Lovely logos you’ve seen

I’ll bet if you close your eyes, you can easily remember the logo for McDonald’s, FedEx, Nintendo, Subway, or Apple. What do they have in common? The most obvious answer, to me, is that they’re simple.

Simplicity is important for several reasons. It makes your logo memorable, understandable, reproducible and flexible.

Understandable

If your logo requires someone to study it to figure out what it’s about, it’s not going to be effective. Take a look at this logo for a sports bar. Ignoring the colors for a moment, notice that the logo involves several different images, drawing the eye all over the place. We have the words “sports bar”, a football, a baseball(?), and a checkered flag. An effective logo can be grasped in an instant. This unnecessary complexity interferes with what the company wants to convey.

What if, instead, they’d created a single image that indicated sports, without making the eye dart around searching for elements? This image conveys information very effectively (though without much pizazz).

Here’s another sports icon. It has problems, but the use of several different sports images is not one of them. They’re tied together in a way that makes them a unit.

Memorable

Simplicity also affects how memorable your logo is. This is a very (very) rough treatment, but look how paring down the Clovis logo changes how you perceive it.

Flexible and Reproducible

A simple logo is flexible and reproducible. Take a look at the Subway logo here. Its clean lines mean you can shrink it, and you can use it when you don’t have color available.

You can emboss it on metal, embroider it on a hat, or carve it into a picnic table. Any use that comes up, it just works.

You can even make it really, really small (which comes in very handy when you’re making a business card). Imagine what would happen to the Cazz’s logo above if you shrank it like this.

The apple logo is another excellent example of a simple logo. It’s recognizable and memorable, and amazingly flexible. In fact, look at all of it’s superpowers—stencil it, invert it, even shrink it, and it stays clear and convincing.

Simplicity can go a really really long way toward making sure your logo makes a positive impression, and helps your business grow.

Logo rants continue next week, same bat time, same bat channel.

1. Look

This post was born when someone sent me a link to Your Logo Makes Me Barf. I thought it was kinda mean, but I laughed a little anyway. Mean or not, it’s seriously a good place to go to see logos that don’t work. (Note: If you can’t tell exactly why a logo doesn’t work, don’t worry, because I’ll cover that below. I’ll tell you upfront, though, that if you can’t tell that they don’t work, you might want to get some help on your logo.)
More important than looking over the ugly logos, though, is noticing what logos you do like. Look through magazines, notice signs as you ride down the street, and visit a site like Logo Faves. Find out which logos make you feel good, and which don’t.

2. Think

Purpose

Consider what your logo is intended to do. You obviously want people to think of your business when they see it, but what else are you going for? Do you want them to feel excited? Comforted?

Audience

What kind of customers will your business appeal to? What’s special about your business?

• For “soft” businesses use soft lines. For “hard” businesses, use sharp lines.
• Are warm colors or cool colors more appropriate?
• Choose elements that make sense. (Don’t use a fish for a tree-trimming company.)

Content

What will you communicate in your logo? Don’t make the common mistake of trying to say everything about your business in one logo. If you have a pet store that also offers grooming, and has dog-training classes, don’t try to describe all that in your logo. If you have a farmstand at the local weekend market, don’t try to include all the food you sell in the graphic. Keep it simple, and choose something that says what you want to say.
When folks designed the FedEx logo, can’t you just imagine the owners saying “It needs boxes. Oh, and a smiling guy.” Someone else speaks up, “What about an airplane? You know, because we deliver fast?” Luckily, the designer knew something about simplicity. (Have you ever noticed the little arrow between the e and the x?)

3. Choose

Since you can’t include everything you come up with, you’ll need to narrow down your choices.

Ideas

You want to convey softness, if you’re a teddy bear company, or intelligence if you’re a code-breaker. Warm and inviting? Delicious? Reliable? Choose the most important of these. (If you try to include all the things you are and do, the logo will be a jumbled mess.)

Fonts or typefaces

Choose a typeface that’s interesting, but not too interesting. Two things mark an amateur logo: a very basic font like Times or Helvetica, that you see everywhere, or a weird font that distracts from the logo’s message. Think back to the logos that you liked. What kinds of typefaces were they sporting?
Great logos also ensure their typeface is appropriate to the topic. You can get by with a pretty cool font if your business is equally cool. But if you’re running a bank or a bakery, your font should say so.
Note that the awesome logos you’ve seen use only one, or at most two fonts. If you find you have a good reason for using two, make sure they’re different enough not to clash. I’m pretty sure there are no good reasons for using more than two. (Prove me wrong!)

Colors

Pick colors that convey your message. Bold, bright, or calm, but never washed out. Washed out makes it look like you don’t mean it. “We’re kinda brilliant” or “We’re a little bit reliable.”‘
A web graphic can use tons of colors, but your logo should use only a few. And —important— make sure the colors aren’t required. You will, at some point, need to use the logo in black and white. Be sure your version will work with various methods of reproduction.

4. Design

K.I.S.S.S.

Keep it simple, simple, simple. Have I mentioned simple? Look at the successful logos you’ve seen, and the ugly ones, and notice which are simple.

Align

Designers use guidelines and other tools for lining things up exactly. Even if you don’t have the same tools, you can remember to keep things lined up together, whether centered, right-aligned or left-aligned. Alignment applies to tops and bottoms, too.

Logic and Sense

Create a logo that’s describable. If you find yourself saying “Well, it’s kindof a rounded trapezoid, with, like, these thing coming off the side,” it’s time to go back to the drawing board.
Your logo should not only make sense, but it should relate to the subject. If you have a lovely graphic of a mermaid for your plumbing business, you’d better have a good reason.

5. Criticize

You should know that the first logo you create will almost certainly not be the final choice. Take your time, and ask for lots of input. (And, of course, that means input from people who don’t like you too much. Spouses and parents will likely love anything you make, even the drafts that are a bit silly. Ask me how I know this!)
You’ll have to be thick skinned if you want a terrific logo. It’s worth it, though. This logo is going to be yours for a long time, so make sure you really love it before you commit to a bunch of documents and a website that uses it.

Before you slug me for not including any technical info in this article…

Coming soon! Details about the logo creation process, with some easy and powerful logo creation tools

But that does’t mean you should write for the bot. As I said in the last post, Google is very motivated to read sites the way the user reads them. The bot gets better and better at thinking like a web site visitor. If you write for the visitor instead of trying to game the system, you’ll find Google’s algorithms (or search programs) will improve, in your favor, over time.

Search Engine Friendly Design is Well-Organized

Search engines like what people like. Clean, well-organized content that is relevant to the topic they’re searching for.

While some browsers will display content in an attractive format even if it’s not well organized, the best way for visitors and bots to discover your content is to serve it up according to web standards, and organized in a way that doesn’t require browsers to guess what you mean.

Here are some specific ways to make your structure search engine and visitor friendly.

Use html tags that clearly identify the content.

Use header tags for headers, instead of just making the words bigger. This lets browsers, and people, understand the document structure.

Use alt text in your image tags, to help users who can’t see the images know what’s going on, and coincidentally to help search engines understand what your page is about.

Keep it simple.

Use text links rather than images, whenever possible.

Do you really need javascript?

Use flash sparingly, when it really helps. Not for the whole site, or for navigation.

Make a sitemap?

To be honest, this is the one case where you need to coddle Google. If your navigation systems are clean and well-structured, you don’t usually need a site map for visitors. You shouldn’t need one for Google, either, but they encourage you to submit one anyway. Why? Because it lets them know how you intend for your site to work. They can compare that map with how the site actually works, and help you discover errors to fix.

Check out how your web site appears with javascript, java, and flash turned off. View it without images—ideally, in a bare-bones browser like Lynx. Your site should work just fine with none of the bells and whistles. That way you know that both people and bots can access your content easily.

Be Precise, and Clean Up Mistakes

Who likes trying to use a web site and finding it broken? Take time to look for mistakes, and fix them. Use web tools like those provided by Google to find the sneaky ones.

Fix broken links.

They drive visitors crazy, and they drive bots crazy too.

Be very transparent.

If your site is about selling motorcycles in Vermont, you don’t want to attract a visitor who is planning a Hawaiian vacation. You want to attract visitors who are actually looking for content like yours. (As it happens, Google wants this too. Otherwise they look stupid.) Make sure you have meta tags for page description and keywords, and make sure they are accurate and clear.

Have a Site Worth Visiting

Hands down, the most important thing you can do to get a high ranking on search engines is to provide value to visitors. I can’t stress this enough. It’s really all about content.

Content that users can find and access is what your web site is all about.

To learn more about writing web content, come back next week, or choose one of these options.

• follow us on twitter
• request the rss feed

Why SEO matters

When you put a web page up on the internet, it dosen’t accomplish anything unless people can find it. If you want visitors to come and see your creation, you have to let them know about it.

Google is the first place many people go when they’re looking for something online. (Other search engines are important, too, but they work much like Google.) If the search engine can find you when people type in, say “Landscaping in Eugene, Oregon” your web site will be much more effective.

So search engine optimization, or SEO, is about increasing your visibility to search sites like Google. If search results for a particular phrase find your page among the first few listed, you’re likely to get more traffic (visitors) to your site.

The “Secret” to SEO

The real secret to SEO is that there’s no mystery, no trick. Despite stories you may hear to the contrary, it’s not about tricks and games. it’s about creating the kind of web site that people want to use.

To me, discovering this was a big relief. Tricks strike me as a little deceptive, and scary. The idea that I could get results without resorting to those tactics… whew!

Get Rich Quick Using Google!

There was a time when people were able to cheat Google and other search engines to place higher in the search results. They’d do it by putting a whole bunch of “keywords” on a page–more than any human reader would need to see. Sometimes, they’d make the keywords invisible to human users, but the “bots” (or “spiders”–computers that scan the web for sites like Google) could see them, and would be fooled.

Some people made a lot of money online this way, for a while. But before long, Google and the other search engines were on to them. The tricks stopped working. More tricks were crafted, but this time, Google caught on even quicker.

It got harder and harder to game the system. In fact, some sites were banned entirely from Google for trying.

In the end, these methods simply can’t win, and here’s why.

The good guys win

Google wants to do one thing well. They want to give people the results they’re looking for when they do a search. They want searchers to be really happy about what Google hands them. If searchers get results that aren’t satisfying, they won’t continue to use and trust Google.

And the thing is… Google is really good at getting what it wants.

So what they do is to continually get better at evaluating whether a web site is what a visitor wants to see. Yes, they do use rules, but the rules become more complex, and, luckily for us, more realistic.

This means that instead of worrying about whether exactly 7.3% of the words one your website are the keyword you think people will search for, instead of buying inbound links from unscrupulous “link farms”, you can worry about creating the web site your customers want to see, and count on Google to do a pretty good job of noticing it.

If your site provides good information, presented well, and it’s the kind of site searchers are looking for, Google wants to find it.

More resources on SEO

Learn more about being search-engine friendly

Google’s support pages have this great article on Search Engine Optimization. You can also find out more on Wikipedia’s page on SEO.

Coming soon: Specific strategies for real SEO.

Come back here next week for some specifics about:

• search-engine-friendly design
• keeping the bots happy
• how a site-map can help
• writing for the web
]]> http://webpresencehelp.com/tips/seo-tricks-and-strategy/feed/ 0 http://webpresencehelp.com/tips/birth-of-web-presence/ http://webpresencehelp.com/tips/birth-of-web-presence/#comments Mon, 02 Mar 2009 05:50:41 +0000 Web Presence http://webpresencehelp.com/?p=191 Sitting around the table one day, Tracy, Max and I (Angela) were talking about what direction we should go with our business. I’d been freelancing for a while, and Tracy was about to leave his cubicle to join me. Max was looking forward to putting his programming talent to work creating something… cool. What we realized is that we’ve talked to many folks over the years who told us things like…
• We can’t afford a website.
• …and we sure don’t want an ugly one!
• We had a kid working on it, but we can’t seem to get in touch with him.
• I think maybe one of those free sites will work, if I can find the time to look into it.
• We have a website, but I’m not sure how to update it.
• Oh, you sent the email there? I don’t have a way to receive those.
• I signed up for something, but I’m not really sure what’s included.

We decided, right then, that there had to be an easier way. So we set out to create one, and Web Presence was born.

How did we do?

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