Branding Step Four

Wow! It's Thursday, good people of the blogosphere, and you made it over Hump Day. Just one more tiny day to go until the weekend will arrive! Can I hear some celebration, please? Continuing with my branding sequence of posts, today we're discussing naming. You're right, this could've been day one, but I wanted you to start thinking about the pictures related to your brand and to get excited about the possibilities before I dove headfirst into names.

IF you're a writer and you're using a pen name, one of the things you have to consider is your genre. It's only a half joke when you do the little test to determine your erotica writer name. Something like Bunnie Whipshard is a pretty telling pen name. Plus, the logo possibilities are out of this world.

Ha ha! Sorry, images of bunnies with fluffy tails and dominatrix masks just passed through my brain. Moving on...

As my example above shows, your name makes a difference. But, when thinking about your mark, you want something that's going to stand out in the crowd. If I'd wanted to take my logo in a fun direction, I probably would've used a cup of steaming coffee (Jo = Cup of Joe = Coffee). See the correlation?  My tag line could even have been something like: Jo Michaels Blog - Your Daily Cup of Joe. But I find coffee cups as logos to be way overdone; besides, I'm not a coffee shop.

When thinking about your naming, consider how it might be possible to move your logo from one thing you do to another. If you're an expert on something, consider using an image related to that expertise. Let's take a look at my friend, Sandi Tuttle, from The Average Woman in a Superwoman World blog. Here's her blog banner:

Her logo is an average female icon, used on many bathroom doors to indicate women, with a superwoman cape draped around her shoulders. It's simple and effective. Her blog is about making average women the best they can be, inside and out. It's fitting, huh?

This is a great example of branding! That logo appears on her blog, radio show site, Facebook, and products. When I got her coffee mug with the "If I have wings... Why can't I fly?" quote on it, her logo graced the other side. No matter what facet she places herself in, she'll always be the average superwoman.

It's this type of branding and naming we should all be embracing. If we use these tools to their full potential, we'll be instantly recognizable no matter where we show up.

Let me give you one more example before I let you go!

If your name is Bunnie Whipshard, and your mark is that bunny with the dominatrix mask, you could brand it like this:

Bunnie Whipshard - Author
Bunnie Whipshard - Photography
Bunnie Whipshard - S&M Techniques
Bunnie Whipshard - S&M Toy Design

Do you see where I'm going with this?

Have you thought about your name and what a mark associated with that name could do for you?

Come on back tomorrow to catch the post on look and feel!

Well, that's all for today, folks! Until next time, WRITE ON!

Jo

Branding Step Three

Happy hump day, good people of the blogosphere! How lovely is it our week is almost half over? Very! Today, we're talking about what your logo says about you. So, grab those pens and notebooks and let's get going!

Here are a few of the logos I've designed and a few belonging to major corporations. Let's take a look and see what they represent.

Anyone see the surveyor's mark and the fun I had playing with the typography on this one?

This one is pretty obvious, no? DNA design, again, repeated in the typography. Like a computer doctor.

Fictional company. Logo is to represent movement forward in new construction techniques and residential windmills. Go green! The blue is to represent the sky.

This one, I love. Green to represent growth. Roots to represent stability. This community club has been around for six generations that keep branching off. Movement representing the wind on the ridge from left to right.

My own INDIE Books Gone Wild logo. Strong type with the indie and the book embracing one another. Our red color represents wildness yet we bring that stability and guarantee through in the black.





Now go take a look at McDonald's. Those golden arches represent bent french fries. Bethcha never thought of that, huh? Nike? The swoosh is representative of the wings on the god's shoes. Pretty clever!

So, what does your logo say about you? Mine was designed to represent flourish like a quill pen and stability like a solid letterform. See how the M wraps around the J? Blue is my favorite color, and my mark will emboss beautifully on that hardcover book someday.

If you're using an image as your identifier, think ahead to your business cards and printed materials. You can add a mark to an image and later use it as a standalone. Think about color, voice, and what you're saying about yourself with your mark. Come on back tomorrow and join me to discuss naming!

If you don't have a mark, why? Is it because you don't know how to make one or you don't think you need one?

Well, that's all for today, folks! Until next time, WRITE ON!

Jo

Branding Step Two

Happy Tuesday, good people of the blogosphere! This week is all about branding yourself with a logo, design, color scheme, name, and look and feel. As promised yesterday, I'm going into color schemes today. Grab your pens and notebooks and let's get going, eh?

You're probably most familiar with RGB (that's Red Green Blue). These colors are created with light. What you're looking at on your monitor is not what you'll see in print when using a CMYK (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Black) printer. Why? Because these colors are created with ink.

It's a long, drawn-out process so I'm not going into all that. What I'm going to do is break it down and explain why you only want two colors plus black in any print job you send to a traditional printer. I'm also going to tell you a little about spot colors (PMS colors).

Now, your printer at home likely uses RGB (unless you're using one with individual cartridges for each color). This means your colors will be close to what you see on your monitor (if it's calibrated).

Big printing houses don't use RGB printers. They do a print run and lay down each color individually with each run. So, if you have a three color print job, that's three runs through the press. It costs you money for each run of your print job through the printer. More colors = more runs = more money out of your pocket.

It may be okay if you're only having fifty business cards printed. But what about when you have two thousand done? What if you want to have fliers or postcards printed? Now you're talking a lot of money.

You see my color scheme in my logo on the top left of my website. It's Brown and blue. Leave off the peach because I can remove that and still be two colors. Notice the peach doesn't appear in my logo/mark.

Most companies have one PMS or spot color in their logo and nothing else but white (or the paper color it's printed on). When you use white, you're opening yourself up to a lot of color issues because paper comes in a lot of colors and white is the absence of ink. A PMS color is often the only way to get that brilliant red, blue, or orange when printing.

Ever design something bright and have it come back from the printer looking dulled out? RGB to CMYK conversion does it every time. If you're designing for print, you should be working in a CMYK color space always.

Home Depot is an orange color. Coca~Cola is a special red (has a copyright, even). UPS-brown. You see where I'm going here, right? One color is sometimes all you need.

But, sticking with my original guidelines, check out these identity packages I've created:

The first uses only one color. Black could be added at a nominal cost. The second is two colors plus black. I know the leaves on the trees look like they're three colors, but they're just tints of the original color (a lighter version). By the way, black is CHEAP! You should see the brand standard book for the second identity package, it's huge.

So, what should you take away from this? That your logo should be harmonious and encompass no more than two colors plus black. Ever. Period.

I hope you got some useful information from this post. Tomorrow, we'll go into design and what it says about you. Many logos and marks have hidden meanings! Yours could, too!

Well, that's all for today, folks! Until next time, WRITE ON!

Jo