Not Just Pretty | Building An Effective Small Business Brand

Thrivin' Edibles Brand Story

Logo, Stationery Kit, Website and Brochure

Thrivin' Edibles is a raw cuisine company, and I designed their logo to work for their many different offerings - from catering, to meal delivery, to packaged snacks available in the stores, to their dessert line.

The icon of the logo is a leafy branch, with a sense of flow and ease to it. The branch has 3 leaves because having three visual elements with a sense of movement helps the viewer's eye move around the logo.

The font in the logo continues the easy flow of the icon with it's slight tilt.

And, of course, to make the leaves look healthy and vibrant, the color palette is a bright, clear green.

The rest of the marketing kit has visual consistency through the horizontal wave and consistent photography.

Why All The Search Engine Secrecy?

The search engines try to be good at keeping their methods of ranking websites top-secret. You never quite know exactly why such-and-so company wound up in the #1 slot and your company is way down on page 3. You wonder if it's because the search engines like it better. Or because it knows the secret handshake.

So, you start doing research—and there's a lot of conflicting information out there:

• Maybe Google will rank you higher if your site doesn't have Flash. But then you hear that it might be able to read your Flash presentation text after all. 
  
  

Or, the search engines might favor you if your site's URL has keywords in it. But those keywords might have to be separated by dashes. Or underscores might workÉ 

You've heard that filling your site with keywords is the only way to get noticed by the search engines. But what if you want to have a very simple, clean, neat-looking site with few words? Isn't there a way you can hide all that icky-looking SEO stuff somewhere in the code of your pages? Shouldn't your web designer be able to help out? 

And, what's this about links? Do you need to have a big links page with the addresses of every site you've ever heard of? Will that help? 

Sometimes, your site can rise or fall in the rankings without you making any changes at all. One week, you're #4, then the next you're at #32, and then you rocket back up to #11. How does that even happen if you have been on vacation the whole time and haven't touched your site?

The more research you do, the more hopeless the entire ordeal seems. Why bother trying to figure out the mysteries of the search engines? It certainly seems easier to just give up on SEO entirely and to do something else with your time.

Are they just out to confuse you?

Why would the search engines go to all this trouble to keep their logic and qualifiers so secret? Why not just publish their requirements and make it easy for you, the overtaxed small business owner, to get exactly what you want?

That would make it too easy for everyone—not just you.

The answer is that if the search engines published their requirements, it would be almost too easy for anyone to get the results they wanted. And this means not only would it be easier for you—the small business owner—to get attention, but it would also be easier for big corporations to lock your site out of the top 10 results and for sleazy old site spammers to pull the search engines' attention away from your awesome site and over to their crummy ones.

In a way, it would probably make getting into the top 10 even more difficult for you—because it would increase the level of knowledge your competition has about search engine processes as well.

They want to get to know you, not have you tell them what they want to hear.

Also, the search engines want to hear what you've really got to say. If they told you exactly how to get into the top 10, straight from the horse's mouth, it would be like walking into a job interview where the interviewer has already given you answers to the questions they're planning to ask, and all you have to do to get the job is to read the answers. Now, while that might make the interview easier and less stressful, the interviewer isn't going to get a picture of your capabilities, personality, or really anything about you. They're going to get the answers they want to hear, but when you come in to work, they may be sorely disappointed by your performance.

The search engines would have a similar problem if they gave everyone the answer to how to get well-ranked. The search engines' goal is to give people who are looking for a particular resource or an answer to a question—searchers—the best and most impartial answers they possibly can.

If they laid out a simple process for getting well-ranked, they'd have everyone telling them what they want to hear, and then they'd have a harder job of sorting the information they get into the type of referrals and information that searchers want. They'd have to develop more hurdles and filters just to deliver results that make sense for their users.

They're not just being mean.

The search engines aren't trying to confuse you or to keep you out of a secret club. They're not trying to make your life hard. They're just trying to keep their results fair and to give high-quality answers to the searchers using their services.

If you want them to rank you well, keep that in mind. Make sure that your site is a good resource for people who are looking for the types of products and services you provide. Add information to your site as well as promotional copy and images, so that searchers can get the answers they're looking for. The search engines appreciate that.

Make your site a resource instead of just a sales force, and along the way, you'll make the search engines happy to recommend you to information seekers. 

What's that font?

Have you ever seen a font in a magazine or on a website and thought, "Hey, this is the font I want to be able to tell my designer to try in my logo. The only problem is, I don't know what it's called!"

Well, now you can find out at WhatTheFont.com. Upload an image to their database, and it will pick the best match for your scan from the MyFonts.com database. Sometimes it won't get a match, but it's a got a pretty wide library to match from, and even if it can't find the exact font it will specify some that are very close.

Your own handwriting as a font!

You never know when you might stumble across a need for a handwriting font - maybe you're designing "personalized invitations" for an event, or you want to add a signature that looks sort of, but not exactly like yours to your website. Or, you may just want to get your handwriting as a font because it's cool and pretty inexpensive. Just $9!

http://www.fontifier.com/

Creative Techs

If you're trying to figure out how to use Photoshop, Illustrator or any of those fancy design programs to design your own materials, here's a great resource with a free newsletter full of tips:

http://www.creativetechs.com/

Also, you might try the eLearning on lynda.com - if you want to learn a particular application in-depth (say, Dreamweaver so that you can do your own website maintenance)

Online Pantone Color Chart

Pantone colors are indispensible when you want to get accurate color on a print job - and using this online Pantone color chip book to communicate your color preferences to your designer (or, even just exactly what "lime green" means to you):

http://www.australiasigns.com.au/qsonline/PMS-color-chart.html

The 6 Jobs of Your Logo's Icon

Preface:

For reference, let's recap the basic rules of creating a small business logo:

1. The logo has 3 parts: the icon, the font, and the color palette.

2. These parts work together to tell your company's brand story and to communicate your Brand Definition to your best clients. They are never meant to tell the story on their own.

3. Each part of the logo has a specific job. Now, we haven't talked a lot about this yet, so let's get down to it.

The 6 Jobs of Your Logo's Icon

Many entrepreneurs think that the icon for their logo should be a picture that appeals to them personally. They go into the logo design process looking to create an icon with personal symbolic meaning, because they think that the icon's job is to appeal to them personally as well as to look interesting.

This is a case of the icon's job description not being well written. In a perfect world, entrepreneurs love their logo icons—and personally identify with their meaning. But, that's the logo icon's last, and least important, job. First, it must do several more important jobs for your company.

What could be more important than appealing to the person running the business?

After all, if you love your logo, there's a good chance other people will see it and like it as well—and you want your logo to get compliments, right?

Wrong. At least, partially wrong. The logo icon's main job is to tell your brand story through the visual meaning of the symbols it uses.

Your logo's icon is a drawing or piece of art composed of symbols that have visual meaning. This visual meaning is called symbology, and it can help your logo to communicate with your customer.

There are two major types of symbols: abstract and representational. Abstract symbols are drawings that don't necessarily look like a thing or object. They can be basic shapes such as circles, squares, triangles—even dodecahedrons—and swooshes. Representational symbols look like a thing, object, animal, or person.

An abstract symbol of a circle can be used to symbolize trust, completeness, or to highlight another foreground element. A representational symbol of a leaf can be used to represent nature, growth, health, or eco-friendliness. You can even layer these elements one on top of another—a leaf on a circular background, perhaps—to give your logo icon more visual meaning.

How do you decide which symbolic message your logo should send?

There's a good chance that your company wouldn't be best served by a logo that consists of a circle or leaf, but then, how do you decide what your logo should look like?

The message your icon communicates should tell the most important part of your business's brand definition story. Your brand definition consists of who you are, what you do, what makes you different from your competition, and who you work best with. Usually, when you put your thoughts about these 4 elements down on paper, you find that you have some simple but compelling ideas about these areas of your business. And one or two are truly interesting from your customers' point of view.

Those thoughts are the foundation for what you want your logo to say. Just which symbols communicate your story is hard to say without knowing it, but once you have defined your brand and know which portions of it are really compelling for your customers, you can do some symbolic research (and there are plenty of books and websites about symbols) or hire a designer to translate that definition into symbols for you.

You said that the icon has several other jobs. What else does it have to do?

Your logo's icon has a handful of other jobs. It has to be:

• Memorable — it should stick in your customers' minds. Your logo icon will become the face of your business, so you want to make sure it is easy to remember. 
  
  
• Unique — so that your logo doesn't look like any of your competitors' logos. You don't want to get confused with them—or sued for copyright infringement. 
  
  
• Scalable — so that you can blow it up to the size of a billboard or shrink it down to the size of a postage stamp. This will enable you to use it across all of your marketing materials, regardless of size. 
  
  
• Timeless — so that it doesn't wind up looking dated or "cheesy" in a couple of years. This will ensure that you don't have to redesign it just as your customers are getting to know and recognize it. 
  
  
• Appealing — so that your customers like it and are pleased when they see it, and so that you can tolerate (notice, I didn't say "love") looking at it for years to come.

If your logo icon can accomplish these 6 jobs—in this order of importance—you'll have a design that will work well for your company and help you connect with your customers. 

Wordle

I've seen these on several other blogs I visit, and figured that it was about time to create my own. Wordle.net is basically a site that takes the content of your blog and creates word art from it, that you can then customize the font and color palette on. Neat!

A shout-out to my printer

Jennifer Points at Allegra Print and Imaging is the best. Always getting projects done quickly, they look excellent and are always delivered to the client perfectly. All at a small-business-friendly price.

If you ever need 2- or 3- color collateral materials printed especially, she's your gal. She does a ton of other types of printing, but I'm especially impressed with her work in those areas.

Oh, and her phone number is 650-358-8685. Located in Foster City, CA.

Pig pirate flag

Some friends asked me about designing a pirate flag that involved bacon in some way.

If pigs had a pirate flag, then it would have bacon strips instead of cross bones.

And I'd call it the Jolly Porker.

Right?