brand new

How does your company look to your customers? It's quite hard to tell when you are up close and involved. Are you projecting the right image?

You may have thought "I can live without a logo" and yes, you can. It's not the end of the world, but there is no doubt that a professional image will help your customers identify you and is more likely to help you succeed.

A lot of these famous brands have been developed over decades of design and adjustments. The Shell logo originated in 1904 and had incremental changes until 1971, and it is still going 100 years later!!

To make it simple, we can identify three main forms of logotype.

THE 'LOGO'
This is a pretty wide term, and the modern usage is applied to any graphic device, symbol, text or combination that is meant to be identified or recognised. For example:- it could be as simple as the dvd video symbol on the spine of your dvd box, or the recycle logo on the side of a can of drink.

CORPORATE IDENTITY
A logo designed to identify a business or service. This concentrates on projecting an image of the company by consistent use of logo, colour, typefaces, layout and themes. For instance An Post, consistently uses the franking symbol and is easily identified with the green shop facias and vans.

BRANDING
The brand is a sales tool and works harder than the other logos. Not only should you identify it, it expresses the personality of the company/product and also says 'buy me - I am better than the competition'. One of the most effective ways or branding is targeting your competition and presenting an alternative. Pepsi to sell their coke to the same(ish) market as Coca-Cola but they try to stand out in their own right by choosing the opposite colour to work with - blue.

So don't expect to get the Coca-cola logo for your €300, it doesn't quite work that way. But sometimes you never know...