This week’s logo design of the week is Cuddle Snuggles! A logo design which has a simple and colourful illustration, perfect for it’s target audience.
As well as winning logo of the week, the customer has won 50 free business cards designed and delivered by our team.
This week’s logo design of the week is Gelato Indulgence! A logo design which is bright, simple and unique.
As well as winning logo of the week, the customer has won 50 free business cards designed and delivered by our team.
This week’s logo design of the week is Franscript! A logo design which is bold, simple and clever.
As well as winning logo of the week, the customer has won 50 free business cards designed and delivered by our team.
This week’s logo design of the week is ArtProNail UK. A logo design which is clean, crisp and clear.
As well as winning logo of the week, the customer has won 50 free business cards designed and delivered by our team.
This week’s logo design of the week is Reach 4 Sport. A logo design for a fitness company which makes use of white space and effective colours.
As well as winning logo of the week, the customer has won 50 free business cards designed and delivered by our team.
This week’s logo design of the week is St. David’s Leisure. A logo design for a group of luxury holiday home and leisure parks in North Wales
As well as winning logo of the week, the customer has won 50 free business cards designed and delivered by our team.
When a client comes to us, we will go through the design brief with them and ask them about their needs and requirements for the website. When it comes to building them, we typically build on WordPress.
Building a custom theme for our clients allows us the maximum freedom to create whatever the client requires, as well as match any branding the client currently has (or to match any branding we create for them).
We can start from a blank slate and build the website and theme with maximum flexibility in mind – we build them such that just about anything can be changed except for the main structure of the theme.
Custom themes are also completely bespoke to the client and they won’t see another theme exactly like it and it will feature all the functionality that they require, built right into the theme itself.
Custom themes also come with full support from our developers – they are the ones that put it together so they will be on hand to answer any questions or make any necessary changes.
Themes can also be transported to other web properties and adapted as necessary, allowing you to launch any number of microsites which will match your core brand, simply set up a new WordPress site and install your custom theme and then make any amendments and you’re done.
Custom themes also means that you’re really invested in your business and your idea and willing to put your money where your mouth is when it comes to marketing and a good design suggests that you are creditable and trustworthy. Templates simply can’t offer that.
Custom designs are also built with you mind so they are as unique as you are and as unique as your business.
Custom templates are also customised to perform well in search engine pages out of the box, whereas templates are simply constructed to scratch the itch of the designer or to be sold as a commodity of its own.
Every company needs to position themselves on the spectrum of high/low cost and high/low quality.
For example, in the realm of car manufacturers, Skoda is perceived by many to be at the low-cost mid-to-low quality end of the spectrum, whereas the likes of Ferrari and the exact opposite, with high costs but high quality cars to show as their products.
Although normal thinking suggests that quality/price should increase in relation to each other, this may not necessarily be true and it shouldn’t be. We live in a world where expensive brands are produced by the same people and factories that produce the same product only with different labelling and sold at much lower prices – you’re paying a premium to buy those brands.
Take clothing for example, you can buy a pair of jeans for £10 and then go into a shop like Next and pay £50 for a pair of jeans that are so similar that they may as well be the same (except for the label of course).
When plotting your brand on the spectrum, it is important to consider that in some way, your prices reflect your “value proposition” – where clients see you on the spectrum.
How you communicate your chosen position will vary by company and many factors will alter how the general public and your potential customers will perceive your efforts.
Exceedingly low prices may give a subtle clue that your service is of lower value whilst higher prices suggest that your service should be higher quality than it really is. Having low prices and high quality service will certainly earn you more loyal customers, but the reverse will only get you a bad reputation.
The look of your website and marketing materials will also affect the perception, with low cost, low quality materials will lower your position whilst overly elaborate materials will appear to be posh and showy, increasing your brand perception, although they will also expect more from you in terms of service and/or product quality.
The speed and conciseness of your communicate will also factor into your perception, as will your responses to customer enquiries and complaints. Although less apparent than the look and feel of your website/marketing materials, it will eventually filter out and it will spread to your potential customers through other means, for example through social channels, word of mouth and the like.
Some public perceptions will mark you for a long time, for example, public reviews of your company that are less than favourable will be around for a long time, as will positively glowing recommendations – and changing those views can take a lot of time and marketing to overcome any negative setbacks that may happen (and it happens to all business at some point – for whatever reason, you can’t deliver in time or the product is lightly mismatched to the customer’s needs).
Managing the perception can involve expensive marketing campaigns, or be as simple as altering the behaviour of your company’s staff to offer higher levels of service and putting in place monitoring that they are keeping the levels consistently high – and over time, the perceptions should raise to meet the newer levels of service your now offering.
If you are thinking of posting on a “crowd sourcing” website or hosting a “design contest”, then you are seriously going to shoot yourself in the foot.
The appeal of design contests is that they offer more options, if not hundreds of options to choose from for the same (or lower) price as getting one from a reputable company.
But just think about this from the perspective of a graphic designer or artist.
Are the best or logo designers really going to pay your contest much attention and if they do, are they going to invest the time and attention to create you something that is unique and appropriate to your needs?
I seriously don’t think so.
Also think about the types of designers who do enter the competition. They are usually low skilled or inexperienced designers trying to get their name out and build a name for themselves. Now this may work for them, if they get lucky and get picked, but for the others who are entering, they have basically wagered their time on getting whatever price the competition was worth.
Some designers may also try to hedge their bets by creating a number of generic designs that they then modify them slightly and then enter them across multiple contests. If they get picked by a couple of them, the designer doesn’t care that two companies are essentially the same logo, they got their pay and they will walk away with your cash in your pocket.
The designs themselves are also of dubious quality. For each good quality design, you may have to wade through twenty or more bad quality designs that just don’t fit anything about the brief.
This is due to a couple of reasons, the first being that the top designers simply don’t enter the contests so you’re not attracting the best talent and secondly, the designers who do enter them are essentially wagering their time in the hopes of winning the contest – they aren’t gonna spend more than 30 mins creating their design.
If your contest is successful, you’re going to need to trawl through all the submissions, the vast majority of them won’t be specific to your project and will be submitted in the hopes of winning. The rest will probably won’t follow all the design brief criteria so you’ll have to trawl through them as well as cut the wheat from the chaff. This can take up a vast amount of time, when professional companies will provide up to 15 different concepts for you to choose from and tweak.
Suppose you pick the best design available, you usually don’t have the necessary contact details to contact the designer in case you need to make small changes to the logo. You may not even receive the final files for the project and will simply get the JPeg image of the logo as your final deliverables, leaving you to pay someone else to create for you in whatever formats you may require.
However, there is a more dangerous snag that many aren’t aware of. What would happen if I create a design, copyright it as mine and then submit it to a design contest and it gets picked?
I could then potentially sue the contest winner because they are using my design. What would happen if I copied a major company’s logo and you weren’t aware of it and then you chose that design? They then get you to either stop using the logo or sue you (and probably win). Not only then are you out for the cost of the initial contest, but your now wasted time and effort only to have no usable design and you have no recourse from the original logo “designer” because of the way the competition sites work.
There are certain criminals making a good living out of this tactic as once they have a logo created, the effort is minimal on their part and the pay offs are potentially very big for them, especially if they offer to transfer ownership of the logo design for a hefty fee.
This week’s logo design of the week is Merika Project – University of Highlands & Islands. A colourful design utilizing white space to create a stunning logo.
As well as winning logo of the week, the customer has won 50 free business cards designed and delivered by our team.
