 I've been a graphic designer for many years. I actually started my career in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in my dad's commercial art studio. I worked for him all during high school and college and I eventually took over his design firm and then I moved to Atlanta and kind of kept it going. I've been a freelance or I've been independent for about the last 10 years. I work in both print and web design and I'm kind of a logo fanatic. I do a fair amount of logo design. I'm glad to see you guys here today. I'm hoping this will give you a lot of useful tips. I'm gonna ask that you hold questions till the end of my spiel and then we'll talk and then I have a handy hand up for you all. So thank you. So I'm gonna start off with kind of an existential question which is why have a logo anyway? We're gonna talk a little bit about logo versus branding versus brand identity and what that all means. I'm on floor, okay? Basically a logo is a graphic symbol that represents the essence of a person, company or organization. When people see a crisp, clear and professional logo on your website, it conveys credibility and authority. It establishes your business or organization as a high quality, trustworthy entity and it offers nonverbal reassurance that visiting your site is going to be worthwhile. Brand identity is a combination of how you define and promote yourself and how others see you. Your logo is just one very important element of your organization's brand identity. Everything you do is to build awareness and reputation around your company and its product or services and that creates branding. Brand identity is the collection of your business assets that includes your logo, print materials, your vehicle signage, pens, your website header, your social media icons. That helps to create your brand image. So here's an example of a consistent and well-planned brand entity that I'm sure is familiar to most people. Mercedes-Benz is a brand identity that exudes elegance, style and quality and definitely a certain price point. So it's really important for your logo to be consistent. It's really important because if your logo gets distorted, if it's reproduced in a hodgepodge of random colors, if it loses its original typeface, that all will dilute your brand. It weakens your brand recognition and makes you look unprofessional. When you're trying to build brand recognition, it can be confusing to your audience if you use a lot of different versions of the logo. So consistent colors, typefaces and shapes help your potential client remember your business and that helps to forge a connection. People are more likely to choose brands that are familiar because they seem known, established and therefore trustworthy. Your brand identity gets delivered through all of your assets from your business card to your website to social media sites to the branded holiday gift that you give to clients. So a strong logo should do the following. I'm just checking my slide numbers here. It should embody your brand, be instantly recognizable, be versatile and be timeless. And by that, I mean just not so trendy that in two years time it looks really dated. The FedEx logo is a really good example of a strong consistent logo. It embodies its brand and you can see the white arrow that's in between the E and the X. It's kind of a little subliminal, very strong little element that they have. It's recognizable, versatile and timeless. It has a consistent look through all media. When you see a FedEx van or a FedEx envelope, it all has the same look, even though there are different iterations of this logo. As you can see here, the three different versions. So let's talk about the key elements of an effective logo and let's start off with typography. There we go. A logo can be purely typographic or it can include a visual element. A logo is called a logo type or wordmark when only the letters of the name make up the logo and there's no symbol. The lettering itself becomes the visual. A text-only wordmark logo is fine but only when you do it with styling and sophistication. You certainly don't want to design that logo in Microsoft Word using Times Roman. Really, don't be doing that. Here's a few examples of some very recognizable wordmarks and then there's one that I did for a client recently on the upper right. She's an event planner and it was just type only but kind of the whimsical feeling and the colors it all kind of contributed. It worked well on her website and she was able to use it easily on social media. A logo mark includes a visual element or an icon along with the business name. Here's some examples. These are some examples I've designed for clients in the past taking into account their desired brand message and their color preferences. Your choice of typeface and the visual element needs to be distinctive and speak clearly to the world. It's sort of an atmosphere that you create. You'll notice the different typefaces, the different colors. Each of these clients had a little different objective in mind. In the case of the one on the lower left, Annie May's Pantry, that shape became sort of the iconic element of her restaurant and her website and everything associated with it. It had sort of a homey, down home country feeling and she showed me a shape similar to this. So when we created this logo, we started with a text-only version and then we embedded it in this shape and the shape kind of became the holder. So it became very much part of her whole identity. She's all over Instagram, if you wanna check her out. You'll see a lot of pretty things and they all incorporate that logo. And she's actually started using this logo to sell branded items. Kind of like Martha Stewart's situation where she's got like cutting boards and utensils and they all incorporate that logo because that worked well for her. So how about if you have no typography at all? Just imagery. Recognized brands like Nike and Starbucks don't really need to show their name because their symbols are so iconic. We're so used to seeing them that over time they've stripped away the name of their company. The symbols recognizable, people just kind of fill it in in their head because you've seen it over and over. Most small businesses or startup businesses can't get away with that. You kind of need their name and possibly a tagline explaining what they do. But in the case of these giants, you all are used to seeing this. So a logo can tell a memorable story. I'm gonna talk for a minute about NBC which was originally known as the Peacock Network. It used an illustration of a stylized Peacock in 1956. The Peacock itself became a marketing tool with the tagline brought to you in living color. This was at the very start of color television. NBC was hoping that people tuning into NBC stations would be motivated to purchase color TV sets to see the living color and they used the Peacock as that example. And over the years, the Peacock has evolved into this newer digitized kind of shape and it has a certain logic to it now. It has a six-colored tail which represents the six different departments of NBC. The Peacock is facing right and that's supposed to show that the network has a bird's eye view of the future. So let's talk about the next big element in logo design which is color. I always recommend creating a distinctive color palette that you'll use consistently on all materials and that includes accent colors on your website. You have to find out if your client has existing colors or possibly a branding guide that you need to follow. Or are you starting from scratch? This will definitely have an impact on the work you need to do on your website and other media. Color choice should reflect what works for your audience. Color is a subjective factor but it always should serve a business purpose. It needs to be determined objectively. There should be a thoughtful strategy for color selection and you need to think of the various formats and media it's going to be used in and you need to make sure it's always gonna be legible and reproducible. A recent university study concluded that color can boost brand recognition by 80%. A lot of memorable logos use a single color scheme but if you plan to use more than one color, make sure the end result isn't a logo that looks confusing or busy. So here's an example of a very simple branding guidelines. There's just a one pager that I did for my company. Sometime larger businesses or corporations will have a multi-page PDF. They'll have files in Dropbox for vendors and internal people to download. This is just a very simple showing different options and it's a good reminder for myself. You'll notice that I have the different color breakdowns. The first line is for color process. The next color is hex code for web and the next color talks about PMS colors. I'm gonna get to that in just a minute. Those different breakdowns. One thing to keep in mind is that color tends vary. Certain color schemes look dated today but were hip and trendy when they first came out. So you can think about the harvest gold and avocado colors that were really big for appliances back in the 70s and 80s. So you need to always keep in mind that what's really cool today might look really dated tomorrow. So this is an example on the right. The Tiffany logo is a timeless trademark color and actually interestingly enough the Pantone PMS color for this for Tiffany is special. It's 1837 is the PMS color and that's the year that Tiffany was founded. So when you're big guns like Tiffany you get to have your own Pantone color. Let's move on. So just touching very briefly you could do a whole page seminar all about color psychology but just remember that color is subjective. It can have different effects on readers. Colors that might work well in our North American culture might convey something completely different to Japanese, South American or Middle Eastern users. Even though we're in a global economy color associations and preferences will vary so you're gonna wanna do a little research if you have an international brand. So talking a little bit about color psychology red implies passion, energy, danger or aggression, warmth or heat. It's also been found to stimulate appetite which explains why it's used in so many restaurants and food product logos. I always think ketchup, you know, Heinz. But you can see there's different kinds of companies that use red and not all of them are food related. It's just interesting when you're out and you're buying products just kinda pay attention to the colors that trigger you what impulse it causes to make you wanna buy. So the color green is often used when a company wants to emphasize natural or ethical credentials, especially with products like organic and vegetarian foods. Green also implies growth and freshness and is very popular with financial products. Also the implication of growth. Blue is one of the most widely used colors in corporate logos. It implies professionalism, trust, integrity, sincerity and calm. Blue is associated with authority and success and for this reason it's popular with both financial and government websites. So remember, for maximum impact, it's always good to stick with a single color or two color palette when creating a logo. However, there are some very successful multi-colored logos. So the implication of multiple colors in the logos you see here is that these companies are offering a wide variety of products and services. For the Olympic rings, the multiple colors sort of give a message of diversity and inclusivity. And now we're gonna go to imagery a little bit and how to select imagery for your logo. So it's really important that your imagery is non-generic, memorable and communicate your business personality. That doesn't mean you have to buy expensive customized illustration every time. But it does mean that you wanna avoid generic overused, you know, banal images that you've seen in a lot of places. Readability is really important. You always wanna make sure there's proper contrast between the logo and its text and the background that it's going to be against. Recognition and clarity are huge. A pale logo typeface against a pale background will be hard to read and very confusing. Keep in mind that icon type images, very simple, flat color are great for social media. So current trends in logo design are unusual typefaces, but readable. Geometric shapes, social media ready, like flat, iconic images, bright, flat colors and gradient colors and overlays. You've seen these like feathered colors, gradient. I think I have some examples. We'll get to that in a minute. So here's like three logos that people are pretty familiar with that have been redesigned in the last couple of years to look great on social media. These are the before versions. And here's the after. So you can see how things got simpler, popular effects like you look at Instagram, sort of the realistic and the kind of shadowy edge and all that, everything's kind of stripped out now. And kind of today when people are viewing things on social media on a mobile device, these are a lot more effective, a lot cleaner, clearer to read. The Mastercard one is also another good and you can see that it doesn't look like a big change but it's pretty major. So just a quick, not to be negative, but overused clip art, be careful. Be very careful of free. I'll get to that in a minute. Poor quality or illegible typefaces like my personal pet peeve, all caps, italic with a black outline and a drop shadow. In regards to free art, clip art included, always, always, always check on copyright limitations. There's so many royalty free image sites now online you can go and for very small amounts of money you can purchase something and then if you buy vector art you can manipulate that in Adobe Illustrator or you can hire an illustrator to help you. Canned logos from stock sites. I see this a lot in real estate where somebody essentially bought a house with some fake type underneath and they fixed it. That has a really cheap unprofessional effect and I would avoid it at all costs. And just remember that people have really short attention spans and your logo needs to speak to them and kind of convey a feeling and be instantly understandable in a matter of seconds. And most of all, don't use clip art that your client found in Microsoft Word because that's not a logo. I've been there and it's pretty scary. So here's a few tips how to help your logo work for you and work hard for you on the web. It's a good idea to take the colors and typeface that you've been using in your logo and kind of echo it in the website so everything's kind of cohesive and belongs together. You want to connect visually and also use your logo's colors on your social media sites and of course on print materials. Make sure that your logo colors and typefaces are consistent, I'm a little obsessed with this because sometimes you'll have vendors who will tweak things to fit the embroidery method they have for the baseball cap or the silk screen that they're doing on the t-shirt and you kind of have to be the logo police for that because it will affect your brand recognition. Your logo also needs to support the general vibe of your site. What's appropriate? I mean clearly a logo for a funeral home or a corporate law firm isn't gonna be the right kind of feel for a logo that you're gonna do for a nightclub or a florist. Next I'm gonna talk a little bit about where should the logo appear on your website. So the header of any website, that's where your visitors likely will first see your logo. It's a strategic part of real estate and it's a great interaction starting point for your website. Users are 89% more likely to remember logos that are in the traditional top left position than logos that are on the right and there aren't, you don't see that too much anymore, logos on the right. The most common design position for logos on the webpage is the top left corner and it serves as a landmark that orient users when they first land on the page. It helps them identify the website they're visiting and they're more likely to recall the brand name and the logos on the left versus center or right. Apparently from my research, centered logos on the website might slightly negatively affect usability, but not as much as a right aligned logo. The location of a centered logo is not as far removed from the expected left position than a right hand logo. And centered logos, I think you're seeing that more and more now because of responsive web design. The mobile first designs that people are doing now very typically you'll have on mobile view, you'll have the hamburger or the menu kind of appear in one corner and then the logo's in the middle. So that's kind of driving where the logo's positioned also on the desktop version. The Warby Parker, great company for glasses. It used to appear on the left side of the website header. I think I showed you that, there it is. And then when you see it on the mobile view, it's now centered. We're so used to the upper left or centered logo positioning that it's kind of jarring to see it on the right. I saw that this is like a, I think a theme demo and it just looks strange to me. I guess, you know, just not accustomed to that. So the dreaded request. As a graphic designer, I've been living with this for many years. Can we make the logo bigger? Guess what, bigger is not better. A lot of clients like to see their logo really, really big. But in truth, smaller logos are most commonly seen and expected on the web. Bigger is not better. And guess what, users aren't browsing your website to become familiar with your logo. It's just a landmark, it's just a guidepost. They're coming there to check out your services. So if your message appears halfway down the page because of the giant logo, there's a chance you could lose the potential customer. And an overly large logo could make your website look kind of amateurish. Make sure your logo is flexible. That you can use it in various formats, including social media and mobile viewing. A lot of companies will take a single letter or their graphic element from their logo and use that for their social media icon. An uncomplicated logo with just a few colors stands out best online. And again, you need to keep in mind when you're designing a logo or you have a client logo that you may need to do different versions for different usages. For example, if your logo is really horizontal, it works great on your website header. You might want to adapt it into a square shape or maybe vertical for business card or for social media usage. It's good to keep that in mind upfront. So again, just using me, my company as an example, we have a few versions of the logo. On the upper left, you can see we have the complete logo with our tagline. So this tagline goes away, as you see on the lower left, if it's used really small and that could be in print or online, like if I did this on a pen or on a tiny post-it, I don't need to include that tagline. This would be minuscule. Nobody will be able to read it. At the upper right is the background we use for our Twitter landscape image and that's using our asterisk icon of our logo and a tint of the aqua color against the solid aqua color. And that's just part of the color branding for my company. And at the lower right is the coral color asterisk that I use full on for emphasis, for bullets, for accents on different materials. So it makes it a little more versatile and a little more playful. Here, this is from our packages page on our website. Just shows how we use the asterisk icon. And actually, these little icons, when you first get to the page, they kind of move. They look like little dancing, like jacks from the game. This is where we describe different service packages. And again, just trying to be a little more whimsical and colorful. And here's how we use it on the business card. And again, the asterisk is pale. It's used as a watermark against a solid background. And we're gonna talk just a little bit here about favicons. So, favicons are small 16 pixel square icon files that are displayed next to the URL of your site in a browser's address bar. They will be displayed next to the name of your site in the user's list of open tabs and bookmark listings. And that makes it easier for the user to identify your site. Well-designed favicons are styled to match the logo or theme of your website. And that way, once again, users have a quick and easy way to recognize your website. And here's the Nimble Design Team favicon. So the favicon is small but mighty. It plays a subtle role in building the brand on your website. And when visitors see it, they know they've come to the right place. A little bit here about logo file creation. I always recommend that logos be created in vector art in Adobe Illustrator. That way, vector art allows you to enlarge things like ginormously or shrink it down really tiny without losing the integrity or the resolution of the image. If something is made up in Photoshop, it's a JPEG or raster file, it's made up of pixels. And if you blow it up really huge, like put on a billboard or the side of the building, it's gonna end up looking fuzzy. So sometimes people will come to me and all they have is a GIF or a JPEG. And typically we'll redraw it. We'll just redo it as vector art because that's kind of the base for everything else you're gonna be doing in the future. When you create your original file in Adobe Illustrator, you also set up colors for various file formats and usages. Here's just a window. Showing you, this is in Photoshop. You can see, I just kind of circled the CMYK down here that's cyan, magenta, yellow, black. That's a typical printing kind of, or digital output for print. The Pantone color selection would be shown in the color libraries area. You would click on that and that would take you to Pantone and Pantone has both coded and uncoated versions, depending on what kind of paper you're printing. And sometimes you have to be a little bit creative with color conversions because it's not a complete, things that look perfect in two PMS colors printed on a business card may not interpret directly to the web. The web uses hex colors, which means it's hexadecimal, means it's a six digit combination of numbers and letters. There are a lot of free online conversion tools you can look around that will help you figure out how to convert from one color format to another. You can also do it inside a Photoshop and Illustrator. RGB is a color profile that's used in digital design and it represents the colors used on computer screens, TVs and mobile devices. I typically, when I create a logo in Adobe Illustrator, I'll start in CMYK or Pantone and then later we'll play with the hex colors on the website. And I think that's kind of it. Except, I'll take questions in a minute. If any of you would like to do a quickie logo review with me or you'd like to talk to me about anything WordPress related or logo or graphic design related, I'll be at the Happiness Fire right after here until lunchtime. I also have a really great little handout. It's a do-it-yourself branding audit checklist and it's kind of fun. So stop up here afterwards and I'll hand one to you. Also, if you visit my website, please sign up for my email newsletter. I send something out every month, not necessarily logo or graphic design related, typically it's WordPress related. And here's my contact info. I'll be happy to take questions. Thank you. Hey, Sarah. Yeah, Karen, yes. Could you go, well, I guess we should wait until everybody, I noticed that on your home page you used the fonts for your headings. That was really cool. We'll talk about being more stable. That was exactly my question. Well, too bad I got it wrong. Where am I? I thought you got it wrong with that. Oh yeah, so I, oh, here we go. So for example. And you use the button color so you can really. Yeah, so I, yeah, I'm still, to be honest, when I use that very sparingly, because that script is not the most readable, but it's kind of fun. It may change in the future. This was my, this was a huge, just to give you some background. About a year and a half ago, I was not nimble design team. I was, I had a name for my design company that was based on my previous husband's name. And I had sort of this revelation sitting in a parking lot on a rainy Sunday afternoon. And I decided to change my business name, my logo, my colors. We were in the middle of a website class with Judy Knight and I was gonna change my web. And I called Judy and I said, I'm freaked out. I need to change everything. And she said, you know what, go for it. So being a logo designer, you know, at heart, I went home that night and on a Saturday evening, I just did the logo, colors, got it all going. And then we started playing on the website. So to me, my website and most of the websites I'm working on, that's like a work in progress. What I love about the web, it's not like carved in stone. It's not a print brochure that got printed last week and the client called you up on a Sunday night at 10 o'clock that there's a typo in the second paragraph. You can change, you can get feedback, you can alter things. I like it. Is it the most readable thing for headings? That's about the most amount of words I would ever use with that typeface. To me, it's more of a headline kind of font. I think it looks great for the word nimble. The colors for me were kind of a riff on Fiesta wear, kind of 1950s. And again, if you go to my website on my blog, I've got posts and those are all from my MailChimp email newsletters and I talk about the color there. Color is super suggestive, so subjective, sorry, subjective. So a person my age might react differently than somebody who's like 22. But I did kind of some random casual testing and it got a good reaction. Many times when I'm working with a client on a logo, they have a committee, they have a board, they have corporate branding guidelines. You really are held in. I worked on something not long ago actually for Emory Hospital in Atlanta. They just built a gorgeous new huge addition to the hospital and they were gonna have this big fancy kickoff party. And I did these layouts and they were really happy and we got it almost to the point of production and then somebody realized that it looked too similar to something their competitor, a different healthcare system. Like there was some element, there was some little like rainbow thing or something going on and they just nixed the whole thing. And a lot of people saw that, including the president of the hospital. I mean, it was just, there's things that are sometimes in your head and your memory, in your personal database and you have to be really careful that when you design or when your client's designing, that it's not about your personal expression. I mean, graphic design and web design, it's all, to me, it's visual problem solving and communication. So you have to put your ego aside, even on your own website. If it's not speaking to your users or speaking to your defined audience, then it's just not working. It might make you feel good for a couple of minutes, but not working. So as far as a website, you've got all three options. That's right. Yeah, for accents. Yeah, I didn't set up like Wi-Fi or anything here, but yeah, I think if you go there, you'll poke around and you'll see. It's just, to me, it's kind of logical that you've got this color palette. You've got sort of a look. And it establishes a branding and identity for yourself that you should carry it out. The logo should not be a standalone that just kind of has its own little world. Everything kind of orbits around this brand that you're building. And it's really important. If other people are like vendors or other people in your company, they're playing with it. You really need to stay on top of, there needs to be a central place where you say, here's the files for this. And by the way, no, you can't put it on a pink leopard background or neon yellow because that's not gonna work. So, yes? 10 years ago, because of the print of Instagram is a great example. Right. What are your thoughts on great-int logos when it comes to, you know, when it looks great, but when it goes to print it can get kind of weird? Yeah, so when I'm working on logo projects for clients, I will do versions. And sometimes what you think looks great in color and then you just create a gray scale version, it's like, oh my God, you kind of have to recreate it and pick the grays and pick how deep is the black. And it's funny, because so even 10 years ago, I mean, my career goes back way farther than that. So gradients back in the day in early versions of Photoshop's, gradients would go like this. So it was like kiss of death. We had a print folder we did once and had a beautiful, like, deep teal up to white. It was so hard to get that thing to work. But remember that was back in the day of offset printing and dots and films. Everything today is so radically different because of digital. And I think because a lot of things that you're seeing now are online only or on mobile and you don't have that printing problem. And I would say if I had a gradient logo and I was worried about that, I would just kind of gang a bunch of different samples and whoever printing it for you, I would have them just output. Just do a piece of digital output so we can show the client, here's what it looks like gradient. Here's what it looks like when I kept it in two PMS colors. Here's where I converted it ahead of time to CMYK. Here's black only. And you can make a judgment call. I think gradient is much less of an issue now than it used to be. A lot of things. I mean, I'll tell you, this is really back in the day. But we used to do everything in like pantone, one pantone color and one black color because that was the most economical. Two color printing, offset printing on a two color press. Well, nobody's used. I mean, two color presses now are dusty in dusty back rooms. I mean, there's some usage, like if you're in Emory Hospital or Coca-Cola and you have your designated pantone color, you are gonna print in two colors or three PMS colors, whatever. Most people today are gonna print using digital output. So whatever the file is you're giving to the printer, that digital device, that machine is interpreting your colors into its colors, which are CMYK. And even that, think about it, it's not ink. It's like powder or whatever. I mean, it's not an offset machine where you watch the guy dump the bucket of pantone 285. You know, it's just, it's radically different. So I like to be cautious and I like to test. And even when I'm showing mockups, if the client has a presentation and it's really crucial, like in the case of some of my bigger clients like Emory, I'm not gonna trust FedEx Office or my own color printer to show a proof. I'm gonna go to the printer who's ultimately doing their work and they're gonna output it. And they're gonna output it on the actual paper stock because another thing that happens a lot in the world of printing, some of you may not know this, but the brightness of the paper color can affect the outcome of your color. There used to be a very popular thing, I think back in the 90s, everybody was printing on this like eggshell ivory cream stock. And a lot of times with like weird brown ink, I'm glad that trend is over. But in any case, if you print a color ink, a CMYK conversion on a beige ivory cream stock and then you compare it to a bright white, radically different. And even when you're picking, if you're ordering business cards online, you go to like Moo or Vista Print or Peppermint Printing, there's a lot of good sites. What you see on your computer screen, it's not what you're gonna get. So sometimes it makes a difference, it's worth the cost to have them actually output it and mail you a physical piece. If it's crucial to your branding, it will look different, the interpretation of your colors will vary. And kind of the luxury on the web is, it's on the web, it's there. No one's gonna print it unless you've got a PDF attached to say an annual report. And then somebody, you don't know what they're printing it out on. Maybe they're printing out on a crappy $60 inkjet printer. It's not gonna be the same. I mean, when a client says to you, oh, I just printed it out, I love it, let's give it to the printer. Well, guess what? Their inkjet printing device is not the high-end digital output that your printer's gonna supply. And they might end up being disappointed. So always in the world of print, you always wanna output and compare and show. Yes, Megan? Are there, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know if it helps with other stuff. And I'm gonna follow up with one more question. Yeah. Are you done? Yeah, I think like colorblind. Yeah. So colorblindness is something to definitely consider. And I personally need to read up more on that because there are certain colors that a large part of the population doesn't see. And so that's not part of my presentation, but that's an accessibility issue and definitely worth reading up on. What I like to tell the client is what you're seeing on your monitor is not what I'm seeing on my monitor. And we need to, I mean, it's like the testing that you'll do on a new website. You're looking at different devices, different mobile, you know, Android, iPhone, tablets, PCs, Macs, it's gonna look different throughout. So I've never had a really tricky issue with like a large corporate client about color. I have a feeling that our whole in-house departments dealing with that. Like if you're in-house design at Coca-Cola, I have a feeling that there's very tricky formulas that are probably shared internally for that. I am really cautious about making sure the client understands that what they see is not necessarily what their customer will see or that the output will be exactly matching with. I mean, I'm just, I try to make that clear because we're all using different devices now and the kind of proofing we did, you know, back in the day, looking at very expensive Chromalin prints that were output with multiple layers of film and there was a whole art. I mean, they're craftsmen, you know, fixing things like pixel by pixel, that's just gone. So most of my clients now don't even want to, I mean, we used to do annual reports and we would make these gorgeous, beautifully output dummy mock-ups, multi-page that looked just like a printed book and it was very expensive. Now we just send a multi-page PDF and they're probably just looking at it online or printing it out on their cheap printer and they don't really care. But when you have something that's really crucial for color, like if there's a newsletter and there's pictures of people, I had this recently, the client was in a big rush, we did this 20-page newsletter, got it done, the photos were crappy, I tweaked it a little bit, there was no time, and then the printer output it and it was embarrassing because again, what I saw on my monitor, there wasn't time to see their proof, their digital proof and if I'd been the client, I would have been very unhappy with the final output. Flesh tones, people of color, shadows, a lot of times you need to have somebody who's a professional Photoshop retoucher do that kind of work for you. And many times, I'll be honest with you, a lot of the logos I work on, just for inspiration, for rough concepting, I'll show the client something that I will literally trace off of a stock image site just for an idea. I don't have it here but I have a client called Andra Hall Living. She's actually, she's the lady behind the anime's pantry, that logo with that kind of funny shape. So she's a very interesting entrepreneur in Atlanta, she's an African-American woman and she's creating this personal brand called Andra Hall Living. It's kind of like Martha Stewart Living. So she sent me this sketch that she did on a napkin, it had this really gross looking like bumble bee and some funny lettering and I got it, she wants a queen bee and she wants script lettering and it's got to be really legible and it's got to look elegant because she's probably gonna end up like gold foiling it and using it on all kinds of cool like aprons and chachkies, so I redid it for her just using a very simple stock image I found of a queen, and I purchased this queen bee and I said, I think this is the direction you want and actually on one of my blog posts I described the whole, I think I described the process, how we did this. So I showed it to her, she said, yeah, you're in the right direction. So then I have an illustrator, this guy's like, he's not a person who should talk to a client, but he's a great illustrator Photoshop guy, I'm happy to recommend him to anybody here and I sent him my rough layout with, I knew the script, I had the type all set up, I had this kind of crappy bee and I said, I need you to clean this up, here's the style I need it done in and he came back in like two hours and had this beautiful, more customized queen bee and it's very elegant and if I was her, I'd be using that logo everywhere and eventually just use that bee because it's really distinctive and it has a really nice feeling with it, with the script, I'm sorry I didn't include it here, this slide shows a little older than that logo is, but that is becoming her personal brand and so you should think about your business, your, whatever it is that you're doing, your company, if you're a solopreneur like I am, in a way it kind of becomes your personal brand as well. So you want to be proud of it, you want to feel like it's not something that everyone's seen before and that same typeface and that same image has been used by thousands of other people, it's good to keep that in mind. Yes ma'am, so some logos of clients I've had, their logo's kind of complicated and it's hard to figure out what are we gonna do for that little favicon and I might take an element and then tweak it a little, like make it solid color so it's not gradated, so it's not 16 different shapes that have to be jammed into 16 pixel square area. I like to think about that because I'm always thinking too, like what's gonna look good on social media? You know, something that's recognizable and simple and clean and professional. We have two minutes left. Do we have any more questions? Yes sir. So I usually do a little research, like I'll Google that online and see what's all out there and then run in the opposite direction. You know, if everybody's using, I don't know, a stethoscope or a heart or a little bar graph of like a heartbeat, just step away and think of maybe different words, even Google's different phrases or just, you know, for me oddly what really works the way my mind thinks is I'll be in the shower, I'll be sleeping, I'll be driving in my car and I like to keep a little notepad with me. I'll take pictures of like, wow, that is a cool logo or I'll pull over to the side of a road and like, that is really cool and I'll take a photo and it becomes sort of my personal little library slash database. Also run it by people who you respect. It's so easy to be cliche because sometimes the client wants you to be cliche because they think that's what speaks to their customer base. And also keep in mind if it's a local or regional or based in your area, I did something for the Georgia Charter Schools Association and we actually ended up incorporating sort of a stylized peach for Georgia. The peach became part of one of the letters. I mean, even think about that if it's a real specific geographic area, that can work for different types of companies. I hope that helps. Yes, yeah. First of all, first of all, don't let them drag you down the path of, I need to see another 30 versions. Don't go there. That's bad. I think you might need to talk and strategize before you continue showing version after version. I mean, what's going on in their head? Is it because their wife likes it? Is it because their kid did it 20 years ago? What's up with the partner? Are they new and are they coming from a background where they have this logo they designed at their previous company? Maybe get a little more info. I'd dig a little bit because sometimes there's certain colors or typefaces or imagery that trigger a positive or a negative response. And just like you do with website design, rather than leap into, we designers love our things, our visuals, our stuff. But maybe before you go there, just step back and do a little strategizing and research with them, questioning. Otherwise, you're gonna go down logo design hell and you're gonna be like, okay, version number 52.8, you know, no. Just, and we're gonna wrap it up now, I guess, but just to tell you, when I take on a logo project, I will tell them there's gonna be three possibly five initial concept layouts. That is it, three to five. After that, narrow it down to your top two. After that, okay, you like that typeface with that. You go from like three to five to two to one. And then we finesse the one and we're done. Don't go there. I mean, unless they're paying you tens of thousands of dollars, which is probably not likely. But anyway, if any of you would like to talk to me about logos or anything else, WordPress related, I'll beat the happiness bar till lunchtime. And thank you so much.