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:

1. When you see the golden arches of McDonalds, what do you think of?
2. When you see the multi-colored font of Google on their home page what do you feel?
3. When you see a Nazi swastika, does it elicit any emotional or analytical response from you?
4. When you see the apple on a Macintosh computer, what happens inside you?

The answer you thought of or what you felt for any of those questions is branding.

When I was a kid, the golden arches of McDonalds meant a quarter pounder with cheese, ice cream sundae and getting to bond with my dad. Now, as an adult and after two unfortunate incidents back-to-back, I see the golden arches and think of vomiting. Unfortunately for McD’s, both cases are equally steeped in branding.

When I see a Xerox logo I think and feel absolutely nothing. I don’t own a Xerox and I don’t really want to, though I couldn’t tell you why. I don’t even remember ever using one, but that’s also branding, isn’t it? The logo means nothing to me.

When I see the Macintosh apple, I don’t really think of anything specifically, but I do get the same feeling that I do when I’m creating something. I get that feeling of magic, and that something utterly insanely bitchin is going to happen soon.

These are all the province of branding. I guess we could loosely define branding as: the message or feeling that is delivered or evoked or recalled upon viewing an identity of some sort.

If a company gives you the warm-fuzzies, that’s branding. If a company makes you want to laugh, that’s branding. If a website looks shoddy and unprofessional, that’s their branding.

What’s the problem with your website?

Though we’re going to talk about websites now, what follows is true for brick-and-mortar companies as well. It’s also true for individuals. Remember that when you’re on your next job interview.

Why your site’s brand is suffering

• The problem is that you’re using a free theme that hundreds or thousands of other people are using.
• The problem is that you created or hired someone to create a logo and you slapped it on your site, thinking it would insta-brand you.
• The problem is that when someone stops by your site, you’ve got (according to web usability surveys) about three seconds to grab them before they leave.
• The problem is that you bought a $49 or $99 cookie-cutter logo from a logo house and it doesn’t really do much for your site.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not trying to put myself out of work here. A good logo is an absolute necessity, because it is part of your total branding package.

But done wrong, a logo is nothing more than a bumper sticker. It might be entertaining or look great, but it doesn’t do anything for the saleability of the car.

It has to be the right logo and it has to work hand in hand with the rest of your site and whatever qualities you want it to exude. A humorous website, for example, with an ultra-slick medical looking logo is not really creating a cohesive brand.

In contrast, a medical website with a shoddy logo isn’t creating a very good brand either.

A sports website with a sports logo…that fits, right? Branding.

How will branding solve your problems?

If your website is suffering any of the above woes, proper branding can alleviate them all. As we looked at already, branding is partially the visual identity of a company, but it’s also the feeling they elicit from you. A strong brand will give feelings of:

Familiarity
Comfort
Stability
Professionalism
Memorability
Market Domination
Success

Good branding will give you these qualities (if it’s done right).

If you’re in doubt about whether or not you need a brand, that should end here. You do. It’s more important than ever. There are millions and millions of websites and companies out there. And with the speed of technology and communications being the way they, we see more brands and we see them faster than ever before.

In this constant stream of brands and products, if yours blends in, it’s gone. Poof.

My brand, a quick case study

Off to the right there is a little 125×125 badge I use for advertising. As of this moment, this badge shows up in exactly three other places on the whole internet.

Obviously I designed that badge and logo, but let’s say I’d paid a designer to do it. Ordinarily something like that would cost from $200 up to $500. Is that worth it?

Within the past two weeks, this badge, from the three locations in which it shows up, has already earned me over well $500 in commissions. I know the brand is growing and inspiring confidence because I receive tons of emails that say, “I keep seeing your little hook logo all over the place.”

Why does this badge work?

First, it’s an alright design. I mean…it’s not horrid to look at. You know, there’s no green with pink stripes and six different fonts. So that’s alright.

Second, it’s legible, which isn’t necessarily true for all 125×125 badges you see.

Third, the tagline “Design that kills…in a good way” is sort of funny-ish. Or maybe it’s just weird, but it’s not boring or stagnant or stuffy.

But as we’ve discussed, such a badge doesn’t make a brand. That’s why I make it my first priority to do other things that solidify the image I want to portray. I do the things a tiny ad like that couldn’t possibly do on its own.

Other parts of the branding package

Customer service : When a customer or potential customer writes me, I usually write back within 5 minutes or so. That’s pretty much unheard of online, unless you happen to know that your customers are the most important part of your business.

Sometimes it takes me longer to write back, but usually not. And if it ever takes me more than 24 hours to get back to a client, something is awfully wrong. Like possibly my head fell off or I was attacked by gargoyles in my bathroom.

Personality : When I write my customers back, they get the same service as my badge portrays, namely that I don’t act like something I’m not. I have a sense of humor that I don’t try to hide. I have a personality that isn’t “put on hold” until I get to know you better. Who I am makes my work what it is. They’re inseparable.

This isn’t by any means me patting my own back. It’s just what I do for my brand.

So, long story still far too long, get yourself a slick logo. Get a nice website. Do what you can to polish your identity, but don’t stop there. Act the professional and be professional in what you do.

Your branding will never be better!

I wrote this post and I’m going to write the next one too. Subscribe now and you won’t miss it!

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 before letting the public know about it. I showed him some samples of my work, Leo gave me the thumbs-up and minutes later I was working on his new header and logo.

Being a fairly simple and Zen fellow himself, Leo’s request was for something simple and not too over the top. As a matter of fact, at the time he wasn’t even sure he wanted an iconic logo or just some slick text.

Text style exploration

In true David Airey style (and a big thanks to David for putting so much effort and education into his posts), I’m going to walk you through the process of designing the logo and header for Leo.

I started with the fonts, just to give Leo some things to check out while I worked on the logo. I figured a blog about writing would utilize one of the following font styles:

1. Hand-writing
2. Typewriter-ish (but not too typewriter-ish, like the courier of Copyblogger)

These are some of the fonts I played with for the hand-written style:

And here are some I found for the more “type-ish” style:

Such hand-writing and type-style fonts are a little too busy visually, and doing all of “WritetoDone” in such a font would be pretty goofy.

Sidenote: One rule I like to follow in design is that too much eye-candy or too much “busy-ness” gives the eye nothing to focus on. It’s like a guitar player who always plays a million notes a second. After a while it just becomes a monotonous stream with no dynamics. Similarly with graphic design, things just become a mess when there’s too much going on.

A better route, or at least the one I like to take, is to be subtle and minimal for most of the design. Then you break out of the box in one spot with some color or crazy font. That spot then becomes visually interesting and gives the piece a certain dynamic, but the design as a whole still remains lightweight and easy to digest.

I’m all about such subtlety, and luckily so is Leo, so we wanted just a splash of these specialized fonts in the logo. The rest could be in a more commonplace font. Gill Sans is a very stable and sturdy font, so I went with that. In bold, which is even more sturdy. Plus I love Gill Sans. If Gill Sans was a woman, she would certainly be my wife.

One of the great things about the title “WritetoDone,” and any other time you get to work with little auxiliary words like “to” and “the,” is that you can use them for the dynamics we’ve been talking about. In this case, the dynamic spiciness came from a font called James Fajardo.

Here are some samples of how the combo of Gill Sans Bold and James Fajardo looked:

Leo and I both liked the subtle use of color and out of the ordinary font, so that was it for the title exploration.

Logo exploration

Again, this being a writing blog, I produced logos with the following subject matter:

1. Sheets of paper
2. A feather writing quill
3. A book/notebook

Each logo sample appears next to fonts, which helps the client visualize them in context instead of just floating alone in space. I always try to send as much context as possible. Actually, though you don’t see them here, I was sending Leo these logo samples placed atop screenshots of his site.

At this point, we were still exploring font styles, so here are the logos I produced alongside some font choices:

Sheets of paper logos

I really liked that top one but it was a little amorphous and nondescript. (I don’t know what those words mean but it makes my parents proud when I say stuff like that.)

Feather Quill logos

I am still completely and totally in love with the top and bottom samples above. Especially the orange paper with the feather. I’m determined to use it somewhere so…keep your eyes open and maybe it’ll show up on the web someday.

Book/notebook logos

Leo liked the final, more photo-realistic notebook on the bottom.

Final Logo and Header

The combo of the Gill Sans Bold/James Fajardo fonts, and the notebook/pen icon worked pretty well.

Except for one thing. Having all the text and the icon in one horizontal line stretched it out too much, pushing it into the tagline (which isn’t shown here, but can be seen on the site). We stacked the words to give it some punch and break it apart from the tagline. It worked perfectly and what you see below is the final version of the WritetoDone header (minus the tagline, which was a slam dunk as we just font-matched the Gill Sans Bold).

To see the full logo/header in place, and to read Leo’s brilliant work, head over to WritetoDone and check it out.

I’d also like to give a public thanks to Stephen Smith of HDBizBlog for getting Leo and I in touch with each other.

He earned a 10% commission for his referral, which I should mention is standard policy here at Charfish Design. Anyone, and I mean any man, woman, child or amoeba who refers work my way earns 10% of the final project cost. It’s free money for you, so send your friends and family here and let me know.

On the other hand, if you’ve got no friends or family and would just like to keep coming back here to read posts, be sure to Subscribe Now!

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 write” and more towards him as the writer.

Because I love type fonts and typography in general, I decided to keep the W but then have an actual guy standing there, instead of some stupid insipid G. The letter G sucks anyway. Everyone knows that.

We didn’t want to go the route of actually having his own body be part of the logo, so I started looking through stock photos. Right away I found a guy leaning and knew he’d be perfect to lean up against the W. He’s cool, calm, collected and standing at a jaunty pose. And when I made a silhouette out of the photo he became mysterious as well. I added the reflection and shadow and ten minutes later it was finished.

The client loved the idea and it turned out to be, at this point, my favorite logo I’ve ever done. Here it is…

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 remembered something Collis said in his tutorial about the redesign of FreelanceSwitch. In that tutorial he talks a bit about the depth that even really subtle gradients can give you. In looking at the preliminary version of the logo you can see there are no gradients.

That’s the problem. It looks flat and amateurish to me. I took Collis’ advice and gave gradients to the white text as well as the background. They’re subtle for sure, but look at the difference in the final version of the logo. I also added a vertical line, just for some visual interest and to separate the two logo bits. Here’s how it came out.

Much better! The gradients made all the difference in the world and I ended up loving the logo just because of those changes.

What do you think?

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 stating:

You never know what the client wants unless you ask.

Though I regrettably haven’t always done this, nowadays I check all of the following with my clients before I so much as put pencil to a stray napkin. This not only ensures the work goes faster, but that the client will ultimately get what he asked for. That alone will keep you in business as a designer for a long long time.

Here’s my checklist for logo design. Feel free to use any, all or none of it as you wish.

Logo Design Checklist

1. Is the logo for the company or a product?
2. What is the overall mood of the company?
• Playful?
• Serious?
• Ultra-professional?
3. Should the logo reflect the mood of the company or is it stand-alone?
4. Do you envision something techy or more organic?
5. Any colors you have in mind?
6. What is the primary product of the company?
7. What are the demographics of your customers?
8. Who is your competition?
9. Where will the logo appear on a product?
• Letterhead?
• Business cards?
• Television?
• All of the above?
10. What is the purpose of the logo?

I know that last question is a little weird. You may even get some blank stares when you ask a client what the purpose of a logo is. After all, every client knows the purpose of a logo is to be as famous as McDonalds! But get it answered anyway.

And if your client doesn’t know how to answer one of these questions, make sure you spend even more time clarifying milestones and the end-product. Any project that’s even slightly nebulous at project outset has a tendency to grow horns and cloven hooves before it’s done.