Recently, Visible Logic celebrated its 10th Anniversary! As the owner of this small business, I’m thrilled that we’ve survived and thrived so long. And it’s especially exciting to see how our firm has grown in its tenth year. One new part of our business is Mail On The Mark, our e-newsletter service.

We have been designing e-newsletters for our clients for a long time, and realized that the tools available to most small business owners were not great. Many of our clients were using email marketing services that produced poorly designed e-newsletters. They came to us for outstanding brand identity work, and then it all fell apart when they connected with their customers’ and prospects’ in boxes.

We felt there had to be a way to create beautifully designed, truly custom-branded, highly functional e-newsletters. So we created Mail on the Mark.

Now as a thank you to everyone who has helped us succeed the past ten years, we are giving away 10 free blueprint designs. These are valued at $999 each!

Note: A blueprint is like a template, except that we HATE the word template. Template suggests a pre-made, generic looking design. All of our designs are completely customized with your brand identity and tailored to the type of content you include in your email marketing. Read this for more information.

We want to help you!

We are looking for 10 worthy groups who would benefit from a well-designed, custom-branded, e-newsletter. This is available to non-profits, small business owners, entrepreneurs, or even you.

Our criteria for choosing the winners is loose, but we are looking for the following (not all of these at once!):

• Organizations who can really benefit from effective email marketing. Ideally you are already established, but have lacked a professionally designed e-newsletter.
• Companies or individuals who currently use another email service, but are unhappy with the results; or do not currently use an email marketing tool.
• Businesses we can help in Maine.
• Organizations involved with: environmental issues; running/triathlon/fitness; cooking; gardening/farming; dance; children/education.
• Entrepreneurs and small business owners who are trying to launch successful businesses.
• Design opportunities that will allow us to create showcase work.
• People who are willing to spread the good karma (hint, click on that Tweet button and/or the Facebook Like button)

Spread the word & stay in touch!

Tell others about this contest:
Tweet

Connect with us on Facebook:

Submit your application below.

Yes, that’s all you need to do!

[contact-form-7]

Fine print: We are designing a custom blueprint for your e-newsletter for use with a Do-It-Yourself account. You will be responsible for any fees related to sending your emails. Generally this fee is .05/email + $10/sending fee per campaign. Learn about the fees for sending.

We’ll keep you posted of who we have selected for this contest.

Presenting the first round of logo designs to a client is one my favorite parts of my job. It’s very exciting to show how loose ideas, general likes and dislikes, and sometimes even conflicting input gets translated into a tangible logo design.

I’m happy to say we’ve been very successful at being able to translate these abstract thoughts into concrete designs, and generally our clients are pretty wowed by the effect. Whether they are a local client from Portland, Maine or someone we are working with entirely through phone calls and emails, we manage to figure out what they are looking for.

The next step then becomes evaluating the options.

How to choose a good logo design?

Good logos have appeal both at first glance and when you’ve had some time to sit with them. Great logos have immediate appeal and then grow even more appealing as someone has time to take in the detail.

A fun example of this is the FedEx logo. At first glance, it is bold and clean. At second glance, you see the arrow embedded in the logo, which sums up the speed and accuracy which is at the core of their business.

First impressions

When you are working with a logo designer, and seeing your logo designs for the first time, try to remember that feeling. Some of those same first impressions that hit you, will hit your customers and prospects.

Probably you will have a strong reaction (either positive or negative) to some of the logo designs you see. Some of these impressions are gut reactions or from the subconscious. You just like it or didn’t like it for reasons you may not even be able to easily articulate. Even if you can’t say why, it’s still a worthwhile feeling to acknowledge.

Another important part of first impressions is that they cannot be easily overcome. A great logo needs no explanation, it just works.

There are many times when your prospective customer will only see your logo very quickly. Whether it’s briefly when exchanging business cards, or quickly as your logo’d van drives by, many first impressions of logos happen quickly without much time for analysis. It needs to be recognizable and memorable in a flash.

Lasting feelings

Just as important as first impressions, you need to have a logo that you love the more you look at it. As a business owner, you will be promoting your brand identity for years, and you don’t want to easily get tired of it. In fact, the stronger a concept behind a logo design, the more you’ll tend to like it as time goes on.

It’s especially great if your logo tells a story. This story or concept helps you connect with your audience. Just like first impressions, sometimes these impressions are hard to articulate, but still resonate with viewers.

A logo that has no substance or concept behind it will tend to look out of date more quickly because the only thing holding it together is “style.” As trends change, your logo (and therefore your brand) may appear out of touch. A more classic design, backed by a strong concept will serve you better in the long run.

Should I get other people’s opinions?

Many designers cringe at the idea of “design by committee.” Group decisions often weaken a design and the result is a watered down concept with a muddied result.

However, I do recommend that you show preliminary logo designs to other people that you trust.

Each person has their own life experiences that they bring with them when viewing and evaluating something like a logo. They may see similarities with other logos or brands that you are not familiar with. It’s good to hear about these possible conflicts before you become too invested in one logo design.

Do not expect to please everyone, and do not look for your advisers to give you answers (just opinions). In other words, listen when they say: “This reminds me of brand X” but don’t put much weight into statements like: “I’d like it better if this were red.”

Rather, listen to their gut reactions and follow up with research on any correlations they see that you are unfamiliar with. For example, if they say: “This reminds me of the logo for that Financial Advisor who embezzled millions of cash.” it would be a good idea to see if there are similarities between your new logo design and brand identity (especially if it has a tainted history).

The final analysis

I really like to hear the process my client went through to select a logo design. So don’t feel that all you have to do is choose an option. When your logo designer has the full understanding of your decision making process, it can help them as they continue to refine the logo design.

Which brings me to my final point. It is unlikely that whatever design was shown in an initial design presentation is completely ready. Most logo designers are prepared to then refine a logo design, once an initial concept has been selected. This is why having a complete understanding of your thought process is useful. It will help your designer avoid going down paths you’ve already dismissed in your mind; and push a design more in the direction of your liking.

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If you want to see some example of our logo design process, I suggest you read about the logo design process for the New England Breeze logo, The Greater Freeport Chamber of Commerce logo, or the Perfect Peanut Brittle logo.

We are pleased to announce the results of our survey about the importance of branded email addresses on business cards.

Email addresses matter

Entrepreneurs and new business owners are always struggling with how to increase brand equity. A simple way to make you and your business look more professional is to set up a domain-level, branded email address for yourself and put it on your business cards. This means your email address matches the domain name for your web site. For example, nancysmith@yourcompany.com.

Start ups, sole practitioners, and small businesses often use email addresses set up on a free or low cost service like gmail or hot mail. But beware, these addresses are seen as unprofessional by customers and prospects.

I always thought it was a bad idea to use an email address that was not based on the domain name, but couldn’t find any research to back it up. We conducted the survey to prove a point. It’s hard to argue with such conclusive results.

70% of people think a non-domain-name email address is unprofessional.

Survey Results

Respondents overwhelmingly felt that non-domain-level email addresses reflect poorly on the individual and their business, with 70% of respondents citing that it “It looks unprofessional.”

You never get a second chance to make a first impression, and it’s amazing how strong and quickly people are forming opinions about you and your business just by the email address on your business card. If you’re one of the 30% who thinks it doesn’t matter?

It does.

Poor first impression

Excerpts from the survey respondents’ comments:

I am leary of email addresses that are free account services such as yahoo, Gmail or hotmail. It would make me suspect that the company could be a fly by night operation or possibly a scam.

Using a non-domain-level address is just the height of laziness (or cheapness) and shows a lack of commitment to your business.

Free email accounts like Gmail and Yahoo, indicates they’re cheap and most likely to cut corners rather than provide quality work.

Using the ISP email account, indicates to me that they’re lazy and not worth my time to deal with.

Download the whitepaper

Our full results, including statistics and more quotations from survey participants is available in our white paper. Download the white paper here.

Our typical design client at Visible Logic is a small business. This could be a one-person operation (such as Cream & Sugar Bakery) or a regional bank (such as Androscoggin Bank). We don’t have any Fortune 500 clients, and we’re OK with that. We love working closely with the leadership team or owner of a small business and helping them to understand and harness the power of effective web design, branding and print marketing.

Small businesses are the majority of businesses in the U.S. and any service-based business has to learn how to work with small business owners.

Today I was thinking about the fact that there are so many business owners who have a budget-conscious, do-it-themselves mentality. This has led to the fact that we pretty much exclusively use royalty-free photos these days.

When I started in design, the idea of royalty-free photos didn’t exist. If you didn’t hire a photographer for a custom shoot, you used what was called stock photography. [Read this, if you're not sure about the difference between stock and royalty free photos.] But now, the pendulum has fully swung to the royalty-free photo side of things.

There are still times you need custom photography (you need to shoot your own location, your own product, your own people, or need something very unique). But the reality is that my clients are demanding royalty-free photos, for the following reasons:

Two reasons small business owners demand royalty-free photos

1. Known product. With a custom shoot you can minimize risk by working with talent you trust, art directing and showing similar photo styles, layouts, etc. but the truth is that you do not know 100% what you’ll get from any shoot. With a royalty-free photo, you can see the image in place, in the layout, before buying the photo.
2. Fixed costs. With royalty-free photos you buy the photo rights once and you can use it for anything. With both stock and custom work, usage rights are negotiated on a case-by-case basis.

It’s hard to argue with the two benefit listed above. However, there is a vast range of photographic talent and quality to be purchased using the royalty-free model.

Today, there are thousands of new businesses who want marketing materials, web sites and blogs, but don’t have an understanding or the money for anything but royalty-free photography. In the old days, the only people buying photos were businesses with a marketing department and budget. They were staffed by professionals who understood the risks of a custom shoot, but understood the benefits, too. Or, they were prepared for the costs of purchasing stock photo rights. These days every business needs a web site to compete and adding photos to a web site is a desirable thing to add meaning, graphic interest, etc.

Royalty-free, OK. But, let’s find some quality images

What bothers me is that there is such little value placed on purchasing the photography. Not only have business owners accepted that they’ll only purchase royalty-free photos, they only seem to accept the most cheaply purchased photos.

The stock agencies have tried to respond by moving more stock photos into the royalty-free category. This allows flexibility with usage. But business owners need to accept that photos are one of those things that you get what you pay for. It’s a good idea to look beyond the cheapest-of-the-cheap if you want to create a professional and unique brand image for your company.

If you are a business owner, what do you expect to pay for photography?

People love the idea of blogging, but often can’t put in the time to make it a success.

Our web design clients are mostly small business owners. This post is about that types of bloggers: blogs being added to a corporate web site, not bloggers who are trying to build stand alone businesses.

Small business owners have heard about the value of adding a blog to a corporate web site. It can increase web traffic, get better organic search results, can increase your reputation as an expert, and provide a place to gather prospects and turn them into clients.

However, a blog doesn’t just write itself. And an abandoned blog makes you look worse than never having started a blog. Unfortunately, we have many web design clients who had us design their blog and pretty quickly they abandoned it. As a web designer, there is only so much that I can do to get someone to write his or her blog. Here are a few things I’ve learned:

7 questions to ask yourself before starting a blog

1. Can I write a lot of blog posts before going live?
Realistically, it’s going to take several weeks to several months to design and develop a new web site with a blog. During that time, pretend the site is live and write as many blog posts as you would plan to write if the blog were live. Once you have that content, you can either launch with several blog posts live, or use these practice posts when you get stuck. (Yes, you probably will get stuck at times either because of writer’s block or lack of time.)

2. Should I call it a “blog”?
Consider calling this part of your web site something other than blog. There are certain expectations of a blog: it is frequently updated; has a opinion or angle to it; and it usually is open to comments. If this fits with the goals of your web site than use the word blog. Some other ideas are to call it: article library, or news, depending on what type of content you wish to feature. The expectations of an article library are that the length and quality of the content may be higher than a blog, but the frequency of updates can be less. News may better for people who want to promote a mix of items including new products, case studies, article releases, etc. but that don’t necessarily seek comments and discussions.

3. Who is your ideal reader?
You need to figure out who you’d like to read your blog. Is it your prospects? If so, what topics will they search for information about? What other blogs or web sites do they already read? Write your content to help them by providing useful information.

4. What am I going to write about?
We recommend that you brainstorm a list of dozens, if not hundreds of topics before going forward. Some of these may end up as categories and there will be multiple blog posts under that topic. Other topics will only end up being one-off posts. Have a list of both general categories and specific blog topics so that you can refer to it whenever you get stuck. I did mention you may get stuck, right?

5. How will I promote the blog?
Your blog should be picked up by Google fairly quickly, but that is probably not enough to drive a lot of traffic, and readers may be too shy to leave a comment. Figure out who you want to reach (#3) and figure out where they are. What web sites, blogs and social media sites are they already active in? How can you get your blog in front of their eyes? If you have an e-newsletter make sure that you introduce your readers to your blog. Plan to submit your blog posts to news feed sites such as BizSugar, and others that are tailored to your own industry or niche. (For example, we regularly submit our blog posts to: Design Float and Design Newz.)

6. How will the blog integrate with Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.
I have read a few articles lately, including on in the New York Times, that suggested that people are turning to Facebook rather than blogs to update their peers and promote their activities. As a branding and design firm, we suggest that our clients keep all original content on their site, but to cross-promote using social media channels. In case you haven’t noticed there is no way to archive the content on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn. Use those methods to connect your content with others, but have your own web site blog be the repository for all the content. It is then archived, searchable and branded.

7. Do I really have time for this?
This is really the core issue for most business owners who blog. Do you have the time to add blogging to your already overfilled days and nights. If you can’t do it, that doesn’t mean your organization shouldn’t have a blog. It’s just might mean that you should not be the one writing it. Some alternatives are for one or more employees to write the blog. Or, you can hire someone to write about topics that make sense and/or interview you to make the process much quicker for you.

Ready to add a blog to your web site?

Visible Logic adds blogs to existing web designs, or designs and develops new web sites to incorporate a blog into the web design. Contact us to learn more.

One of the basic tenets of marketing is: know me, love me, trust me, buy from me. Whether your web site is your business (for an e-commerce store), or an extension of an offline business (the majority of businesses), your web site creates an impression that either leads to greater trust, or to lots of skepticism.

I believe the most critical factor in website design in 2011 will be the ability to build the trust of your viewers. A combination of technological, economic and educational elements are coming together that puts a more urgent spin on creating a true, and trustworthy web experience.

Specifically, I’m talking about :

1. The continuing evolution of web design and development
2. The recovering economy
3. The greater understanding and appreciation of design and branding

These three elements separately and, more importantly, together are creating a critical movement as we march into 2011.

1. Maturing web site design means higher standards

If you’ve been in business for a while you understand that you can’t just design your web site once and think it’s done. Not only should you be updating content frequently, but you should plan for a fairly extensive overhaul every few years. The reasons behind this are that both your own business is changing, and also the web is changing. Many things that are considered “best practices” (or at least trendy) today either didn’t exist or held a different value five years ago.

As an example: a flash-based intro splash page. These were very popular five to ten years ago and someone was doing a very good job selling a lot of people on the importance of these. Now, they’ve fallen out of favor. I can pretty much guarantee there is something very popular today that is going to fall out of favor really soon. (My hunch: those walk on videos; but for right now the data shows that people react to them).

Web standards are also continually evolving. And the way we interact with the web is ever changing. Mobile applications will continue to grow in importance. We are in a period of rapid evolution in web design. I bet that if you haven’t redesigned your web site in the past few years, that you are starting to hate it.

You need to stay on top of web design and web development trends. That doesn’t mean that you need to be the leader. But an out-of-date web site screams that your organization is not keeping up.

2. Moving into economic growth mode

While the economic growth may not be robust, the US economy is no longer contracting. Business owners are starting again to invest in the growth of their business. We are seeing it with with our own sales. In 2008 and 2009 business owners were hunkering down and saving any cash they had. Now, it’s time for the survivors to think about moving forward.

The first movers are already investing in a better web presence. Have your competitors already launched a new web site redesign? Is your web site showing you as out-of-date? It’s time to get moving.

During the recession, many companies thought it was OK to take a do-it-yourself approach to your web site design. No one wanted to be seen as frivolous. And a plethora of low cost, do-it-yourself templates and web-building tools made it attractive. Now that some organizations are getting busy again, they realize that it’s a better use of everyone’s time and money to hire an expert to do it right.

Also, the recession forced many unemployed professionals to consider becoming entrepreneurs. These accidental entrepreneurs probably lacked the funding and planning to hire out for their first web site design. If you’re in this group, and have realized that you’re ready to take on the challenges of being a small business owner, then you need to show the world that you are serious by having a professionally designed web site.

3. A greater understanding and appreciation of design and branding

As I explained in a recent blog post, I’m happy to say that there is clearly an increase in the awareness of the importance of good quality design, well-designed websites, and branding. That means that people are judging your web site as never before.

People are more savvy about how poor most do-it-yourself sites look. They are able to recognize stock templates, junk photography and out-of-place graphics. All of these portray you and your organization as unprofessional and lacking seriousness about your business. It’s time to get serious about redesigning your site.

How to build trust

We are entering a time when people will find you and judge you by your web site like never before. You don’t just need a web site. You need a good one. Previously, there was the idea that you have to have a web site to be legitimate. But we’re beyond that. You can’t just have a web site; it has to instill trust.

You can get started by reading my suggestions on the Top 10 Web Design Trends for 2011 That Will Help Your Small Business.

You need to present yourself and your organization in a way that shows you are real and presents a solid brand identity.

All of these suggestions revolve around the fact that you can’t cut corners with web design and expect people to trust you. Your clients don’t want to work with someone who skimps on quality, sells snake oil, or who isn’t serious about their own business.

They want business relationships with people and firms that they can trust.

One thing that can be difficult for people to grasp is that your brand is not completely shaped by yourself and your organization. There are external factors that help build your brand.

As a graphic designer and brand identity specialist I hear the confusion that surrounds the conflicting ideas of building a brand identity and dealing with the external factors that also become part of your brand image.

A strong brand identity can help you promote an ideal vision of your company, product or service and can help you manage some of the external brand perceptions.

Frequently, small business owners:

• Don’t take a comprehensive approach to their brand identity, but should
• Don’t properly use and share key files (such as logo artwork)
• Don’t empower their employees to share and build their brand
• Don’t effectively use customer stories and media coverage to their benefit

Take a look at this slide show, it’s a visual metaphor for how a strong internal identity strategies can counteract external influences.

Did this help you better understand the outside effects on your brand and also how a strong brand identity and message strategy can help you maintain your brand image?

Note: I replaced the original slide show with this version from SlideShare.

Starting a new Chamber of Commerce is tricky. There are people who want, and would benefit from, the Chamber, but who is in charge of getting it off the ground? You need enough commitment and momentum from the volunteer base before you can go out and hire executive staff. Yet, there are things that need to be created, and that help in the recruitment and building of the chapter before the chapter itself is a full entity. It’s a catch-22, chicken-and-the-egg situation.

A web site, signage, and advertising were all part of getting the Greater Freeport Chamber of Commerce launched before they had the leadership, time and budget to take a critical look at their logo.

Visible Logic was hired by the Freeport, Maine group to design their logo—after a web site had been live for a few months and signage had been ordered. Obviously this is not ideal, but that was the reality.

Knowing that a brand identity was already alive on their web site and in their signage, we had to incorporate elements of those pieces into the final, new logo. To do otherwise is wasting any brand equity they had built.

Assessing the current identity

The Chamber had a temporary logo on the web site. It was the Town of Freeport, Maine’s logo with the words “Chamber of Commerce” placed on top of it.

The temporary logo which was the town logo with Chamber of Commerce added at the bottom

While the town was fine with the Chamber using the logo temporarily, the Chamber wanted to make sure it had a distinct identity and logo separate from the town. They were representing businesses both in and out of Freeport and were the mouthpiece of the Chamber members, not the town itself.

Meanwhile, a sign had been purchased for the building.

Photo of the signage for the Greater Freeport Chamber of Commerce

I took this snapshot of their signage on the outside of their building. It had just been ordered when I got involved with the logo project.

Not a Usual Logo Process

I highlight this all to say that this was not the clean slate that we dream of as a graphic designer embarking on a logo design. But, to throw out everything that was already in place was mistake. While it’s easy to change a logo on the web site, redoing large scale building signage was not going to happen. And while you can change the logo on the web site, you must remember that it has already been viewed by lots of people. Brand equity, visibility and trust were already starting to grow.

So the sketching and researching phase centered on assessing what we could take from these existing sources.

• Both graphics used a Script F, although they were different fonts.
• The typography on the signage was much more professional and traditional looking than the words on the temporary web site logo.
• The temporary logo had a gritty, yet ephemeral feel that the new Executive Director liked.
• The sign had a bold, more masculine look that the Executive Director liked.
• The temporary logo had a washed out, pale color palette, whereas the new signage was a deep green.

Pulling the Elements Together

This is how we pulled together the existing identity and created something new, that still harkened to the their current identity.

We used elements from each current identity piece and pulled them into something fresh and professional looking. The new logo design:

• Features a script F, it was closer to the signage F, but reminiscent of both
• Uses the same typeface (Trajan) as the signage, but minimized the type size changes to make it cleaner looking
• Uses the dark green from the signage (the two colors are pretty similar when accurately phtoographed/printed)
• Has a new montage of photos that gave the ephemeral and gritty feel of the temporary logo, but showed imagery more recognizably from the community and participating businesses.

We also created a couple of other versions for other uses:

The all green version is a one-color version that can used when printing one color is more economical, or when the photo montage background would not work with the other design elements. The version with the black text is to provide more consistent of color reproduction across across different media.

This logo design process started with a lot of “baggage”, but we were able to create a finished logo that really works for the organization.

When we work with a client on a branding project we spend a considerable amount of time looking at who their competitors are. Knowing and understanding your competitor’s strengths and weaknesses can help you find your own niche where you can dominate.

But the reality is that many times your prospects are not choosing between you and your competition, it’s a decision between you and doing nothing. And with the recession, the choice to do nothing—and keep one’s hard earned cash tight in hand—is often a very alluring choice for your potential customers.

Branding helps you to Sell the Invisible

I recently read a book called Selling the Invisible. Written in 1997 by Harry Beckwith, it’s not a new title, in fact according to it’s cover it’s considered “A Classic.”

It was recommended to me as a small business owner. The book is a compilation of very short articles on how to market a service-based business. Unlike a product-based business, there is nothing tangible to show or demonstrate to your prospective client. Therefore you are Selling the Invisible. The book is filled with all sort of tips and ideas, but here are my key takeaways, especially as they pertain to building a strong brand identity.

• People Hear What They See. Since people cannot see your service they are relying on all your brand touchpoints to create an image of you and your service. Your business card, your web site, your office or even your shoes all need to project the right image. No amount of words can overcome the visuals.
• Attack the Stereotype. You need to have a firm grasp on the first thing a prospect thinks about when they hear about someone in your line of business. Some examples he gives are: “Accountants are humorless. Lawyers are greedy.” If you keep your head in the sand and don’t do something to counteract that stereotype, it will outdo any of your brand building work.
• Say only one thing. This is what psychologists calls The Cocktail Party Phenomenon which means that if we start overhearing another nearby conversation we can no longer concentrate on the conversation we are presently having. Beckwith writes that “people cannot process two conversations at once.” Therefore, your brand identity and messaging needs to clear and consistent.
• Eliminate your prospect’s fear. The overwhelming reason people continue to do nothing, rather than buy from you is that they are scared. Unlike a product that can be seen and tested, you are selling something sight unseen. While Beckworth talks about offering to take on small projects to start (which is definitely a reasonable course of action), I would also suggest that this is where branding can help your prospects overcome their fears. A consistent and professional brand identity helps people to recognize and trust you and your business. A professional brand image helps people to feel comfortable with the idea that you know what you are doing and our prospects will have confidence in you before you even work together.

If you are a small business owner who has a service-based business, I recommend this book. And I recommend you think about how a professional, consistent and compelling brand identity can build trust with your prospects, help you make more sales, and command higher prices for your services.

Whenever we design an identity project for a new company or service we usually create a letterhead as part of the logo package. The letterhead design gets sent off to the offset printer and the client has a ream of beautifully designed and printed stationery paper. But in this internet age, many people are sending letters, proposals, estimates, etc. only as electronic files. So if you use Microsoft Word to write letters, it makes sense to have an electronic version of your letterhead.

To ensure that we are able to design a cohesive look and feel for our client’s electronic letterhead, we start by creating many of the elements in either Illustrator or Photoshop and then pull them into Word.

I put together a video showing how to create an electronic version of a letterhead design. The tutorial includes how to get your graphic images to bleed to the edge of the page by overriding the margin settings in the header and footer area.

Not sure you have all the graphic elements ready to create your own electronic letterhead? Need a professional graphic designer to help you? Contact us and let us design both your printed and electronic stationery.