Is it time for a logo Makeover?

How do you know if it's time to give your logo a makeover?

Start by evaluating what works and what doesn't. Your logo may only need a few small changes or may need to be redesigned from the ground up. Remember your logo is not about what you like or dislike but what appeals to your market. It's important to start this process by being honest with yourself.

The good news is this is an excellent opportunity to reevaluate your brand and how your logo fits within the scheme of your goals. Does your logo project the essence of your brand? Has your vision and mission changed over the years? Has your market changed? It's difficult to deliver on your brand promise if one or all of these elements have changed.

Find out what it is about your logo that still works. What elements of your present logo does your market respond to? Is it an image, logotype, colors, your tagline? Ask your existing customers what they like about your logo and what they would change.

Many logos simply need the application of a reductive approach—removing and simplifying the mark. Take Starbucks as an example. As they've grown over the years their mark has become highly recognizable allowing them the freedom of removing their name from the logo/mark. I wouldn't recommend this for most small businesses because few small businesses have the brand recognition of Starbucks. However, you can see that each time Starbucks refreshed their logo a reductive process was implemented—simplifying the mark to it's bare essence and increasing its visual recognition.

One of the most consistent mistakes I see in logo design is font choice. So many logos are designed with trendy fonts that come and go in just a few years. Can you imaging being a large corporation and spending millions of dollars on a new logo only to have to update it a year or two later? It just doesn't happen.

This is one area where I recommend small businesses think like a large corporation and use a traditional font as the foundation of your logo design. One exception to the rule is restaurants and nightclubs. Successful restaurants tend to change very quickly depending on the trends. But for most small businesses it just doesn't make sense.

If you do decide to make changes to your company's logo you will need to update your entire identity system (everything your logo is applied to). Even if you only change your logo's color(s) you may need to adjust the style, look and feel, and coloring of other brand elements such as your photograph or graphic elements (other than your logo).

One last important point is to remember—your logo is not a work of art but a communications tool. If your logo does not communicate what your business provides, either product or service, you're loosing potential buyers.

The Curse of Knowledge...

Made to Stick is a great book about crafting ideas and sharing them with people who can make a difference. We all have ideas but most never take off. This book shares the stories of those who made their ideas stick.

I was especially drawn to the chapter on "the curse of knowledge". It's stuck with me and I thought I'd share an excerpt with you from the Made to Stick web site—try it for yourself.
The following is an excerpt from Made to Stick web site: http://www.madetostick.com/excerpts/

Tappers and Listeners 

In 1990, Elizabeth Newton earned a Ph.D. in psychology at Stanford by studying a simple game in

which she assigned people to one of two roles: "tappers" or "listeners." Tappers received a list of twenty-five well-known songs, such as "Happy Birthday to You" and "The StarSpangled Banner." Each tapper was asked to pick a song and tap out the rhythm to a listener (by knocking on a table). The listener's job was to guess the song, based on the rhythm being tapped. (By the way, this experiment is fun to try at home if there's a good "listener" candidate nearby.)

The listener's job in this game is quite difficult. Over the course of Newton's experiment, 120 songs were tapped out. Listeners guessed only 2.5 percent of the songs: 3 out of 120.

But here's what made the result worthy of a dissertation in psychology. Before the listeners guessed the name of the song, Newton asked the tappers to predict the odds that the listeners would guess correctly. They predicted that the odds were 50 percent. The tappers got their message across 1 time in 40, but they thought they were getting their message across 1 time in 2. Why?

When a tapper taps, she is hearing the song in her head. Go ahead and try it for yourself — tap out "The Star-Spangled Banner." It's impossible to avoid hearing the tune in your head. Meanwhile, the listeners can't hear that tune — all they can hear is a bunch of disconnected taps, like a kind of bizarre Morse Code.

In the experiment, tappers are flabbergasted at how hard the listeners seem to be working to pick up the tune. Isn't the song obvious? The tappers' expressions, when a listener guesses "Happy Birthday to You" for "The Star-Spangled Banner," are priceless: How could you be so stupid?

It's hard to be a tapper. The problem is that tappers have been given knowledge (the song title) that makes it impossible for them to imagine what it's like to lack that knowledge. When they're tapping, they can't imagine what it's like for the listeners to hear isolated taps rather than a song. This is the Curse of Knowledge. Once we know something, we find it hard to imagine what it was like not to know it. Our knowledge has "cursed" us. And it becomes difficult for us to share our knowledge with others, because we can't readily re-create our listeners' state of mind.

The tapper/listener experiment is reenacted every day across the world. The tappers and listeners are CEOs and frontline employees, teachers and students, politicians and voters, marketers and customers, writers and readers. All of these Groups rely on ongoing communication, but, like the tappers and listeners, they suffer from enormous information imbalances. When a CEO discusses "unlocking shareholder value," there is a tune playing in her head that the employees can't hear.

It's a hard problem to avoid — a CEO might have thirty years of daily immersion in the logic and conventions of business. Reversing the process is as impossible as un-ringing a bell. You can't unlearn what you already know. There are, in fact, only two ways to beat the Curse of Knowledge reliably. The first is not to learn anything. The second is to take your ideas and transform them.

This book will teach you how to transform your ideas to beat the Curse of Knowledge. The six principles presented earlier are your best weapons. They can be used as a kind of checklist. Let's take the CEO who announces to her staff that they must strive to "maximize shareholder value."

Is this idea simple? Yes, in the sense that it's short, but it lacks the useful simplicity of a proverb. Is it unexpected? No. Concrete? Not at all. Credible? Only in the sense that it's coming from the mouth of the CEO. Emotional? Um, no. A story? No.

Contrast the "maximize shareholder value" idea with John F. Kennedy's famous 1961 call to "put a man on the moon and return him safely by the end of the decade." Simple? Yes. Unexpected? Yes. Concrete? Amazingly so. Credible? The goal seemed like science fiction, but the source was credible. Emotional? Yes. Story? In miniature.

Had John F. Kennedy been a CEO, he would have said, "Our mission is to become the international leader in the space industry through maximum team-centered innovation and strategically targeted aerospace initiatives." Fortunately, JFK was more intuitive than a modern-day CEO; he knew that opaque, abstract missions don't captivate and inspire people. The moon mission was a classic case of a communicator's dodging the Curse of Knowledge. It was a brilliant and beautiful idea — a single idea that motivated the actions of millions of people for a decade.

Nonprofits—Make Your Site Donor Friendly

According to smashingmagazine.com nonprofits share many of the same best practices as any other website. However, the call to action requires a slightly different focus. Check out SM's post with 8 easy steps to improving your nonprofit website, which also includes 20 great example sites.

Smashing Magazine—Best Practices for your nonprofit website...

Why Small Businesses Fail

The E Myth

“40 percent of all startups fail in the first year of business.

Within five years, more than 80 percent of small businesses will have failed.

And the rest of the bad news is, if you own a small business that has managed to survive for five years or more, don't breathe a sigh of relief. Because more that 80 percent of small businesses that survive the first five years fail in the second five."

~ Michael Gerber


The opening of Michael Gerber's book, The E Myth, clearly illustrates the incredible challenges of starting, growing and maintaining a small business. What surprised me most after rereading The E Myth, 20 years later, was the lack of improvement in the failure rate of small business startups. These are pretty sobering statistics and they made me wonder why would anyone go into business knowing the chance of succeeding. The second question is—why do so many small business startups fail?

The E Myth covers many of the issues that keep small businesses from succeeding. It's a quick and highly informative read and well worth the time of anyone starting or running a small business. You'll discover how to avoid some of the biggest mistakes most small business owners make and how to make your business work for you instead of the other way around.

The E Myth introduced me to how I perceived and ran my own business as well as how I advised clients. It was an epiphany that exposed all my struggles, failures, and misperceptions regarding my personal concept of what my business should be. I learned very quickly that I was the epitome of what Michael Gerber describes as "the technician".

It dawned on me, while I was reading the book for the second time, I wasn't reading just any business book; I was reading an outline of a process that has come to be known as brand development. The term just hadn't been defined or coined yet. Michael Gerber introduces us to the most important elements of the branding process and applies these strategies to the small business.

Brand development is an all-encompassing process of business development. A good brand strategy reviews every aspect of a business and exposes what’s being done right and what needs to be adjusted. However, when it comes to the majority of small businesses the owner is the primary obstacle to the success of their business. I believe this book helped to spark a new perception of starting and running a small business by establishing the core purpose of why anyone starts their business.

Twenty years ago, after reading this book for the first time, I realized many of my small business clients had become statistics shortly after opening their business. It seemed the sign company was removing the signs as soon as they had installed them. As a young graphic designer I wondered, "Did I do something wrong?" Did I misunderstand their demographics, their mission? Did I use the wrong color, the wrong font in the logo and communications? Was it my work?

Over time, I started to monitor and understand the issues that caused the downfall of so many of these small business startups. I found that most of them were skipping on the basics—like bypassing the proper licenses and permits. To this day, many of the small businesses I work with have not taken the important steps first. For example, meeting with an attorney and accountant.

My own professional experience has shown that businesses that understand the entire scope of their business and their core purpose for being in business are generally the ones that succeed and are still around. They understand the purpose of their business on every level and understand that the business exists to serve them not the other way around. Still so many small business owners refuse to understand and adapt these basic principles because of their own fears and misperceptions.

The E Myth is a great starting point for any small business owner. If you’re interested in discovering what’s standing in your way to a great business and great life I highly recommend you start by reading this book.