nokia

The hype around Yahoo’s month-long roll out of its new logo may have you wondering if your company is ready for a new design, too.

“A logo is your business’s public face,” says Patrick Llewellyn, president and CEO of 99designs, a graphic design firm where businesses hold online contests to find new logos. “If it doesn’t represent your business at its core, it’s time for a change.”

Llewellyn says there are several indicators that a small business needs a new logo. Here are five signs that it’s time to work on a new design:

1. Your logo doesn’t adapt well to modern media.
If your logo was designed for your storefront 15 years ago, it might not be optimized to work well on a website or on social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter.

“It may have looked great on a sign or in a Yellow Pages ad, but businesses today promote themselves in a lot of new ways,” says Llewellyn. “It’s important that the logo works across several mediums.”

Llewellyn says entrepreneurs should ask themselves these questions: Can the logo be sized up or down and still be readable? Does it look good in black and white? Can you derive an icon from it? Does it make an appealing button for a mobile app? If the answer to any of these questions is no, it may be time for a new logo design.

2. Your logo doesn’t represent your current business.
Over time, most business evolve. It’s not uncommon for entrepreneurs to start out with one product or service, then grow and diversify into something quite different. If your logo doesn’t reflect what you currently offer, it’s time for a rebranding, says Llewellyn.

“A logo isn’t about where your business was in the past,” he says. “A logo should be aspirational, capturing the essence of your business today as well as where you’re headed in the future.”

3. Your logo was a do-it-yourself project.
If you created your logo or had a friend of family member create it, it may be time for a professional to step in.
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“Companies such as Apple have become very successful due in part to their emphasis on design,” says Llewellyn. “As a result, our world has increased its expectations of design.”

He says if you’re not receiving compliments on your logo, it probably needs to be redesigned.

4. Your logo isn’t as appealing as your competition’s.

Llewellyn says social media review sites such as Yelp have made the business world increasingly competitive. He suggests looking at your competitions’ logo designs.

“If their logos are more appealing, it’s a good indicator that yours needs an update or change,” he says.

If you’re not sure, compare your social media following to your competitors’. If they have more fans and followers, it may be time for a new design. “Don’t underestimate the impact of good design,” he says.

5. Your logo is too complex.
Llewellyn says the growing trend in logos has been towards simplification in design. “Gradients and drop shadows used to be popular in logos, but these techniques are starting to look dated,” he says. “They’re also difficult to translate across some mediums.”

Instead, choose a simple logo design that utilizes up to three colors. Choose a flat matte look. “One indicator that your logo is simple and effective is if it can be used in a transparent form as a background and still be recognizable,” Llewellyn says.

Image credit: Shutterstock

Everybody makes branding mistakes. Early missteps in retrospect often are as big as the eventual names of some of the companies who made them — Google was originally called Back Rub, Pepsi-Cola was known as Brad’s Drink, and IBM started out as Computing Tabulating Recording Corporation, to name just a few.

And a company’s logo is just as tricky and as important as its name. Your logo is the most powerful and immediately identifiable part of your brand. Properly done, a logo instantly communicates and reflects your company’s personality. It also connects with your consumers. Done poorly, a logo can turn people off to your business and damage your reputation before you’ve had a chance to make your pitch.

But take heart, not everyone hits a homerun the first (or second or even third) time at the plate. Here are five iconic brands that did it their way, and then decided to do it another way.

Apple

Apple’s original logo was designed by co-founder Ronald Wayne and has a decidedly dull look and feel. The original logo is pretty much the antithesis of everything the company stands for today. In fact, the drawing of Isaac Newton sitting under an apple tree (complete with a William Wordsworth quote!) was not only ill-conceived but ultimately short lived. Within a year of founding the company in 1976, Steve Jobs demanded a redesign because he felt the logo was too intellectual and far too intricate to be stamped on computers.

The Gap

Gap faced so much hostility toward its new logo (on right) that it switched back to its old logo (on left).
In business not everyone travels in the same direction. And that also holds true for logo design. In the 1990’s clothing company, The Gap, hit upon what many to this day believe is one of the iconic logos of American fashion. So why in 2010 did the San Francisco-based clothing giant mess with success? According to reports at the time, company spokesperson Louise Callagy said the new logo was supposed to signify The Gap’s transition from “classic, American design to modern, sexy, cool.”

Of course, a new logo is a gamble. The Gap learned that lesson the hard way and reverted back to the old logo one week later.
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Starbucks

Today’s Starbucks’ logo is as green as the eco-friendly company strives to be. But the coffee maker’s brand wasn’t always the color of money. In the early days the original Starbucks logo sported a brown woodcut illustration of a topless siren from Greek mythology. While that undoubtedly was fine back in the laidback 1970’s Northwestern U.S., a semi-nude icon probably wasn’t going to play well in the rest of America. In recent years the green, black and white logo has been significantly streamlined and the siren covered up. Starbucks’ current version — used since 1992 — is much more conservative and contemporary.

Google

In a little more than a decade Google has grown from afterthought search engine into a global brand worth more than Disney, McDonald’s and Coca-Cola. It’s hard to fathom now, but at one point in the late1990’s Yahoo was the big player in the space. The now floundering company held such a dominant position it could afford to essentially lease out Google’s algorithm as a backup for instances when the Yahoo search engine couldn’t deliver immediate results to people’s queries.

It might not be a stretch to say that the Google guys wanted to be a bit more Yahoo-like. Just check out an earlier version of their logo complete with exclamation point!

Nokia was first founded in 1865 as a wood-pulp mill in southern Finland, and later in 1868 opened a second mill on Nokianvirta River, hence its name. After several years the mill was transformed into a share company, and ultimately evolved into one of the world’s biggest telecommunications companies. Given the company’s aquatic origin, it’s no wonder in 1966 Nokia execs chose the image of a fish for its logo. However, cooler heads ultimately prevailed and the fish head logo was reasonably replaced with a more fitting image for a global company.

Courtesy of Entrepreneur.com