Forget all about branding

Marketers like to bandy lofty terms around such as branding and engagement. Truth is, most marketers differ on the basic concepts. Who’s right?

As always, it turns out the customer is right.

At my previous job I wrote down my definition of marketing. I wanted to find out what the marketing department thought the definition of marketing – their jobs, basically – was to them.

I asked six people. I received six different responses. The responses varied widely too, and all were different than mine. If the marketing department of a massive, multi-million dollar company can’t agree on such a basic definition, do not stress out too much yourself with various marketing concepts and activities.

Your best bet is to keep it simple, and focus on creating quality products good enough that gamers will tell their friends about them. Keep your marketing simple.

This includes logo design.

You might have heard or read about branding. Don’t get fooled into spending time and money in pursuit of so-called branding endeavours. Billions each year are spent by agencies and on agencies for this mythical branding.

What the heck is a brand? Ask people. It’s like trying to grab a cloud.

How do you measure a brand? Again, more blank stares. If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it effectively. If you can’t manage it, do not waste time or money on it.

Wrapped up in this erroneous concept and false importance placed on branding is logo design. “The logo is supposed to reflect the brand” is something I hear a lot.

Oh? And what is a brand, good sir? How do you measure it? How much did it increase your sales by last year?

I read a quote the other day that was excellent. When asked what a brand is, a famous business person (whose name escapes me) said it’s what people say about you when you leave the room.

That is bang on. You do not control your brand. Your customers do. You can spend all the resources you want on fancy graphics, commercials, massive signs, and clever logos. But, if your customers don’t like your product or service, they will spread the word and _that_ becomes your brand.

Likewise, if you have a great product that people love, what they say about you becomes your brand, your public image, and the words and emotions people associate with you automatically without thinking about it.

Therefore, aside from some basic concepts as outlined below, your logo is not a life and death decision, and not really an important one when put beside the importance of your product, customer service, and reputation.

Know a logo’s primary purpose: identification

The number one purpose and value a logo has for your products and business is as an identification mark.

Customers will use your logo to find you faster and easier, and to tell others about you faster and easier online, if you have a logo.

As you’ve probably already heard before, we are dosed with thousands of ads every day. The bulk of that count is logo exposures. In a sea of logos, you need to have yours in the mix to get recognized and identified by customers.

In addition, when true fans promote you on their blogs, social network profiles, forums, and other places, they’ll often scoop your logo and use it as an avatar (likely a remixed version), icon, button, or banner link.

Logos also communicate core pillars of your business

The basic things you should get in synch between your RPG business and logo is:

Genre – a logo that communicates fantasy but your products are sci-fi would do you disservice. Make your logo genre neutral or in synch with your genre.

Product type – are you selling books, a service, movies, music? A logo that says music for a business that sells books would get you the wrong kind of attention.

There’s nothing wrong with a neutral logo. Remember, it’s a sign post. People stop truly seeing it after awhile anyway. It becomes an icon to them and they don’t question the small details that you will inevitably stress over in vain.

Keep it simple

Scott MacLeod, in his book “Understanding Comics”, has a great chapter on how detail ruins comics if not done to perfection.

He shows you clearly how fewer details in images get your brain imagining more of those details. Instead of having a poorly drawn detail wrench you out of a story, and instead critiquing the art, comic books should strive for less-is-more to engage readers better. Let the comic book customers bring the details.

This works the same way with the written word. You can describe a character, but the reader forms their own mental image of him, which is part of the delight in reading.

So it goes with logos. Keep your logo simple. Keep it iconic. Let your customers read into your logo all the details they want. If you want your logo to tell some kind of story (not required!) use simple elements open to interpretation and let your fans do the rest.

A huge benefit of a simple logo is it can be reproduced with clarity. If you need your logo small, black and white, in print on crappy paper, in the form of an ink stamp, on thermal fax paper, on the bottom of a mini, whatever, a simple logo will work well.

Logos with too much detail (fantasy logos are especially guilty of this) just lose their detail when reproduced in and on various media.

Worse, logos that get mangled because of reproduction or media issues stop serving their most important purpose: rapid identification.

Make it strong

Another trick of logo design is to use strong and confident elements.

This also makes them easy to reproduce. Imagine the difficulty of trying to print out logos with particle effects, flames, or 1 pixel lines.

A strong logo can also impact your product identity. See below for more on this.

Finally, wimpy logo elements do not bestow much confidence or faith in potential customers. I know, I know; I said logos were signposts and don’t help your branding. But, in this case I do feel a tentative logo does make a poor initial impression.

Make it 4×3

Square or 4×3 ratios are your most common fields on which you place your logos. This is true online and offline.

Long thin logos fail quickly when reduced in size. They especially fail when they are forced into a square or 4×3 space.

You want to make your logo as portable as possible. You can never go wrong with 1×1 or 4×3 ratios.

Make it legible

Print your logo out so it’s 2 inches on one side and put it on the wall. Stand back 3 feet. Can you still recognize it? Or does too much detail get lost? Does it just look like a dust ball of fuzzy lines? Does it still look strong and iconic?

If you are serious about your Gamer lifestyle, your logo will eventually make it onto various media and be used for a multitude of reasons. You might be on a convention program, have a trade floor presence, be on a website with a boatload of other logos (such as RPGBloggers), be in a catalogue, be on an electronic shopping cart, be on your newsletter that gets printed out and left around….

You never know the location, usage, and distance. So make your logo strong, simple, and identifiable from a distance.

Oh, hey! I forgot to mention one of the best all-time uses of your logo: on the spine of a book on a shelf in a game store. Hence, the three foot test. :)

Don’t rely on colour

Your logo is guaranteed to be printed in black and white. When it does, you’ll be lucky if it even gets a few shades of grey scale. Assume pure black and white.

Multiple generation photocopies kill grey scale. So does toner saver settings, printers nearly out of ink, and old printers.

A huge mistake of logos is they rely on colour to separate visual elements. Red against blue forms a line, and if your dragon is red on blue and your logo is in colour it seems to be ok. Print it out in black and white though, and you get some ugly results.

Accessibility best practices also advise against requiring colour to identify important elements in case your customer is visually impaired.

Also, should you ever go to print, if the colours are offset even by a millimeter, your logo looks like crap if it depends on clear boundaries of colour to make sense. Ask your local printer about four colour printing and margin of error sometime.

Put it on black and white fields

Another key test is does your logo look ok on black backgrounds and white backgrounds?

The majority of websites have black or white backgrounds. You’ll want your logo to be in forum signatures, user profiles, on other blogs, and numerous other online locations.

Design a logo that survives black and white fields.

As a bonus, you should see your logo on grey, but it’s not required.

Do not add text

Text kills logos. For all the tests and usages mentioned, such as resizing, text will cause logo issues.

More importantly, text is not iconic. What if you need to change the text? What if the direction of your business changes once you’ve gone through a product release cycle or two?

An exception is using your business name or text that clearly is associated with your business that passes the above tests.

Feel free to add taglines and other text around your logo. Just don’t make it part of your logo – something that must be reproduced every time and is tied to the identity and recognition of your business as an iconic graphic.

The logo anchors your product identity

This is a critical point. Maybe it shouldn’t be the last tip, because it’s so important.

Your logo is the anchor of your product identity. It informs, or at least synchs up with, the various design elements of your product.

Your product will have cover design, page headers and footers. If any of these elements have visual design aspects, they must gel with your logo. Otherwise, there will be inconsistency that some folks will pick up on. It could be subtle, but it can make a 100% product into a 99% or 95% experience.

Even for just a per centage point reduction in product quality, I vote you make your logo with your future products in mind.

For example, if your logo is all sleek curves, and your book sidebars are bricks, you have a potential incongruity that is slightly off-putting.

Another example: if your logo is green and your website or product cover is black, that won’t look so hot. Green on black can only be fixed if it blinks, and scrolls slowly across the page. Joking!

Just be aware that your logo influences product visual design, including colour, shapes, and style.

A simpler logo gives you more options here, by the way. :)

Those are my logo tips. I hope you found them useful. I’ve done several logos for my various projects and businesses over the years. I know it’s fun considering the options, playing with the possibilities, and tinkering. Please consider the tests above before making your final decision.