There was a pretty interesting article at Entrepreneur.com on how to create a logo. The article touches briefly on what a logo is to your business and why it’s worth spending both time and money on. It isn’t advocating blindly throwing cash at a logo, either, it’s about what considerations should go into your new logo design.

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.

I’ve said it before and I will keep saying it: YOUR LOGO IS NOT YOUR BRAND. Your brand is everything—EVERYTHING—that is a part of your business. Sure, your logo is definitely the most visible, but there is so much more to it and this includes customer interactions.

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.

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.

A few more versions of the new AOL logo. Er…make that the Aol. logo.

Does anybody remember when America Online was the 400-pound gorilla of the online world? There were many ways to go online, but AOL made the whole process very easy. AOL put together a marketing plan that included mailing CDs with their software to every man, woman, child and family pet in North America. The plan worked, though, as people were signing up as fast as AOL could send the CDs out. For years, this was the first thing you saw on the screen, just before hearing the ubiquitous, “You’ve got mail.”

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.