related business logos

We want your Company to Succeed

Welcome to designlogos.net. This website is my personal website of what I consider helpful advice for those seeking the finest in design and print. Having been involved in design and print for most of my life I get asked common questions frequently:

1. What makes a GOOD graphic design?
2. Can you make a logo last forever?
3. What is branding?
4. What are the best colors to use?
5. Why do I need a logo?

Hopefully we can sort some of this out right here on this website! Over at our parent website www.printinglogos.com we boast 1000’s of professional, unique, ready-made business templates. You will notice that we have 4 rotating graphics on the left hand side of each webpage. They will appear randomised and offer links to some of our most accomplished graphic designs.

We have compiled a group of articles written by experts in the graphic design industry. Here you will learn design tips from the pros. Take some time and brush up on your creative design skills.

These are links to some of my favorite logo design and branding articles. The articles listed here are for the novice to expert graphic designers:

• Options are Endless If you have a great logo and brand, you can add another profit center to your business by selling retail items…
• Design logos like a pro. A logo is the image which represents a company or its product…
• Why image IS everything …. just like Andre said. Wordmark Logo
  The most widely used of all logo types, the wordmark focuses on text and typeface but can incorporate other elements as well…
• Is Your Logo Helping or Hurting Your Business? The quality of your logo can mean the difference between success or failure. It can be that simple!…
• How Do You Define a Good Logo Design? Everyone wants his company logo to be the best but how good is good?…
• How a Logo Can Help Brand Your Business- An effective logo can go a long ways in distinguishing your business from your competitors and in making your company memorable to customers.
• Successful Logos Explained - It’s All About Credibility Principles
• A Simple Guide to Picking Logo Colors- Selecting a fitting color for your logo is a critical step in the design process
• Logo Strategies: Types of Logos Don’t be fooled. The Internet Gold Rush wasn’t in the 1990s. Sure there were a lot of corporations getting millions of investor funding for little more than a promise, but it turned out to be a flash in the pan...
• Designing Logos for Web and Print If a client so much as utters the words design a logo, one of your first questions should be, Do you plan on having this printed on stationery?…
• What Makes a Good Logo Design? A good logo design in theory should be able to create a positive, powerful first impression…
• Creating a Brand that Sticks Most people, when they hear the word branding, think logos - but in fact, branding is really much more than that…
• The “Right” Logo- Logotype, commonly know as a logo, is a design, a graphic representation/image/trademark symbolizing one’s organization.
• What to Expect from Your Logo Designer- I recently had my website designed, and my new logo created for my company.

Tags: create a logo, corporation logo, best