Case Study: Absolute Pressure Washers

Since 1989, Absolute Pressure Cleaning Equipment has provided a variety of high pressure cleaning equipment, accessories, cleaning detergents and supplies for professional industrial and commercial cleaning companies.

The BEFORE Website

The Problem

Absolute spent several years working with ineffective and unprofessional web design companies. The company's most recent website:

• Offered incredibly ineffective branding that made the company look like a provider of pressure washing services rather than a distributor of professional cleaning equipment
• Made the company indistinguishable from its competitors
• Relied on the look and feel of John Deere, the farm equipment company, further confusing potential customers

The AFTER Website

The Solution, by Julie & Company

After losing both time and money, Absolute hired Julie & Company to to build a compelling branding and web presence. Julie & Company:

• Created a new logo that rebranded Absolute and set it apart from its competition
• Focused on the company’s commitment to selling US-manufactured  products 
• Provided detailed pages that feature the company’s equipment, accessories, and detergents
• Added a branded shopping cart
• Delivered visually interesting experience for potential customers

The Client Says

Over the past four years, Absolute has worked with a number of web companies who just could not get the job done. Our owner is hard to please, but these companies did a terrible job, too.  Julie & Company, as per usual, did a spectacular job with the branding and website – our owner is 100 percent happy, which I hope you take as a HUGE compliment because it is.

- Shawn Mahaney

Contact Julie & Company to learn more about what we can do for your company. Call 301-330-9353 or info@julieandcompany.com.

Super Bowl 50 logo goes for the W, not the L

Every sport strives to avoid the loser's L. Super Bowl 50 is no exception. To avoid connotations of defeat, the NFL has drop-kicked L, the Roman numeral for 50, in favor of the numeric 50.

Photo credit: NFL/ABC News

Since Super Bowl V in 1971, the NFL has used only Roman numerals to indicate the number of the Super Bowl being played. This system remained unchanged, even for potentially controversial numbers like XXX, which is 30 in Roman numerals but is also a generally accepted symbol of erotic content.

In 2016, however, the NFL will instead use Arabic numbering for the Super Bowl. The San Francisco host committee lobbied the NFL to use Arabic numbers instead of the L, a well-recognized symbol of losers and losing. The NFL has indicated that, after 50, it will return to Roman numerals, starting with Super Bowl LI in 2017.

Most official materials for the Super Bowl will now use the Super Bowl logo with 50 in the background, rather than the L. Some variations of the 50 logo designs will include icons from the San Francisco skyline around the Lombardi Trophy, which has itself only been a part of the logo since 2010.

Brad Matthews is a content writer for Julie & Company. He can be reached at brad@julieandcompany.com.

Only blue

Few elections in life end with a unanimous vote. People come to their ballot box with different experiences, childhoods, and educations. But if you ask a man to vote for his favorite color, you are bound to get the same response: BLUE.

I make this observation after almost two decades in business. As an expert logo designer, I've never had a man tell me his favorite color is violet, fuchsia, or orange. Or even azure, beryl, sapphire, or cerulean for that matter. He likes blue and he wants his logo to be blue, too.

To prove my point, check out just some of the world's most famous blue logos. Behind each one of them, I'm willing to bet there's a dude whose favorite color is blue.

You know there's an economic downturn...

... when logo designers create mock logos instead of new ones. I didn't design these, but I admire whoever did. The car faux logos are particularly clever.


Thanks to my stepsister, Liz Holm, for sending these (and some others) along.

Designing Logos - Lesson 1

What have I learned about designing logos over the past 12 years in business? Plenty. From time to time, I'm going to post some lessons learned about logo design.

Lesson 1: Always remember who your customers are and design everything for them.

In The E-Myth Revisited, (required reading for all entry-level business owners, btw) Michael Gerber suggests that start-up entrepreneurs almost always name their companies after themselves. Why? Because business owners cannot see a distinction between their inner selves and their companies.

I know this is true because this is exactly what I did - my company is named Julie & Company, after all!

So what are the implications of naming your business after yourself? Business owners:

• End up working IN their businesses rather than ON their businesses, which leads to burnout, misery, hopeless, and failure.


• Take every business success or disappointment personally because they've invested their very soul in their companies.


• Believe the business should reflect their inner being - and this includes most particularly their branding.

Creating a brand to match your internal self is simply ineffective, bad, wrong, dumb, meaningless. Your logo is NOT yourself, just as your business is not yourself.

Which takes us to the primary purposes of a logo: to attract customers to your product and/or services and to then get your more attention and make you more money. That's why you go to all the trouble to brand your business - so you can be successful. Period.

So given this, what is the most important thing you should do when designing a logo?

Make it customer focused. Design the logo to meet the expectations and desires of your prospects and clients. Get in their heads and figure out what look and feel you need to have to get their attention. Then remember that whatever that look and feel is doesn't have anything to do with who you are as a human being - and that's just fine.

Let me give you an example from my own business. I am a graphic and web designer. My clients come to me because they want creative people to solve their business promotion problems. They want my service offerings to be fresh but professional. Therefore, my business needs to look fresh and professional, so:

My corporate colors are saturated hues of rust, avocado, and plum - usually more color than most of my clients want for their own businesses. But this color usage shows that Julie & Company has the creative spark that they need. I once had a client over to my home. She was disappointed that I didn't live in orange, green, and purple land. I don't. My home is much different from my corporate online presence. My home is about me. My business is about my customers.

The Julie & Company website doesn't look like other designers' sites and for good reason. I don't want us to look like everyone else. Julie & Company needs to be distinctive but in the right way. Instead of having a Flash website with lots of gizmos whirling around, I tell our corporate story in a solid, steady, business-like way. My clients aren't Coke or Nike and almost none of them sell to teenagers or young adults. They are instead B2B or B2G firms who generally despise gratuitous animation. Therefore, on my website, I give them straight HTML pages with a little Flash animation, just enough to get them interested but not so much as to make them (of me!) epileptic.

My customers want sober grown-ups with 20 years of business experience to help them - not post-adolescent kids who make every business look like an alternative rock band. Which brings me to another point: don't ask your teenager for approval of your logo. Kids do NOT want to see what ADULTS want to see in terms of branding.

A perfect example: for Christmas, my 53-year-old boyfriend asked for a black belt to wear with dress slacks. He got two belts, one from me, a 49-year old woman, and one from his son's 17-year-old girlfriend. Guess which one I picked out? And guess which one he'll actually wear with his dress slacks?

So be careful asking for your kids' approval. They will almost definitely point you in the wrong direction if you are selling to adults. (However, if you're selling to teenagers or twentysomethings, make them your own personal focus group. Listen to everything they have to say about design because for the kids' market, they'll be absolutely right.)

Bottom line: See your business as you want others to see it and then create a logo that matches that vision. That's the bottom line to your success, too.

Giant's Project Refresh

My brother called yesterday morning. "I've got a blog suggestion for you. Comment on the new Giant logo. I read the Post article about it and it sounds like a load of crap to me." While I respect my brother's opinion, I disagree.

I had seen the new branding; in fact, a postcard urging "Come celebrate our fresh new look!" was propped up against my monitor. Frankly, the coupons on the back are what caught my eye. Like everyone else, my food budget is stretched thin and I was drawn by the coupon for $1.00 off Rotisserie Chicken. But I had also read the Washington Post article, "Giant Puts on a Fresh Face For Its Supermarket Upgrades," that describes the rebranding.

I think Royal Ahold deserves high praise for reworking this tired brand. I grew up at the White Oak Giant Food; my mother hauled me there every Saturday to buy the family's groceries. Giant was THE place to shop for food in the DC area - until a few years ago when the house that Izzy Cohen built was sold to the international conglomerate, Royal Ahold. The store's venerable brand then slipped because of lackluster customer service, higher prices, poorly laid out stores, and more.


This serves as another reminder that a brand is NOT a logo. A brand is the feeling customers or clients have about your product or service. To use a very hackneyed analogy, creating a new logo for a mediocre company is like putting lipstick on a pig. Royal Ahold knows this and "is planning to expand its selection of prepared foods and private-label offerings. It also is instituting a family checkout lane that bans tabloids and candy in favor of yogurt, animal crackers and bottled water. Hand-held scanners soon will be available for shoppers to ring up groceries while they browse the store." New logo + improved service and products = renovated and resurrected brand. Smart, too.

The old Giant logo is just that: old. As the Post article states, the brand was created in 1963. Just like me, it needed a facelift (just kidding - in my case anyway). Royal Ahold needed to breathe life back into the stores, and in a market that includes exceptionally well-branded companies like Bloom and Trader Joe's, Giant needs to be able to compete.

My nomination for the next brand that needs refreshing? Safeway. It's looking a wee bit weary and boring in the now-more-vibrant grocers industry. It will interesting to see how the company reintreprets this household-name brand.

An icon from my youth

Like everyone else in life, I've had my share of ups and downs. But when I turned 16 and went looking for my first summer job, the employment gods smiled wide upon me. Paul Frene, a carrot-haired, multi-freckled friend of mine, had recently been hired by Roth Theatres. He got me an interview (which I drove to - illegally - in my father's brand-new Mercedes SL Convertible - but that is another story). I was thrilled to have a real job - even if it was one that paid me $2.50 an hour - less than minimum wage even in the 1970s (I forget how they got away with that one!).

The reason I mention all this is because my brother, John, also a Roth Theatre alumnus, recently emailed me the stolen embroidered patch that was originally sewn on the god-awful, blood-red, polyester blazers the ushers were made to wear.

The logo made me smile and remember many things, but most importantly for this venue, it reminded me that I was fascinated with branding long before anyone even conceived that term. I remember staring at the Roth Theatre's logo, pondering the rationale of inverting the R and the E in Theatres (which I now know to be the British spelling of the word). I wondered if the italicized letters going up at a slant made the whole thing seem more positive and fun, and guessed that the reason they used the stars was to tie it all back to Hollywood.

Now I look at the logo and think about how lucky the company was to have such a short name (four letters... I mean, come on!) and marvel how much money they were willing to pay for printing a three-color logo in the days when Xerox Docutech printers hadn't yet made printing even remotely affordable. (I also have to admit the one-color version on my brother's name badge looks pretty good.)

I don't think I would design the Roth Theatre's logo like this now, but I do think it stands up pretty well after 40 or 50 years. Perhaps you can thank Bob Mondello, the renowned NPR film critic, for this; he was in charge of Roth's advertising in the late 70s when I was but a lowly "candy girl," as we called them back in the day.

Roth Theatres has been defunct for many years now. Roth's Silver Spring East is now a bank on Thayer Avenue, and Roth's Silver Spring West, on Georgia Avenue not far from the DC line, is now a street-front church. The West, as it was affectionately called, was originally a vaudeville theater that was converted to a movie house.



As you can tell, I have wonderful memories of my theatre days. Besides working with my bratty, little brother, I met my first love there as well as my oldest friend, Bill Burgess, and sewed a passion for logo design that blossoms to this very day.

Debuting a couple of new logos

I recently finished a couple of new logos that I thought I'd share with you.

First up: Distinction. I created this distinctive logo for a corporate events planner who is looking to start her own business. She wanted a look that is fresh and professional but lively and fun, too, so I combined the traditional Roman lettering with the dragonfly and colored the lot with regal purple and gold. This look and feel will help her business stand out from the crowd and give corporations a sense of her creativity in event planning. Dragonflies are always busy, moving, getting things done - all excellent attributions for her business. I think it will work well for her.


Second: I had a great time dreaming up this traditional football logo for the Westlake High School Boosters from Waldorf, MD. Their bulldog mascot is a natural for the football theme, so I wove together the football, the rough-and-tumble doggie, and a great collegiate typeface from Chank and touchdown! Westlake's mega-cute logo will adorn T-shirts, sweatshirts, and a variety of other incoming-generating merchandise for the team.



If you'd like an effective, clever logo for your team, business, or organization, give me a call: 301-330-9353. I'd love to help. Creating logos is one of the great joys of my life.