“A logo does not only give your brand a visual identity but it also performs the functions of elaborating your brand’s personality, making it visually memorable, marketing your products globally and persuading different groups and sectors of society to not only buy but also become your loyal customers.”

Successful logo designs like Nike, GAP, and FedEx define the elements of success as simplicity, attractiveness, and easy to remember. It is not difficult to make your logo stand out in a crowd of millions of logos. You only need to spend more time in brainstorming and conceiving the concept and spend lesser time in over-designing a company logo. Even if you are an amateur logo designer, who wants to win over the experienced designers in online project markets like Freelancer, the following tips to avoid mistakes while designing a company logo can be your professional partner.

Mistake #1 – Not Using Vector Graphics

Since almost a decade, brand marketing has expanded its wings from print and electronic media to social media. Your company logo design needs to perfectly fit in the frame of HDTV as well as different screen sizes of mobile phones. Many logo designers commonly use raster graphics and bitmaps which lose quality when zoomed in orpixilated.

Tip– Use vector graphics to design the first sketch for easier editing and screen friendly zooming. Use scalable vector graphics and embed the logo designs into the web pages using HTML5.

Mistake #2 –Over-Designed Fonts and Typefaces

When working with fonts, you need to choose the simplest logo designing techniques. Over-designed typefaces not only make the logo look confusing but it also miss the factors of brand persona. To play with fonts, it is essential to keep the information of company, its operations, public brand image, space usage, and overall design look in mind. Another common mistake with fonts and typeface logos is the use of more than two font types in one logo.

Tip– Take the example of FedEx. The designer has used the two basic colors in single font and generated the ‘feel of company operations’ by making a visually catchy ‘arrow’ between E and X. If you want to work with more than one font in a logo, then use different shades of one color or single shade of same color. Working with more than two fonts is generally not favorable unless the purpose of logo is to show the company’s diversity. But make sure that you choose vision-friendly combinations of fonts.

Mistake #3 –Making Complex Designs by Imitating Successful Brands

A company logo should be easy to reproduce, leave an instant impact and must be simply enough to memorize. As a general rule, the logo designers should avoid using pictures, images, and sketches in the logo to avoid complexity. However, there are some examples of famous brands like Starbucks and Kentucky Fried Chicken which have image carrying logos. These brands gained fame from their trend-setting products, and not the logos, during the times of least saturated markets. To stand out in the saturated capital market, it is vital to design a simpler logo.

Tip – Instead of imitating the successful brands, spend more time doing research on the company information and business to conceive a relevant logo design.

Mistake #4 – Poor Color Coding and Making Logo Color Dependent

When you want to choose only one color for your company logo, it is important to consider the meaning of the color. For example, blue is the color of loyalty and mostly used for corporate logos. Orange is the color of freshness and liveliness, and it is mostly used in the logos of fruit juice brands. But orange is also used with pink and green color for clothing series of female and children. When you want to choose more than one or two colors for your logo, then consider the overall look of the color contrast rather than the dictionary meaning of individual colors.

Tip- A perfect logo is the one which is free from color dependency. Design your company logo in the black and white and add colors in the end so that the color can be changed for redefining the brand later on or introducing a new range of products and services.

Mistake #5 – Using Stock Art in Logo

A majority of the beginner logo designers use stockart images in their logos which kill the uniqueness of logo and company’s brand personality. Some business owners also design their logos on their own to save money and choose the shortcut of stock art for designing a company logo. The biggest problem with stock art images is of copyright infringement and violation of intellectual property laws. You not only lose your logo but also lose company’s reputation.

Tip–Make freehand sketches using paper and pencil while keeping the company information in mind. Closely review the sketches and find out the best workable sketch to redefine the company features in your unique logo.

Mistake #6 – Remembering Trends

A person wearing red shoes cannot stand out from the crowd of people wearing red shoes. Trends look better in the fashion industry only. For establishing a long-lasting brand identity, it is vital to design a logo that visually promises quality and describes the company’s vision and mission statements.

Tip – Define and elaborate the features and promises of the brand. Pick 1 to 3 features and promises and then design a company logo. If they don’t work out together, choose other features and promises. Incorporating all features in one logo will complicate the visual appearance of the logo.

Mistake #7 – Designing Extra Literal Logos

In order to avoid complex logo designs, many designers choose literal logos that look like illustrations and drawings. Even if you want it to be extra literal, yet you can add a hint of brand identity in the logo, for example, Families logo.

Tip – Remember three rules when designing a company logo; simple, memorable and unique.

Logo designing is a diverse art which can make or break a brand identity. Challenge your creativity and don’t fear trying out new ideas. Don’t follow a specific style or theme and learn to play with colors, fonts and symbols by simply using the tools of practice.

The post Tips to Avoid Mistakes While Designing Company Logo appeared first on Digital Marketing Agency - TIS India Blog.

Are you planning to redesign your website and give it a completely different look? Redesigning a website can be sometimes tricky, especially at those points where you run the risk of dropping your site’s traffic. Hence, this could be a seriously challenging task that most of the businesses face when they think of redesigning their site to give it a new touch.

Many questions simultaneously pop up in the mind of website owners when it comes to giving a new design to their website like what’s going to happen to my site’s traffic on its re-launching? What will happen with the 404 errors? How the site will perform in search engine results? What have to do with the current links of the absent pages?

Setting the Stage with Two Impressive Ideas

There are two important ideas that all website owners or designers must keep in their mind about sprucing up their sites’ with new looks:

• SEO should be considered regularly while redesign process

While website redesign process, it is necessary for the developers, designers, and SEO experts to interact continuously with each other. It helps the designers and developers to make the changes keeping the perspective of SEO experts that helps in maintaining and improving site’s rank after its revamp.

• Don’t launch at rush

Most of times, I have come across facts that some of the world’s renowned websites and brands miss very important SEO steps in the rush of meeting deadline. Maintaining site’s traffic in accordance with the SEO guidelines is more important meeting with the deadline because unreasonable deadlines might affect the overall performance of the site over the search engines.

Steps To Be Taken During Website Redesign Process

The most common reasons why we need website redesign can be any of the two reasons, which are either the website looks old enough and it does not attract significant traffic and user engagement while revamping your website, it becomes vital to take care of few steps to save your website from suffering huge traffic loss upon is re-launch.

1.Don’t Pull Down Your Old Site

Don’t pull down your old site unless it requires to be pulled down for the uploading of new design. This impacts your current site’s traffic significantly since, most of visitors stop visiting a site if they counter the website with a message, “Website under Maintenance” for several days

If you want to continue the magic of traffic on your new site, it is necessary to maintain your old site as long as the new site doesn’t go live.

2.Retain the Same URL Structure or Use 301 Redirect

If you can retain the same URL structure, you will save your new site from facing traffic loss because when you change your website’s URL structure, you lose huge traffic through inbound links. You will have to conduct an enormous 301 redirect mapping campaign to get your site’s traffic back to its normal pace. Hence, if you are thinking to alter the URL structure of your website, then you must execute the 301 redirects also to maintain your website’s traffic

Benefits of using 301-redirect are:

• It redirects the visitors from the old URL to the new URL.
• With 301 redirect, the search engines will move the value of all set up inbound links from old URLs to new URLs.
• For implementing the permanent change, search engines favor the 301 redirect process for old URLs

3.Execute Inbound Link Analysis

Inbound links are considerable important for developing effective SEO strategy and if you are planning to change the URL of your website while its redesign process, you might face huge risk of losing your site’s effective inbound links. Hence, it is important that you should perform a detailed inbound link analysis before proceeding with the website redesign process.

It will also help you in understanding your link profile. For doing so, you have to know about the pages that links to your website and the source from where those links are linked to your site. You can perform the inbound link analysis with various tools available online and one of them is Open Site Explorer that gives you a detailed analysis report for your inbounds link.

4.Check Out Your Website’s Reporting Before Redesign

When you are planning for revamping your website with new design and look, it is important to check out the existing site reporting to know about its top performing pages, top quality content and referring sites. This will let you know which of your web pages are contributing the most to the traffic and user engagement on your site and which are the top landing pages of your site. You could also know which of your landing pages are getting referral traffic.

Analyzing site’s report will help you in exporting them from your current analytics package to the new site, so that you can retain and maintain your existing traffic without facing any drop.

5.Create Webmaster Accounts

Most of the popular search engines like Google and Bing offer webmasters tools that the webmasters can use for setting up their accounts for authenticating the possession of a website, analyzing the diagnostics of their websites, and checking click-through data and search queries related to their sites.

Having webmaster accounts will help you in receiving messages directly from the search engines if something is wrong with your website. If you are planning to move your site’s domain, you can tell it to Google using the Google Webmaster tool to reduce any affect on the current traffic of your website.

By creating accounts on the webmaster tools of Google and Bing, you can keep a check on site before redesign as well as after redesign to ensure everything is moving smoothly.

6.Using Vital Keyword Phrases In Website Redesign

It is important that you determine the vital keywords of your website for their appropriate implementation during website redesign.  Evaluate your existing site content to know if your targeted keywords are used properly in them and add this content to your new site to retain your site’s traffic.

Once, your website is re-launched with new design, work on the target keyword phrases to get visitors interested towards your services and products. You can improve the optimization of your website after its re-launch by developing relevant tags using the important keyword phrases of your website.

As you can perceive, there are various key topics to know while going through CMS migration or website redesign process, however, it is very adverse that still most of the businesses are not aware of the after-effects of website redesign and as a result, they lose their complete SEO power, natural search traffic, sales, and search engine rankings.

But if you choose to plan accordingly before the start of the redesign process, you might not lose your site’s SEO power. I hope that you will definitely take care of the discussed steps to make your website redesign process successful.

The post Steps to Redesign Your Website Without Affecting SEO appeared first on Digital Marketing Agency - TIS India Blog.

Designing a good logo is one of the most vital things you can do for your business, especially when you are founding a new company. Your logo should be capable of conveying the intended message to your visitors without any additional context or explanation. Understanding the act between viewing and perception is a critical process, and a logo does it for you. Your logo is the first step towards setting up your brand identity among your competitors and customers. Therefore, it must have the ability to stand out as a unique identity in the slew of other well established brands.

Sticking with your business goals is the first thing to consider while designing logo for your company because strong logos translate well through diverse mediums. However, before moving towards the principles and practices of logo design, it is important to know the primary goal of a logo.

“A logo represents a symbol or a graphical design that conveys your business goals to the customers, which means logo helps in branding and identification of any business by setting up its unique existence in this cutthroat marketplace”. In short words, a logo is the first thing or you can say the instant core message that any brand offers to the world.

What Makes a Good Logo?

A good logo must be appropriate, communicative, impressive, distinctive, and simple in form with the ability of conveying the company’s goals to the viewers. The logo must have a concept or meaning within it so that it can communicate the intended message successfully. Moreover, a logo will be considered good only if it can be easily printed in different sizes and it must be effective even without color as well.

The two most important things boiled down by a good logo include:

• Great execution
• Great concept

Here are some examples of effective and good logos of some reputed brand:

All these logos effectively represent the intended message and their simplicity and effectiveness makes them ranks among the most appreciated logo list.

Are You a Startup Firm? Know the Challenges

Searching for a professional logo designer is the most difficult challenges faced by any startup firm. Although, there are numerous logo designers available, whom you can choose for crafting an effective logo for your startup firm, but finding a good logo designer within budget is not so easy to accomplish. If you lack a good logo designer for your founding team, then your company might suffer for setting up its existence among the well established rivals. Hiring an experienced and talented logo designer with a constrained budget is a great challenge for you.

There some startup firms who are uninterested in how their visual existence affects their customers. However, if being a startup firm, you really want your business branding to go in an effective way; the best way is to hire a skilled logo design professional, who can create a clear and effective visual system for your business with exclusivity.

The benefits of hiring a professional logo designer are listed as follows:

• A logo designed by a professional will worth for the time and money you have invested with the designer.
• A professionally designed logo attracts immediate attention from the audiences
• A logo designed with perfection and professionalism will help in improving your brand identity instantly among your well established competitors.

Understanding the Logo Design Process

Some of us might wonder as to why creating an effective logo design is so complex. They are just small symbols and they also look easy to create, then why to understand this process in detail, isn’t it? However, this interpretation is the result of our own thoughts, but creating a communicative logo especially for a startup firm is very difficult because logo takes creativity and thought into consideration, and then only these elements combine to create something extremely valued.

A successful logo design follows some simple steps to ensure the final design meets the requirements of the patrons. The steps included in this process are listed below:

Design Brief

Conduct a questionnaire on your audiences to conceptualize the design brief.

Research

Conduct a thorough research on behalf of the company to know about its rivals and history. This will give you a view of how the logo design process should go in the flow. You can also research on the latest trends and styles of logo designing.

Reference

Take references from the logo designs of your competitors that have been successful since their creation. This will allow you to create a layout of your logo with a perfect blend of creativity and ideas.

Sketching and Conceptualizing

Develop the logo design concept revolving around your research as this is the single most important vital part of your logo design process. Be inspired and get creative because sketching is not a time consuming task, but it helps in putting your ideas in one place in your mind and also helps in evolving your imagination.

Reflection

Taking proper breaks through the design process helps your ideas to mature and renews your enthusiasm an also allows you to solicit the feedbacks.

Presentation

Always try to show the logo in context to your customer as it will allow them to clearly visualize your business’ brand identity. Being a logo designer, you must present your logo designs in the best way to your clients so that they can understand how effectively you have put your efforts for creating best logo designs for them.

Delivery and Support

Deliver the best logo designs to your patrons and provide support whenever required to get appreciable feedbacks from them.

5 Effective Principles of Successful Logo Design

You must know the 5 essential principles of successful logo design to make sure that your design meets the requirements of the patrons.

These 5 principles are listed as follows:

• Simple
• Memorable
• Timeless
• Versatile
• Appropriate

 Simple

Simplicity makes a logo design easily identifiable, memorable and versatile. Good logos always feature something unique or unexpected without being overdrawn. Simple logos are most effective in conveying needs of the patrons.

Here is an example of a simple and effective logo:

Memorable

If you want the logo to be memorable, then it must have a sticky factor and it needs to be both simple and relevant to the audiences. Its design should be simple enough to convey the imagery, which reverberates with the target audiences.

McDonalds, the world’s famous burger restaurant has a simple and memorable logo, which marks the minds of the viewers in their first sight.

Timeless

You always want your business to stand the test of time and hence, your brand needs to be timeless. A great logo will remain great for 10-20 years from now. Time consideration is must when you are choosing or designing a logo for your brand.

An example of a timeless logo is given as follows:

Since its inception, the coca cola cheers its logo and it stood unique amidst its competitors as the favorite soft drink of its customers. Decades have been passed, but this classic logo of coca cola needs no change or modification yet.

Versatile

Will your logo adjust to different sizes without affecting its quality? Here comes the role of versatility that must be there in any successful logo. An effective logo must be compatible and adjustable to different mediums within different contexts.

The logo of WWF (World Wildlife Fund) is the best example of a versatile logo:

Appropriate

Understanding the needs of your target audience is vital in the logo design process and your logo must exhibit the effectiveness and the message that you want to convey to your customers. Knowing which font will be appropriate for your users along with the colors is important because you cannot use the same features for different companies.

Suppose you have chosen certain color and font for a toy company logo. Now, you can’t use the same font and color for designing logo of a car manufacturing company as both companies have different audience segments with different needs. Hence, it is important to consider appropriateness while designing a logo.

Final Note

If you are able to develop an effective logo by adhering to the principles and fundamentals discussed in this article, your logo will definitely perform an exceptional job of shaping your business now and for the imminent years as well.

The post Logo Design Principles – How to Create a Successful Logo For Your Brand? appeared first on Digital Marketing Agency - TIS India Blog.

You’re only as good as your last website design – while it is not imposed, this should be the mantra all web designers should live by. In order to constantly elevate your web design skills, you need to look around, check out masterfully crafted websites and attempt to equal these sites if not outdo them.

One way of doing this is to use tools and one of these highly useful tools is the browser extension called Firebug. At the very basic, Firebug allows you to view how the HTML components of a specific webpage work as well as enable you to try and see how your site will look like using a particular design without modifying the underlying codes.

Firebug packs a lot of features which can benefit web designers. Here are some of them.

Make CSS Changes Instantly

Wouldn’t it be great to make changes on any webpage’s CSS real time? This is just one of the most useful web design benefits of Firebug. The CSS tabs tell you everything you need about the visual elements on your site and if you think there is something of, you can make the changes right there and then and see the revised version on an instant.

All you need to do is to highlight the HTML component that you want to alter and Firebug will automatically highlight the CSS tied to that element. The presentation is very clear. CSS codes that have been replaced are crossed out. Further, you can add or disable CSS values and properties, preview colors, typography and graphics or images and even learn with Firebug’s comprehensive list of CSS keywords which you can access simply using the up and down arrow keys while you are modifying a CSS property.

View and Modify HTML Real Time

On JavaScript-based sites, it’s quite difficult to view the HTML source. Firebug solves this common web design problem by providing web designers with a dedicated tab that shows the HTML source and how it really looks like. From here, you can modify these HTML elements and you can see the changes on the page as you type. Sounds like magic? Not quite. Additionally, Firebug enables web designers to insert and take out HTML components, ID or class and put in provisional inline styles.

Improve Performance with JavaScript Debugger

Firebug also features a highly effective and easy to use JavaScript debugger which allows you to locate scripts that you want to debug, suspend execution, measure performance and identify bottlenecks. It works just like any other debugger (with options to Step Out, Step Into, Step Over and Continue) plus other features meant to make the process of web design more streamlined and efficient. There’s also an option that enables you to “automatically break into the JavaScript debugger” if there’s an error. Isn’t that convenient?

Allowing Designers to Stay on Top of their Game

The discipline of web design is constantly evolving and great websites are springing out of the nowhere every now and then. Keeping that in mind, web designer need all the tools (like Firebug) they can get to ensure that they are at par with current trends, as well as to streamline the process and make quick changes to cope with the dynamic demands of internet marketing.

Do you have other website design tricks up your sleeves?

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