Corporate Identity, Logos, and You

When you look at a wall of business cards like this, it’s obvious that very few of them will stand out and catch a viewer’s attention. When you hand your card out at networking meetings, conferences, and sales calls, and it goes into someone’s pocket or briefcase with all the others, it may blend into the collection in the same way.



















Will your business card stand out from the pack? Does your web site, flyer, e-mail, conference presentation, or letterhead bring your company to mind immediately? One solution will make all these elements of your corporate identity memorable: a well-designed custom logo.

An excellent logo can be used in all elements of your corporate identity package:

• Corporate Logo
• Business Cards
• Web Site Design
• Flyers
• Posters
• Promotional Items
• PowerPoint Template
• Microsoft Word Template
• E-mail Marketing Template
• Brochures
• Letterhead
• Product Profile
• Corporate Graphics
• Brand Usage Guidelines
• Signage
• Billboards

The consistent use of a well-designed logo helps to make your brand immediately identifiable and to establish trust and recognition, as well as taking that all-important first step of attracting attention. A well-designed logo makes your clients and customers open that envelope, read that e-mail, and save that flyer, because they know right away that it comes from someone they’re happy to hear from: you.

What is a well-designed logo?

• The basic principles of design apply to logos as much as to all other designs. Simplicity, unity, balance, repetition, and intentional use of color and theme are essential. With logos, less is definitely more. You want an immediate impact on your first-time viewer, and immediate recognition after that. To get these effects, you need a striking and memorable logo. A professional logo design is a worthwhile investment.

• A logo should be meaningful, as well. The logo Sharp Hue, Inc. designed for our new Visual Cart system echoes the leaf shape of the main Sharp Hue logo, but we’ve put it in the form of a friendly shopping cart, because that’s exactly what Visual Cart is: a user-friendly new electronic shopping cart. When your logo creates the emotional and visual impact you want, your brand benefits. We work simultaneously with font, slogan, icon, and color, keeping in mind your target audience, to ensure that your logo does its job.

• We’ve moved past just making a great design on paper. In order to get the maximum from your design investment, you’ll want to use your logo on all the visible products of your company. That means that you’ll need to have your design in formats that will work for online, screen, and print applications. Sharp Hue, Inc. designs with vector graphics and “pixel precision” to ensure that the design will work with a variety of media. It’s also useful to make certain that your logo is invertable – that is, that it looks good on both light and dark backgrounds. This level of versatility maximizes the return on your investment. When we design your web site, we work with your existing logo, or design a new one for you, and make sure that it will shine with your web site design.
  

When is it time to change your logo? This is not a step to be taken lightly, since you’ve put a lot of time and effort into making your logo well-known and recognizable. Still, it is often an essential step:

• When your original logo doesn’t capture the image of your organization adequately. In this case, the sooner you change to a better logo, the sooner you’ll see better results.

• When your original logo needs modernization. UPS has redesigned their logo several times over the years as have many Fortune 500 companies. The basic UPS shield remains and the color scheme is similar, so they won’t give up recognizability, but the new look is sleeker and more modern in appearance.

• When your business has changed. If you have expanded your market, increased your offerings, or changed your delivery systems in exciting ways, it might be time to show those changes in new visual elements.

Check out the logo design page at SharpHue.com for examples of fresh, visually appealing logos. Does your logo measure up? To arrange for a professional custom logo design, to make your current logo available for multiple media formats, or to design a web site that complements your logo, contact us today at logos@sharphue.com.

Web Site Content Tips from Wikipedia

On the web, content is king. Excellent, dynamic content lures the search engines to visit your site more frequently, turns your casual visitors into regular readers, and gives your web site authority that can improve your rankings.

What kind of writing does it take to achieve these goals? Consider Wikipedia as an example.

Nearly any noun you type into a search engine will have Wikipedia on the front page of results. Tattoos, nanotechnology, Guglielmo Marconi, pilates – almost anything you search for, there Wikipedia will be.











How is Wikipedia getting those results? And how can you get a similar effect with the content of your own web site?

It’s often more cost-effective to have your content written professionally, especially when delays or diversion of staff from other tasks make the opportunity costs of in-house writing high. Sharp Hue, Inc. can provide professionally-written content designed to be effective for both the people who visit your web site and the search engines. Our knowledge of the best practices for search engine marketing and our objectivity allow us to find the words that will accomplish your purposes, faster and more effectively than you can do it yourself.

If you really want to write your own copy, though, you could take a leaf from Wikipedia’s Manual of Style. Where Wikipedia’s style manual differs from the one you’ve had on your shelf since college, it’s often a good SEO move.

Here are some examples:

• “If possible, an article title is the subject of the first sentence of the article... If the article title is an important term, it appears as early as possible.”

When you type a word or phrase into the search box at Google or Yahoo, the search engine looks for pages that start out with that word or phrase. Whenever possible, use your keywords right at the beginning of your page.

• “It is not useful and can be very distracting to mark all possible words as hyperlinks. Links should add to the user's experience; they should not detract from it by making the article harder to read. A high density of links can draw attention away from the high-value links that you would like your readers to follow up.”

While you generally want as many links as possible coming into your page, outgoing links from your page need to fulfill a specific purpose. Wikipedia’s point about the effect on human readers is very important; it’s also true that search engines will decide that your page is less important than the ones you link to if you use links out to do the job your own page ought to be doing.

• “Using color alone to convey information should not be done. Such information is not accessible to people with color blindness, on black-and-white printouts, on older computer displays with fewer colors, on monochrome displays (PDAs, cell phones), and so on.”

The manual happens to be talking about color here, but this is just one of the many places where they make an important point: think about your reader’s experience. Usability is one of the essential factors in designing your web site, and that includes the text.

We’ve looked at examples that have to do only with online writing; most of the rest of the Wikipedia style manual is similar to the paper style manuals on your bookshelf. Is that less important for optimizing your site for search? No. Google considers pages with writing errors – poor spelling, punctuation faults, bad grammar – less trustworthy than well-written pages. So will your human visitors. Even when you write your own content, you should consider having it edited and polished up by a professional.

Sharp Hue can assist you with all aspects of your web design, from concept to content. Call us to schedule a demonstration of our new product called Visual Cart, an e-commerce system built around writing good content that is friendly to both search engines and people.