A logo is the first pillar of any brand building campaign. It helps your potential clients and customers to remember your brand. But, only if it has a certain few qualities, otherwise it is just a pretty picture that no one bothers to do anything with.

Uniqueness, attractiveness and effectiveness are the most important qualities of a logo design. It has to be unique as it is your brand / business identity. It should be something good to look at, and it should have some smart idea behind it that would make people curious about it. It should communicate the message which the designer intended to deliver as effectively as possible.

What happens if a logo design doesn’t do all that? Well then it is a bad logo design. If you are a well established financially strong business you can probably undo the damage by spending more on further re-branding and redesigning a perfect logo. However, if you are a startup then there are some serious consequences of a bad logo design that you must watch for.

1. Brand Distortion
A bad logo design distorts the image of your business or brand by misrepresenting it. Viewers unable to understand it would assume whatever they wanted with your logo design. Hence your brand image in their minds is distorted and you can’t help fix it.

2. Negative Impact
There is nothing worse than a logo design that communicates a wrong message, something negative or evil, like racism for example, or promoting hatred or something. Of course you didn’t want to do that on purpose, but it happened and your brand image is not only distorted and disliked, sometimes people can be brutal and they might even start hating you just because you had a bad logo design.

3. Silent Damage
Sometimes businesses and organizations do not even realize that they have a bad logo design which is not helping them at all. They keep using it meanwhile worrying why their promotional efforts are not paying off. This damage continues to grow until the cause is identified, but surprisingly not many businesses pay attention to their own logo and how it might be causing them the cold response.

4. Redesign Costs
As a start-up, a new business, or an established small business you might have limited budget to spend on branding and marketing. Getting your logo redesigned is just an unwanted experience which would increase your promotional budget and since you had a bad experience with a cheap logo designer this time you might consider hiring someone a little more fancy, which will cost you even more.

5. Rebranding Costs
As soon as you got your logo you may have gotten it printed on your business cards, your brochures or banners, posters, mugs or whatever approach you use to promote your brand. Redoing your logo design would not only cost you designer fee, it would also cost you a lot more when you start using new and improved logo on your promotional stuff. The added cost would become too high if you had already spent too much on marketing with your previous but horrible logo.

As a start-up you can avoid all this trouble by making smart choices right from the beginning. Spend some time on researching topics like design, business logo, and branding. An intelligent logo can boost your start-up’s brand image, get one in the beginning and then build your business empire on it.

Author: Ben Johnson is the Alliance Manager at Logoinn, a custom logo design company. He writes about the effect of design on marketing and brand identity and helps small businesses find design solutions for effective marketing.

In a recent article published by the Hartford Courant, statistics which show that most people who work from home are actually significantly more productive than those who have to work from an office. Some of the reasons for this increased productivity included the following [source]:

• Saving commuting time
• Able to fit work around other commitments
• Better able to concentrate
• Fewer interruptions
• Less stressed

Now, I don’t know about you- but having worked in an office environment I would have to absolutely agree with all of these reasons. Of course, it also helps if you have a separate room or workspace to work in when you are home (working from your kitchen table is not nearly as comfortable!).

The only down side to working from home is that it is easy to slip into a pattern of working too much and/or not taking a break when you really should. Then, of course, what happens if you are sick or feeling under the weather? It’s not like you can call into your office and tell your boss that you’re not going to be in that day. In most cases, those of us who work from home just suck it up and keep on trudging along. I guess you could say that this is the price we pay for comfort.

Should Office Employers Be Worried?

With the recent onslaught of people who are working from home with some sort of increased frequency, some employers are starting to become a little concerned. After all, how are they supposed to compete with employees who now have all of these options to lead the lives that they many others would kill for: the opportunity to set your own hours and work in your PJs without having to worry about makeup, rush hour traffic or the watchful stare of your boss? As Rebecca O’Connor from Times Online succinctly put it:

For millions of us, going to work means piling into monolithic tower blocks stuffed with rows of generic desks, strip lighting, muddy-looking carpets and off-white walls.

But not for all. Over the past decade, wireless broadband and BlackBerrys have meant that more workers have ditched the office in favour of working from home, in quiet studies overlooking gardens, with cups of tea and a comfy sofa only a room away.

And this has presented employers with a problem — how to cultivate a culture of presenteeism in a world where being present is not always essential. The answer? Commission interior designers to upgrade office space. The result? Unintentionally, perhaps, offices are beginning to look more like living rooms. [source]

In a day and age of WFHers, employers know exactly what they are up against. This is why many of them are now scrambling to renovate and redecorate with the hopes of making the office experience something that is akin to a ‘home away from home’, some place where employees feel excited and happy to go to….but will it be enough?

The following is a guest post from the guys at Logo Inn.

A Logo Design Service Provider

Today, the world is more socially connected; in this regard reputation management has become more and more a concern for any business whether it is small or a large enterprise. Social media marketing in this scenario can help small and medium size businesses to gain reputation and popularity without deploying multiple websites.

One of the best examples of social media marketing could be the presidential campaign of Obama. With his unique logo, he had run the campaign almost on all popular social networking websites included MySpace, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube etc. Even now when the campaign has been finished his profile could easily be identified due to his unique logo.

It’s your profile picture that makes you identifiable on social networks, and if you put your logo instead of any other picture, it becomes very easy for visitors to identify and remember your business. Hence, a unique logo can be easily identified by the viewers at a glance and makes your profile to standout from the crowed.

Advertising through web banner can also be done on social networks, which is proved to be very effective and cheaper way of online marketing Thousands of users visit social networking websites daily, subliminal effect could be left on their mind if they don’t even look at the advertisement, but impression of a logo would be saved in their subconscious mind.

One other advantage a small business gets is through creating groups, where you are allowed to setup a main page with a graphic/logo, company’s description, and a wall where users can post comments. Additionally, it provides a discussion board for posting questions that encourage group members to interact and share their opinions. Group creation is free, it is Viral – when people become your fan it is updated on their profile with your logo and shared with all their friends, publicly indexed, and promotable with social network Ads.

It is just not enough; there are many other ways a unique logo can help. Widget marketing is another way to promote your business. Widgets are simple applications that can be made available for your website or blog visitors to copy and paste in their website or blog. Useful widgets can be designed for your visitors, and when they embed this widget to their website or blog, your logo will appear. Therefore, your logo would become the source of bringing qualified traffic to your website and creating brand exposure. Companies like YouTube, Twitter, and Slide are the examples that have taken advantage of widget marketing.

In the last, I would say benefits of social media marketing are never ending, and if you have a unique logo the advantages would be immense. Many other ways are there to utilize unique logo for social media marketing, and it’s your brain how you create innovative ideas to take full advantage out of your logo.

The following is a guest post from the guys at Logo Inn