Branding is not a logo. It’s not a fancy font or tagline, and it’s not a color. And it’s not some “indefinable quality that you’ll know when you see.” Designers say this when they want to charge you a bazillion dollars while they’re walking the astral plane looking for “true essence.”

Branding is none those things, though each may play a part.

What branding really is

Let me ask you some questions and you’ll understand the simplicity of branding:

When you see the golden arches of McDonalds, what do you think of?

When you see the multi-colored font of Google on their home page what do you feel?

When you see a Nazi swastika, does it elicit any emotional or analytical response from you?

When you see …

Just because you use an out-of-the-box theme doesn’t mean you can’t make it something special.

I recently got the opportunity and honor to work with Leo Babauta, the creator of the ultra-successful ZenHabits blog.

Recently Leo released a new blog that is already well on its way to becoming ultra-successful in its own right. His new blog, WritetoDone.com, is a great place to pick up what Leo has to teach about the art and craft of writing.

Thanks to a great pal and erstwhile client of mine, Stephen Smith, Leo and I were introduced to each other. At the time, WritetoDone hadn’t been unveiled yet, and Leo wanted to give it some more oomph and branding …

Finished the site and logo for the How to Write Guy a while ago, but wanted to say a couple things about the logo.

First, it’s unfortunate but I lost all of my napkin sketches for this, which I love show for process. Needless to say, most of the early versions were a “W” and a “G” in various layouts. I’m sure you could imagine some. Put a W next to a G. Put a W on top of a G. Put a W sort of behind a G. Now play with colors.

It was no good.

The main problem with these W/G configurations was that they deemphasized the “THE Write Guy” part of the site. The client wanted the branding to lead away from “how-to …

Here’s my latest logo and header design, done for Ignite Living.

With a name like Ignite Living I figured right off the bat that the design would be split in two parts. One would be more of a graphical logo utilizing fire in some way, and the other would be “Ignite Living” written in full. Most of the design time was spent trying to find a font that would look good in both situations. I finally settled on Baskerville Semibold.

The first version came out like this:

For some reason I hated it. I could see it had potential but it wasn’t sitting right with me. For the life of me I couldn’t figure out what was wrong.

Then …

I recently had a client who wanted a logo designed for a line of diet bars. While I was interviewing him before starting my designs, one of my questions sparked an interesting answer from him.

He said he was afraid of his diet products appearing “too diet”. He wanted something more “frivolous and comfortable” which is something I never would have guessed or designed for. How much time would he and I have spent if I hadn’t known this?

Because he had no problem with full disclosure, he and I had a great working relationship. After the initial logo was done, he hired me on to do six others for some other health products.

So, the obvious rule that needs no …