LogoBids Blog

Branding and Your Startup’s Visual Identity

Isaac — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 21:38:35 +0000

Starting up a business involves endless tasks and a bunch of hard work. Sometimes all of the daily commitments can almost make you forget why you wanted to start a business in the first place. But you can’t neglect the bigger picture–it’s crucial to define your company’s identity, and the branding process can help keep you focused on exactly that.

I recently read a great article that lays out the five basic building blocks for branding a startup. Here are a few of the highlights:

Define Who You Are.
This is best achieved with one simple descriptive sentence. The best way to communicate your brand is with brevity and clarity.

Differentiate.
What people want to hear is why your thing is better than the other things out there.

Avoid the Helicopter Mom Syndrome.
Delegate tasks to other people in your organization. Micromanagement slows down the process and diminishes the quality of work. Instead, focus on the organization as whole.

Existential Anxiety Is Normal.
Understanding this will help when you’ve spent so much time strategizing, brainstorming, and planning that you start to question the validity of what you’re doing. It’s healthy to take a break now and then and get some perspective from someone outside your organization.

Craft a Visual Identity.
Once you have sorted out the more existential facets of the brand identity you can start sorting out a visual identity: logo, website, fonts, colors, business cards, and letterhead. The great thing about design is that if applied correctly it can make your business instantly emit the values you want to communicate like; trust, gravitas, innovation, quirkiness, luxury, whatever your brand identity dictates.

However, do not attempt to design your own brand. It almost never works. Hire a professional who actually knows what he’s doing. It will pay off.

That’s where we come in. We are a community of professional designers worldwide that create logos, web sites, letterheads, magazine ads, post cards, business cards, t-shirt designs and other graphic designs for your company, at a price you set.

Can I use clipart and still be original in my logo design?

Isaac — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 21:09:50 +0000

So we have noticed that a lot of designers are suggesting that using clip art in your design would imply that your design entry is not original and therefore should not be considered by the contest holder.

I understand this perspective. The non-clip art designers feel like their originality is being overlooked and somewhat degraded by the designer who uses the “quick” method of instilling clip art into their design. Most designers will read the design brief, open a blank page in adobe illustrator, or whatever graphics program they use, start designing from scratch. Other designers like to get inspired by pre-made designs or clip art. So those are the 2 approaches that designers normally use, but their final project can often look the same.

I have seen many designers that don’t use clip art complain about the process and submissions of those that do. They don’t think it is true design. Designers that do use clip art think that its an acceptable part of the creative design process and in fact that using clip art to enhance their design is a form of art in itself.

So what is our opinion here at Logobids about using clip art in logo design? Simple, we don’t have one. Why? Because we aren’t the ones who have to live with the final product, our clients do. Our clients come to get a logo design. Period! The client doesn’t care (and half the time doesn’t know) if someone used clip art in their design, they only care about how it looks. Some clients may care about the original creativity of their design, while others will only care about the final outcome and true creativity does not matter as long as the design looks “good” to them. In the end, this is THEIR choice, not ours. However, we have found that most contest winners are those that use original designs.

So we are giving the contest holder the power to control whether or not they want to allow clip art in their designs. When contest holders start a contest they are asked to check a box that says:

1. “Allow Clip Art: Designers may use pre-fabricated clip art in the design. Must be royalty free.”
2. “No Clip Art: Designers must be creative and original with the entire design.”

Which ever choice they made will be visible in the design brief. Keep in mind, this is their logo that they will have publicly displayed and used on their products, they should have a say so in how it is created. Plus, they are paying for it. So now the designers have a choice: Don’t participate if you don’t want to complete against clip art designers or don’t participate if you cant complete against original designers without using clip art.

Tell us what you think? Clip art? No clip art? Let the client decide?

How giving away our paid services for free gave us a 4000% return

Isaac — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 21:49:45 +0000

Ive always wondered how well the freemium model would work for our company, but I could never figure out how we would implement it without losing money. Our issue is that our business model requires us to pay money out to our designers when they win a logo design contest. So if we did a freemium model we would still have to pay money out, regardless of the client not paying us. This wouldn’t work for us. We would be in the red on day one. I shelved (actually trashed) the idea. Never thought about it again.

Then a year or so later I had a conversation with Noah Kagan at appsumo.com. He suggested that I run a contest for a logo design and allow anyone to participate. We would only need to cover the cost of the logo design for one customer and not several. Ala! We can afford to do this with breaking our bank! Freemium? Not so much, but close. And to think, I completely gave up on the idea of be able to offer anything for free.

So we teamed up with appsumo and we launched a contest (www.appsumo.Com/logobids) for free logo design…for life! Yes, for life + unlimited revisions! Pretty crazy huh? But it works with our model and the promotion is affordable. Plus, giving away free stuff to startups is fun and rewarding. So for the first time ever, we have something of value to give away free.

Here is the cool part. We get a decent amount of hits per month and new user sign ups, but once we started sharing this free contest and appsumo shared it too – our visitor numbers are up 4000 percent and our sign ups have more than doubled. Im sitting here watching GA Real Time stats – OMFG! These are numbers Ive only dreamed of.

I could not have pulled this of without teaming up with appsumo. And I never would have thought about this giving away stuff free concept without talking to Noah. Needless to say, this is a lesson to be learned … never give up on an idea, try it, tweak it and fix it to work with your biz model. You will be faced with many opportunities that seem like nothing of value until you figure out a way to make it valuable.

So now that we know this works, we are gonna do it every month (maybe every week), but we are gonna make it even sweeter. Free logo for life + 500 free business card for 3 team members + a Dozen t-shirts with your new logo on it. Im looking forward to seeing what kind of numbers that will bring and Im most excited to see who wins and who we get to help.

Do good. Work hard. Be determined.

12 Mysterious Logos With Hidden Numbers

Isaac — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 18:28:12 +0000

Often clients are looking for something very unique with a hidden message about their company or product.

We have compiled a gallery of 12 Logo Designs that have hidden numbers creatively placed within the logo. Some of these are very obvious like the ONE logo, while others have hidden there message with more depth like 5 Locks. Point us to some more great logos with hidden numbers or submit your own. Enjoy!

5 Locks Logo Design: Creative use of the number “5” disguised as the letter “L” and “O”. It also represents the image of an open lock. They choose the perfect font to tie it all together and have the curves of the “5”,”C” and “S” blend the entire image together.

Nine Art Photography Logo Design: the name Nine Art represents creativity in its own right. To incorporate such a clever design by hiding the “9” within the lens just adds to their creative abilities.

9 Pan Logo Design: For a small business logo design, this is very memorable. Some people don’t initially see the “9” in the steam, but at a closer glance it is very obvious.

96 Percent Logo Design: This logo design has been done in several variations, but this one sticks out because of the clean lines and open font. They combined 2 elements into one. The “9” and “6” back to back form the “%” symbol.

A2B Concepts Logo Design: For a company to represent a conceptual twist on their logo to display their ability deliver on their services, they definitely hit the mark. The color scheme also plays an important role in hiding the “2” within the “a” and “b”.

Imagine Logo Design: Numbers, that’s all you think about as you read the word “Imagine”. The chocolate brown background is a perfect mix with the enlightened wording. 6 numbers represent this business logo design - 136859.

6 Locks Security Logo Design: Simple, clean design. You see the “6” before you notice the lock. This is interesting because normally you see the object before the hidden number. Memorable? Yes.

No One Logo Design: This logo design has a different twist, simplicity mixed with the complexity of synchronized numbers. It plays a trick on the eyes, almost making you dismiss the numbers as symbols.

One Logo Design: Very obvious placement of the number “1” in this logo design. The colors can be adjusted to match almost and adverb to follow the word “one”. This logo can be applied to many business names.

One To Love Logo Design: This logo hides the words more than it hides the numbers. Clever use of the “2” in order to represent “l” and “o”. Adding the heart at the end was a cleaver touch to help the brain process the word “love” within the logo.

Three Gull Logo Design: Two things stand out with this logo. The “3” is obviously a seagull and the emphasis on the “three” in order to help bring out the number “3” by association. The blue background is a great touch to bring out the oceanic feeling.

Win Logo Design: This one is a little harder to pick up on unless you know the title of the logo “Win”. At first glance this looks like a math problem, not a logo. They cleverly disguised the “3” as a “w”, “1” as an “I” and the “2” as a “n”. Problem solved.

Welcome to LogoBids 2.0

richtermeister — Thu, 02 Jun 2011 18:25:19 +0000

Hello LogoBids Designers,

Welcome to our new Blog!

We know it’s been rather quiet around here lately, but as you already may have noticed LogoBids has been busily undergoing many updates these days, and we are just getting started!

Many more good things are in the works, and we wanted to take this opportunity to invite your feedback and participation to help shape where things are going.

After all, our design projects thrive on your active involvement, so we want to make sure we do all things on our end to keep you happy.

We are welcoming any suggestions that you may have that will improve the site for the clients as well as make the site more functional for designers.

Send us an email at support@logobids.com with any suggestions you may have.