I think anybody who is starting a business or ready to take their business to the next level should give the article a read. It’ll only take about five minutes to read, so click the link above and check it out.

There were a few items in the piece that I thought were important enough to warrant a mention here.

Many companies skimp on logo creation. Nowhere is this more true than with small businesses. Throughout the region, I’ve seen thousands of business cards and signs and I can tell you who spent money on a designer and who didn’t. In this area, you see a lot of businesses who try to do it themselves or let their sign company design their logo. Bad letter spacing, poor font choice, use of clip art—these all give potential clients cues as to what kind of business you are running.

A great example of this is a restaurant I know. Their logo was clearly put together by a sign shop or a nephew or something. The typography on the sign is horrible. Poor font choice, poor use of the poor font, weird spacing, etc. I happen to really like this restaurant, but this sign is a great indicator because good as the food may be, the service is often pretty bad. You can sit waiting for service for 30 minutes when there are only two other tables in the place. Just horrible, sloppy service. And that’s exactly what their sign promises—sloppy and not thought out.

Planning and research in logo design is critically important. Whenever I design a logo for a client, I ask a lot of questions, but before I even meet with them I want them to do some of the legwork for themselves. Sit down and really articulate what it is you do, what you want people to think of when they think of your business and stuff like that. If you can’t tell me what you are, how can I tell anybody else?

I also highly recommend looking at other logos in your industry (websites, too, for that matter). Not to steal anybody’s logo, but to get a feel for what others are doing in the field. Maybe your initial idea is a cliché or maybe it’s too abstract. A logo doesn’t have to be a picture of what you do, but it is very hard for a smaller company to make the associations between abstract logos and their company brand.

Hire a professional designer or, at the very least, consult with a professional. Of course I am going to recommend this. Yes, it’s self-serving advice, but it is also solid advice. They give price ranges from $4,000–15,000 for logo design, but I’ll be honest and say that I’ve never had a $15,000 logo design project. If anyone has an extra $15K laying around, though, I promise that I will design you a SUPERKICKASS logo.

The truth is you can have a great logo designed for less than $4K, too. Every job is a little bit different, so don’t let those numbers scare you off from talking to a designer. There are a bunch of talented designers in the Tri-Cities, so you have a lot of people to choose from. Beware, though, because for every good designer there are at least three or four hacks masquerading as designers. How do you tell the difference? Look at their past work. Look at the logos they’ve designed. Look at the clients they have worked for.

If you have very strong ideas for your logo, most designers will be happy to work with your ideas. Mostly likely you are going to need a designer’s expertise anyway because you probably don’t have the skill set needed to create your logo in the formats you will need for printing. And if you give a designer your ideas, maybe their experience will give them a couple of ideas that you didn’t think of.

Don’t think of a logo as a one-time cost. A logo is designed to last for years (this article says it’s a minimum of 10 years, but I think it’s closer to 7 years because things/times/businesses change and grow and you have to allow for that). The point is, though, that you are not using your logo one time. It’s the one thing that everybody sees on  your signage, your ads, your business cards, your vehicles, etc. Think about the cost of logo design as being amortized over the life of the logo…5 years, 7 years, 10 years…whatever. It is a big check to write at one time, yes, but if you take the time to do it right, it will serve you well for years.

A well-designed logo tells potential customers who you are, serves as a visual reminder of what you do, and helps solidify your top-of-mind position. Logo design is one of the best investments you can make in your business, whether you’re just starting or if you’re due for an update.

Thanks for taking the time to read this and, seriously, read the Entrepreneur article, too. It’s a good piece.

Recently I had an experience with Staples that served to reinforce the notion of employees being a vital part of your brand. I had to prepare some comps for a client meeting and sent them to Staples to have them printed. Generally, I use Staples for this sort of work because they have high-quality color printers, produce the work relatively quickly and aren’t too expensive.

I have had a few bad customer service experiences with Staples print center, mostly due to the inexperience of some of the people working there. By and far, though, my experience with the Bay City location has been positive.

On this particular order, though, I sent the files with EXPLICIT instructions, in hopes of avoiding any issues. The girl working at the copy center called me to confirm the order and that she would have them done very quickly. I went to pick the order up and it was wrong. The files, which were larger than 11″ x 17″, needed to be reduced to fit the page, but they were printed at full size and parts of the pages were cut off. The Staples co-worker told me that what I asked for couldn’t be done. I was really annoyed to have to pay $10 for work that was wrong, but the co-worker couldn’t fix it.

I was probably a little more curt with her than I would like to be, but I was furious. I had an 8AM meeting the next day and had to show up with bad proofs. The girl working there felt bad for me and talked to her supervisor (who was not in the store while I was there). The supervisor took it upon herself to call me and let me know that it was an easy fix and that the girl who ran the prints just needed to push one button. The supervisor offered to reprint everything for me and have it ready for me to pick up in the morning. I explained that I needed the prints an hour before they opened and she talked to the store manager—who comes in before 8AM—and told him what was going on.

She called me back and gave me the manager’s phone number so that I could come at 7:30, call him and pick up my proofs in time for my meeting. The supervisor’s follow-through was really impressive. And when I picked up the prints in the morning, the manager was both very friendly and very apologetic. By this time, all had been forgiven. Staples really did make up for their screw up and by going out of their way to make sure that I had what I needed, they reinforced what I already feel about them.

When I was a general manager for kinko’s (sorry FedEx, but I can’t bring myself to call it FedEx Office), we were at a managers meeting (in Austin or Cincinnati, I think) and we reviewed a customer service case study. The point of the study is that customers actually have a higher opinion of customer service from companies who have screwed up and recovered. Because this was almost 20 years ago, I can’t remember the actual figures, but the way it works out is that if you consistently perform very well, customers’ opinions stay equally constant. If you make a mistake and recover from it, overall approval ratings end up higher than if you had never made a mistake.

Staples is a great example of this very thing. Because they stretched themselves a bit to make sure that my needs were met, I really think very highly of their customer service. I was never going to boycott them or anything like that, but I’d be less inclined to go there if I need something. As of now, though, I will have no such hesitation.

Good save, Staples.

For example, I had a great post about Michigan State University’s proposed logo change and the furor that came from Spartan Nation. In the end, the University scrapped the new design—which really was an improvement—in favor of tradition. Their head-fake toward progress was adopting a different Pantone green. I’m all for tradition, but I think that there are times when a stale logo can stand to be freshened up. The new logo wasn’t a major change, it was just an updating of the current logo.

Doesn’t matter, though, because I never wrote the post. Or one hundred others just like it. I can’t fault myself for prioritizing client design and writing ahead of my blog, but I need to make the blog more of a priority. And that’s exactly what I am going to do. It’s the summer solstice today and that feels like a pretty good time to pick back up with the blog.

To the people who have come back time and again to see the same, old posts I wanted to say thank you for your continued patronage. I promise to work harder to earn your repeated visits.

Happy Summer Solstice, everyone.

It’s no great surprise that AOL has taken a pretty good beating in blogs around the world the past few weeks, after introducing their new…um…logoish thing. I was one of MANY, MANY people who took the time to comment on the logo and almost all of the commentary has been negative. It seems that almost everybody has a reason to hate the logo.

Alissa Walker wrote an article for Fast Company, allowing branding firm Wolff Olins to tell their side of the story. While I am not sold on the somewhat tongue-in-cheek explanation that the new AOL logo is the logo of the future, I think that AOL’s management and Wolff Olins make a good case for themselves. I don’t buy AOL chief of staff Maureen Sullivan’s explanation that scrapping the old name is “the lazy consultant answer,” I can certainly appreciate the idea of hiring Wolff Olins at least in part because they were in the very small minority who advised them to keep the name.

Have you ever heard the old saying about when you’re in a panic situation and everybody is heading for the exits, you’re better off heading in the direction they’re coming from because you stand a better chance of getting out alive? I can appreciate that. I think, were I asked, I’d advise AOL to keep the name simply because AOL is an icon, so I agree with keeping the name.

Again, I don’t care for the changing imagery behind the logo, but the imagery isn’t supposed to be the logo. The logo is the Aol. wordmark in front of the image. If you go to the Wolff Olins home page (linked above), watch the video. It’s a good demonstration of how the logo “works” in a motion environment. The videos produced are, as Walker says in her piece, quite good and make a strong case for the “invisible wordmark.”

I still think they’d be better served by having identified one image as their flagship logo for print purposes, but I at least get what they were going for. I don’t know that it’s the future of design, but I have to admit that I like their out-of-the-box thinking.

Even if you don’t care for the new logo, Wolff Olins certainly gets an A for process and creative thinking. So kudos there, Wolff Olins.

What I’m most curious to see now is how many people start mimicking the style? I only wish I could put together a graph correlating the number of mimics with the number of critics, because you can bet your ass that there is going to a lot of crossover in those two groups. We hate it today, but we can’t wait to steal it.

Woody Allen was quoted once as saying, “80 percent of success is just showing up.”

Often when I am speaking to high school or college classes, the question of how to be successful designer comes up. And more often than not, I quote Woody’s wisdom because it is an absolute truth that applies not just to filmmaking and graphic design, but just about any other path in life you choose to follow.

The best example of not showing up is something that happened recently in my attempt to have a print project quoted by a printer. I am not going to name the printer, but I will tell you that it wasn’t F.P. Horak, McKay Press or QRP. Those are the three printers I use most often and I don’t want anyone to think that I’m talking about them.

This particular project, I thought, was a good fit for another printer in the region. The printer in question threw up every single roadblock they could come up with along the way. Honestly, it was as if they didn’t want my work.

My first step was to find their website to get contact info. The Google search took while because I wasn’t 100% sure of their name (they have gone through some ownership changes). With the correct site located, I clicked through to look for contact info and trouble ensued.

Their site is a wide-awake nightmare. I couldn’t find the information I was looking for, contact info was buried, sales department names and e-mail addresses weren’t available, etc. I didn’t want to fill out a form to wait for a response because my experience with these forms is that response time tends to be slower.

I was able to locate a phone number, though, so I called which led me to a pain-in-the-ass phone tree. If you don’t know the name of the person you are trying to reach, you’re directed to a general mailbox. Since I couldn’t find any sales rep names online, I would be stuck in the general mailbox which often isn’t much better than filling out the online form, where response time is concerned.

I call back and hit zero a few times and get through to a live person. I explain that I need a quote and she isn’t sure who she needs me to get to. After some confusion on her part, I just ask for a customer service rep and says she’ll connect me to the person I need to talk to. The call goes through to an extension which promptly hangs up on me. I call back again and ask if I can speak to a living, breathing customer service rep, but because I don’t have an account manager, she can’t direct me to a CSR.

Finally, in frustration, I give up. The job was a perfect fit for them and it will be printing elsewhere. It isn’t the hugest job in the world, but it would probably be somewhere between 5–10 grand every month or two. How many jobs like this do they lose in the course of a week? There were several opportunities along the way for them to save the interaction, but they managed to miss at every step. All they had to do was show up, but they phoned it in and missed out on a decent, little revenue stream.

There is actually a humorous postscript to the story, too. About one week after being unable to get a quote, I actually get a call from the sales manager wanting to sell me on doing my printing with them. I told him that I was surprised to hear from him and told him all about what had happened the prior week. He is both grateful for the candid input and assures me that is not the way they do business. He asks if he could send me some material to look at about them and maybe set up a meeting. I understand that every business has bad days, so I tell him to send the info and we’ll get together after that.

Five weeks later and guess what…nothing ever showed up.

Chuckleheads.

While the logo isn’t great, it’s not horrible, either. It’s just sort of there. I know that a lot of designers really hated this logo, but to be honest, I was on AOL before I was designer so the logo is very familiar to me. It’s not great, but it brings back good memories from the early days of the internet (granted, 1991 wasn’t that long ago, but it was still long before many people knew much about it).

As AOL continued to grow (and grow and grow), they decided to updated the logo to be more in step with the time. In 2004, the logo was given a more contemporary feel. Strangely, the new logo was to be part of the 20th anniversary celebration of AOL, but that was still seven years in the future.

Fast forward to 2009 and we’re still 2 years shy of the 20th anniversary and AOL finds itself facing a business climate change which they didn’t anticipate. Between DSL, cable modems, wireless networks and so forth, the need to have a dedicated service to connect to the internet is no more. There are still people who use AOL, but the numbers are WAY DOWN from the good, old days. AOL needs to find a way to make themselves relevant in order to survive in the current environment. Step one in that process is, apparently, a major rebranding. Behold the future…

…that’s right, it’s a goldfish. In other versions of the logo the goldfish is replaced with a green scribble, some sort of weird brain thing or any of many other little icons with an updated type treatment. AOL’s big branding brains came up with a whole slew of icons. Their explanation (excuse, is more like it) for this is that AOL is a 21st century media company and that required a brand that is “open and generous.”

Um…yeah…whatever. Just call it what it is…we don’t know who the hell we are, who we’re supposed to be or what you want us to be. So we’ll just be everything.

Can you believe some people get paid to come up with a goldfish with type on top of it? Assuming they were paid for the design work (and I use design loosely), they should be locked up for larceny.

This is, of course, the 989 Design logo:

Then as I was browing one day, I see this:

Ad Index guys, you’re embarassing me with your clear imitation of my logo. I did, after all, invent the red circle with reversed out characters.

And then to further the flattery, I refer you to the Great Lakes Loons Man of Steal poster:

Four or five weeks later, I was sitting in Brewtopia when I spotted the cover of the new Tri-City Magazine:

Stop it, you guys, you’re making me blush! I really appreciate that so many people have taken the time to mimic my work but you’re embarrassing me with all of this imitation.

Okay, to be clear, I’m being very tongue-in-cheek about this. Neither Ad Index nor Tri-City Magazine copied my work. There are trends in design and there are good ideas that happen simultaneously. Each of these is a case of  coincidence. It’s just dumb luck that I spotted the Ad Index logo (haven’t been able to find it since), but when I saw it the 989 logo was the first thing I thought of. As far as the TCM cover, that’s just a funny coincidence that we each had a Superman idea at the same time. I’ll take my Superman over theirs, though, because while Mike (on the magazine cover) is a great guy and a great golfer, Dee is going to be playing for the Dodgers one day.

We’re going to start with an album that some consider to be the very first true rock-n-roll record, Elvis Presley’s self-titled debut on RCA Records. When RCA purchased the 21-year-old singer’s contract from Sun Records’ owner Sam Phillips (for $35,000) Presley had only a few singles to his hame. This 1956 album was the album that introduced him to world and launched him to the stratosphere.

Twenty-some years later, in 1979 (1980 in America), The Clash released their masterpiece, London Calling. The cover of London Calling featured a very clear tribute (or was it a thumbing of the nose?) at Presley’s cover.

And now, thirty years after the Clash’s homage to the King, New York City design studio The Chopping Block has breathed new life into the image with their robotRock t-shirt.

I can’t even begin to tell you how much I love this shirt. I’d like to recommend that everyone go out and buy one—and I really think you should—let’s just coordinate what days we’re going to wear them, cool?

I’m a big Clash fan, so the London Calling image has been a part of my consciousness for many, many years. I never realized until a while after that it was a nod back to the Elvis album. There have been many other covers, images, parodies, etc. that have borrowed from that original Elvis album, but these are a couple of the best examples around.

So what will I design that will be toyed with for the next 50 years? Hmmmm…good question.

Because he was using the wrestler’s image and name without permission, a lawsuit was threatened and Fairey created a new iconic version of the likeness. This new likeness became a brand of its own—Obey Giant.

Like the original stickers, the Obey Giant icon took off. Fairey, a longtime proponent of pushing the limits and breaking rules saw another one of his creations spread around the world in stenciled graffiti and stickers and more.

Fast forward to 2008.

The Obama campaign approached Fairey and asked him to come up with an iconic image and he came up with the Obama Hope poster (bottom image). The image caught on like wildfire and began showing up EVERYWHERE, giving Fairey yet another pop-culture hit icon. This time, however, there was a catch.

The Associated Press claimed that Fairey used one of their photos (top image) as the basis for his icon without permission/rights to do so. Fairey denied the accusation saying that he based his drawing on another photo, but made significant changes to the photo, which he claimed was within fair-use rights.

Taking the offensive, Fairey sued the AP, presumably because of the damage their claims did to his reputation. The AP didn’t buy his explanation and promptly sued back. All along Fairey kept proclaiming his innocense and defending his good name. Until recently, when Fairey admitted that he had, in fact, used the image that he was accused of using.

So let’s recap…the AP said he used their image, he denied it and went so far as to sue the AP. Now he admits that the AP was right and that he concealed/fabricated a story about the other image and filed a lawsuit under false pretenses. His laywers dropped the case as quick as they could and now Fairey is claiming that the real issue is fair use rights.

This guy is a million-dollar talent (literally) with a ten-cent head. What the hell is he thinking? He’s going to lose this case, lose millions in a judgement to the AP (which they have pledged will be given to a non-profit organization), pay all court costs, and could face further punishment for filing a frivolous lawsuit under false pretenses. Hell, for all I know, he could end up with a little jail time.

As a designer I can tell you that if anybody ever took one of my photos and just traced over it, I’d be pissed. That isn’t fair use, that’s copying. It’s larceny and Fairey deserves whatever punishment he gets. He stole an image another artist (the original photographer) created.

The really funny thing is that when another designer created a parody of his Obey Giant icon with a SARS respiratory mask, guess who threatened to sue, claiming trademark violation. Fairey went so far as to call the Texas designer a “bottom feeder” and “parasite.”

I don’t like to see people, even jackassy people, go through bad times, but I have to admit that I want to see this guy get his comeuppance.