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.