Does your logo speak?
The following is a guest post from Ben Johnson of Logoinn, custom logo design service provider based in UK. Logoinn designed the logo for my “Bring Spotify to the USA” facebook group and come recommended.
Among all the significant activities of marketing and branding, logo designing is considered to be the most crucial. A well-designed logo speaks to the people and tells what your business is all about. But sometimes people get tired of looking at the same logo again and again. No wonder why Google changes its logo when any holiday or anniversary comes, because they want to portray the more dynamic feel and to show that their logos actually talk to the public.
Case Study: Google Doodle
According to Google
“At Google, we like to reflect the ever-changing world of our users through the logo designs on our homepage. These ‘doodles’ celebrate different people, events or special dates and are designed by our original Doodler, 30-year-old Dennis Hwang.”
If we go back to the history of Google, the first ever dynamic Google logo (they call it Doodle) was designed by the Larry Page and Sergey Brin themselves. It was designed for the Burning Man festival in the summer of 1999. They created this in case their site crashed, and for browsers that were wondering why the phones weren’t being answered. Now the browsers would know they left for the festival.
Later on, they hired a graphic designer named Dennis Hwang, who has now become the official doodle maker of Google. He draws the designs by his own hands and then computer graphed them. Dennis has designed nearly 150 doodles up till now. At present, Google designs Doodles for nearly every event, and place it on their website for certain period of time.
The last doodle was placed at April 27, 2009, in which Google celebrated the birthday of Samuel Morse, and displayed it all across its homepages. Samuel Morse was an American painter who created the single wire telegraph system using Morse code. This code is a type of character encoding that transmits telegraph information using rhythm. This doodle is in the same Morse code.
Conclusion
Google has been using doodles which come with slight changes according to the events. This branding tactics reflect Google’s image as a more advanced and up-to-date company, and also shows their affection with the events. This not only looks eye-catching to the customers but also helps Google to position its brand dynamically. Hence, you can be the one who can use this tactics to brand your company by using dynamically designed logo on your website at every event. You can even develop an event calendar to get your logo designed before any event arrives. Make your logo to actually speak to your customer.
Ref: http://www.google.co.uk/doodle4google/
What I’m listening to right now: The Dream feat. Kanye West – “Walking On The Moon”
Tuesday, May 19th, 2009 at 9:32 am and is filed under Blogging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Welcome to my blog. My name is Kieron Donoghue and I am the founder of ShareMyPlaylists.com, ContentNow.co.uk and some other businesses. I thought it would be fun to blog, writing about my experiences in Internet Marketing. I'll include some personal stuff too, probably about my other passions, music and cars. Please feel free to post your comments and thoughts too.
Interesting, I’ve only used a different logo for Christmas so far, I’ll have to look into using more variation on our logo where appropriate.
Does anyone have any ideas for times for logo changes? Preferably ones that will last longer than one day tho!
“Make your logo to actually speak to your customer.”
And then to be firing all the staff of the call centre?
Good guest article!! @Stephen loved your interpretation of the “Make your logo….” ha ha. Good one!!
Logo design indeed plays a very vital role as you said it speaks about your business brand after all. Excellent write-up.
I would agree that a new logo design sparks interest in a web site or company.
I’ve been thinking of having 12 designed, one for each month of the year.
But until I can decide on a template across all of my web sites I won’t go ahead and commit to having them done. I think having just one site look can help towards branding just like a logo.
The two need to go together.
While Google is a really great example of the point that is being illustrated the regular business can not just willy nilly do this. Everything from adverts through to printed promo material, business cards, flyers and even vehicle branding needs to be done, which is sometimes just not economically viable.
With everything that’s going on in the world right now, it seems so petty to be discussing the merits of a logo. Google would be better paying the money they pay in salary to charity.
We used a different logo for Christmas, as well as seasonal ‘features’ just below - a cute chick at easter, a dragon on St Georges, etc.
It shows you’re constantly updating the website, not just adding blog posts etc. I think that means something!
I’ve got to admit I love the way Google changes its logo. There’s a great video montage of them here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCMQvNUkuds
@Andy.
Yes, it shows you are changing your logo but surely people want updated, uniquely referenced content rather than just a new pretty picture?
I don’t think I know anyone who doesn’t look forward to seeing the Google designs! They are truly interesting. It also helps further brand the Google logo. To do so yourself takes a bit of effort on your part.. but it’s a nice way of further branding and drawing attention to your logo.
I love how google constantly changes their logo. Like this saturday it looked like tetris - I guess there was a reason for that. The attention to detail is amazing.
Logo is a very important part of any company’s website. It shows company’s branding image in market.
a new logo is like a fresh shop window..