With the New Year settling in, most of us can’t help but make that traditional list of resolutions. In a month when gym memberships are at an all time high, it’s easy to jump on the bandwagon and create a list of goals. This often happens right after we reflect on the past resolutions we failed to meet. It’s no wonder that aerobics classes and health clubs are packed throughout the month of January – nearly everyone commits to lose weight and get in shape.

Yet New Years resolutions are important. They remind us to take a critical look at our lives and push ourselves to make some important changes. As entrepreneurs, this is especially valuable because we often find our focus jumping between many different things. We can easily lose focus and forget the details that will help our companies to succeed.

Looking back on 2016, you may find that your marketing and branding strategy slipped through the cracks because you were so focused on a new product design. Or maybe you didn’t make time to explore new trends in your industry. Maybe there’s an entirely other aspect of your business that you’d like to focus on. Either way, here are five helpful New Year’s resolutions for entrepreneurs.

1. Create or change your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategy.

We cannot stress this enough! For a lot of entrepreneurs, search engine optimization sounds like a scary marketing technique that only the most sophisticated companies use. The truth is that in order to compete in the fast paced world of today, you have to learn how to push your company towards the top of the search results. With a New Year come new trends, competition, and a lot of other changes that can skew your current SEO planning. Plus, search engines are constantly tweaking their algorithms and these tweaks often impact search results. For more information on how to create an effective SEO strategy, check out our 2017 SEO strategy guide.

2. Reimagine your blogging efforts.

It’s no secret that blogging became one of the biggest marketing trends of 2016. In 2017, that trend is expected to continue, but it will be even more difficult to stand out from the crowd. Some experts caution that blogging will require a long term investment – something that many entrepreneurs and small businesses are rarely prepared to make. Social media consultant Andrew Davis says “A lot of brands will give up on content marketing as they are not seeing short term results. This can be a great thing for anyone who is playing the long game.” So push yourself to blog more and through more channels (think Medium, guest blogs, your blog, etc.) to make your voice heard in 2017.

3. Open up the communication channels.

Revamping your marketing strategy does not mean brainstorming a list of ideas and then telling your employees which ones to implement. Being an entrepreneur means being a leader, which means involving the entire team in contributing to your company’s success. Communication is essential in creating a marketing strategy. If you traditionally hold closed brainstorming sessions with just the marketing team, include your designers, engineers, or customer service people. This can even be applied to other aspects of the company – you might be surprised how creative your team can be.

4. Try influencer marketing.

Social media has changed marketing and advertising dramatically in the past few years. It is becoming one of the most effective channels to target customers. More recently, a niche called influencer marketing has been using established social media stars to promote different products. In 2017, this trend is expected to increase in popularity, leaving those not using influencer marketing in the dust. Influencer marketing is a great way to reach a specific group of people quickly and persuade them to trust your brand.

5. Stop what isn’t working.

Entrepreneurs are often so tied to their companies and to strategies that it’s tough to abandon anything that holds significant amounts of invested time. It’s not that we don’t know what isn’t working, it’s that we don’t want to admit that we were wrong or that we have to restart. But when we avoid change out of fear, we enable our own failure. If a strategy isn’t helping you to meet your goal(s), it’s time to let it go. Many of the successful companies we know today made huge pivots in their strategies. These pivots helped them to succeed.

In the next few days as we begin the new year, take a moment to implement these resolutions or make a list of your own. Remember that your company will only grow if you push it to grow. And no matter what you do, remember to hold yourself accountable by assigning measurable goals you can meet. That way, you’ll be able to actually tell whether or not you succeeded with your resolutions. With ambitious goals and a concrete plan, you’ll be able to look back on a successful 2017.

Image credit: James Niland

You’re ready to build. Maybe it’s a website, an app, a landing page, or an email template. Now you just need to figure out the design. And it’s here, in this pivotal moment, before anyone has put pen to paper or pixels to screen, where you’ll either get it right or get it wrong.

Here are the top 5 mistakes commonly made in UX design – and how to avoid making them.

Mistake #1: Prioritizing your own aesthetic tastes.

We have preferences when it comes to the digital media with which we interact. Some people really like interactive sites with lots of video. Some people like a site that’s bare bones with simple, intuitive navigation and straightforward text explanations. Some people like a modern look. Some people are still big on gradients. It just depends.

And those personal tastes are all perfectly valid, but personal is the key word in this discussion. You are not the entirety of your customers and prospects. You do not represent your whole audience. And while it’s certainly within your rights to have an opinion on how a design looks, if you rely solely on your own tastes, your end result will be about you instead of the people you’re hoping to engage. This not only will create low-conversion pages (or app), but will also impact your search results.

Quick Tip: If something about a design is rubbing you the wrong way, frame your response as a question instead of a dismissal, and use the answer to check your concerns. Ask, “Is there a particular reason we would want to use this size image?” or “What was the rationale behind your color choices here?” If the response is grounded in evidence, research, and experience, be sure to keep that in consideration before you make a final decision.

Mistake #2: Relying heavily on fads.

Every year, and especially towards the end of one year and beginning of a new year, you’ll find a slew of articles detailing all the design fads to watch for over the coming months. Some of these are less radical than others. Some represent a significant break from convention, usually popularized by a handful of trailblazers. But much like our wardrobes, what is fashionable in one season can become passe in the blink of an eye.

And this is where trying hard to make your digital media fit with current design trends can backfire, especially when designing digital media intended to be durable. It’s one thing to tailor an email template to the hottest design look of the season, but when you’re spending good money on a website or app, you need to think beyond frills.

Quick Tip: Don’t hesitate to ask your customers what they like. If you’re just getting started, researching the design choices of your competition is a good way to kick things off. Once you’ve got a working idea together, though, consider leveraging a focus group to test your assumptions. For example, all design projects on crowdSPRING include free focus groups that let you quickly test your design options privately or publicly (with your own email list or on a social network like Facebook or Twitter). I can’t tell you how many times I’ve run projects, picked a favorite, only to learn that my friends and acquaintances preferred a different design (and for good reasons).

Mistake #3: Not caring about fads at all.

It can be tempting in the face of fickle tastes to say you don’t give a hoot about trends in design, choosing instead to go your own way. Sometimes that pays off. More often than not, though, it can hurt you to not consider those trends at all. After all, there are reasons these ideas became popular in the first place. In one way or another, they’ve worked for people… and people tend to obsessively test their concepts.

For some of your audience, it probably won’t matter that your digital media isn’t the belle of the ball as long as it gets the job done. But for those who need some persuading, the aesthetic you offer can be a tipping point. It’s hard to convince a potential customer of the quality of your service or product if it looks like something out of the early 90’s. This is particularly true with many small business websites. You can be small, but your web presence or mobile app doesn’t need to scream that loudly.

Quick Tip: Reach out to younger friends and family who may not be familiar with your company’s products or services. Given the world they’ve grown up in, they likely boast higher design expectations from the brands they give money. Ask them to take a look at the design concepts and describe your brand in 3-5 words from a quick glance. Once again, quick focus groups can help you to make better choices.

Mistake #4: Assuming general UX best practices will work for your audience.

An effective design, especially when you consider user experience, must be tailored to your expected audience. For example, mobile apps are designed differently for kids and for adults. When designing for elderly users, you must take into account special needs, such as larger fonts, color contrasts, and other techniques that help older people to interact with designs.

You also should consider not just audiences, but how they’ll consume your content. If most of your customers and prospects use Android devices (and not iPhones), there are special design considerations when designing for Android devices.

Many people run into problems here by copying designs of other companies. What works for one audience may not necessarily work for another. There’s not a large margin for error. People’s attention span is incredibly short – just 8 seconds!

Quick Tip: If you don’t know your audience, you should consider sending a survey to better understand their demographics and psychographics. Even if your audience covers different age groups, cultures and sexes, you still would benefit in knowing more about the people who’ll interact with your website, app or newsletter.

Mistake #5: Not adapting your design for mobile.

Even if most of your customers and prospects will be viewing your site, app or newsletter on a big screen, a great many will also view it on a mobile phone or a tablet. Smaller resolutions and screen sizes in the mobile world create unique problems for effective user experience. Thankfully, responsive techniques permit designers to design a different solution for various screen sizes. When we design at crowdSPRING, we always start with mobile design first, and then port it to a bigger screen. This forces us to consider the small screen first and deal with limitations of mobile devices.

Quick Tip: It’s tempting to design for both Android and iPhone at the same time, but there are nuances to those two mobile platforms that require some customization. We typically pick one platform (usually iPhone) and design for that platform. Once we’re happy, we tweak the designs for the other platform.

Do you have additional UX tips or a question? We’d love to hear from you in the comments below.

The digital space is constantly evolving, forcing entrepreneurs, small business owners, and marketing teams at bigger companies to continuously reevaluate their marketing strategies in order to stay competitive. In the past few years, we’ve seen significant changes in how companies market. These changes range from participation on new social networks, new technologies, and the increasingly popular content marketing.

But many companies are finding that there’s too much content – much of it not especially useful or actionable. Customers and prospective customers are becoming overwhelmed with content – much of it is just noise. These problems are made worse by changes made by Google and others in the way email is delivered. There’s no question that content marketing is more difficult to execute effectively today.
Smart business owners and teams are looking for creative ways to lift their content marketing efforts without relying on email or other more overused techniques. That’s where influencer marketing can help.

Influencer marketing pushed itself to the front of many marketing strategies, and will continue to be an important marketing tactic in 2017. While larger companies are already relying on influencers (60% of chief marketing officers plan to increase their influencer marketing budgets), startups and small businesses should also take advantage of this tactic.

We saw this when a company would partner with a celebrity like Kylie Jenner, and send Kylie free products in an exchange for an Instagram post. Kylie Jenner’s followers would see the post, and connect to the product by either following a social media account or purchasing the product. At an average cost of $50,000 per post, the company converted thousands of Jenner’s followers into customers. This worked because Kylie Jenner has positioned her brand as being luxurious and desirable, attracting 82.6 million followers just on Instagram and netting over $28 million last year between her lip kits, modeling, TV appearances, and social media ads. Her success has skyrocketed over the past few years, exponentially growing the demand for sponsorships.

But influencer marketing has become more sophisticated recently to include not just pure celebrities, but also other types of influencers. Deirdre Breakenridge, CEO of Pure Performance Communications, defines influencer marketing in an interview for Prezly:

I look at it as ‘influence equals action’. It’s knowing there’s individuals that come in all different shapes and sizes, everyone from your own customers to bloggers, Twitter personalities, LinkedIn power-users, analysts and experts who are able to move the needle for you.

Similarly, Google discovered that certain content creators on YouTube had 3x as many views and 2x as many actions on sponsored content posts than celebrities.

These trends suggest that it would be smarter for companies to focus on influencers who best engage with their niche target audiences rather than just looking for general household names. Here are five tips to get you started.

1. Identify the right influencers.

Create a list of influencers who you find best engage with your target audience. Some might decline to work with you, so make sure you have enough names on that list to give you some options. Find people in your industry that are trending on Twitter, being talked about on Facebook, or have the most followers on Instagram. Identify people who run the most popular blogs in your industry, or even who your competitors are using as their influencers and build off of those networks. To find a high quality influencer, look at engagement to make sure that the influencer isn’t just pushing content, but that they are also having conversations with their followers. Renowned marketing expert Jay Baer clarifies the fine line between content pushers and influencers: “True influence drives action, not just awareness.”

Expert Tip: Find an influencer whose recommendation you would personally trust. According to Nielsen, 90% of consumers trust peer recommendations as opposed to 33% trusting advertisements.

2. Align your influencer(s) with the right channel(s).

Make sure that you align your list of influencers with your preferred channels. This typically happens organically, since you should already be using the platform that your target audience is using. Be wary of sponsoring content on channels that you are not involved in, because it can create a disconnect with your target audience. For example, if you don’t have a presence on Instagram, it would be more difficult to reach that audience through an influencer on Instagram – but not impossible. It just requires more careful planning and strategy.

Expert Tip: Target influencers who have large followings on multiple social media channels so that the sponsored content can be cross referenced.

3. Be clear on what you need from each influencer.

Whether it’s one paid post or a video series on YouTube, have a clear idea of how the influencer can help you. Usually, the method of distribution is guided by the channel. While it’s common to have one-off sponsored posts across multiple social media channels, tactics like brand takeovers have become synonymous with Snapchat or Instagram Live, and Q&A sessions with Twitter. Influencer marketing should always be backed by a specific focus, and the method of distribution has the power to vary that focus from a new announcement to a call to action of purchasing a product. Since influencers commonly help businesses, don’t be afraid to ask for their advice and leverage their experience to improve your campaigns and tactics.

Expert Tip: Use the channel of distribution to prime the influencers before you reach out to them by engaging with them. Repost, like, or comment on their content to start creating a deeper connection.

4. Reach out to the influencers.

Connect to the influencers to get the conversation started. It’s important to introduce yourself and your company, and to briefly describe the mutual value that the partnership would provide. Also include your preferred method of compensation, whether it’s your product/service at a discounted (or free) rate, or a payment. Use clear, friendly language so that the outreach seems personal and not automated. Follow up once in 2-3 days if the influencer hasn’t responded, but avoid filling up their inbox with emails, messages, or tweets. Unfortunately, you won’t always receive a response or agreement. When you do, keep the conversation going as you work with the influencer to refine the sponsored content for their audience.

Expert Tip: Reach out to the influencers through the social media you’d like them to use and through email to have a better chance at getting their attention and cutting through the noise. This will also help you assess how responsive each influencer is to their audience.

5. Follow through with an integrated strategy.

Once you have come to an agreement with an influencer and the sponsored content has been released, implement the action plan that you created around the campaign. Analyze the traction that the sponsored content creates, or reach out to consumers that comment or share the content. It’s important to evaluate the efficacy of the content to inform your future influencer marketing strategy, and also to keep the content relevant so that you can reach the maximum number of consumers.

Expert Tip: Check out these tools for additional support on influencer campaign management.

Influencer marketing isn’t for everyone, but many businesses can benefit when they increase the power of their brand voice through influencers. A few smart influencer connections can let you speak to a much larger audience of potential customers, and pay off big in 2017.

Image credit: Alan O’Rourke

When perusing our galleries here on crowdSPRING, we see some amazing work submitted in the projects. Today, we noticed this gem submitted in this Book Cover project:

The challenge of this project was to create a book cover for a fantasy novel featuring Bomoki, an epic bad guy who oozes badness. The ideal cover would show Bomoki as a half living, half undead decorated in armor composed of ram skulls. Running down his arms and up his spine the actual spine of the ram’s head would be pincered into Bomoki with a multi-horned ram skull sitting like a helmet atop Bomoki’s head. Each ram skull would have its own baleful green light gleaming from its eyes at the viewer… And as you can see, paganus pretty much nailed it!

Let us start the slow clap for paganus. Check out more great work on paganus’ profile page.

Nicely done, paganus, nicely done!

One of the biggest advantages when marketing a small business is the flexibility to try new strategies and explore opportunities to grow your business. Because they have a direct relationship with both the product and customer, small business entrepreneurs are able to quickly analyze what strategies are or are not working and adjust accordingly. This is especially an advantage in digital marketing, where a businesses willingness to try something new can be a significant competitive advantage for reaching new customers in meaningful ways.

Though you may be flexible enough to try new marketing tactics to grow your business in 2017, is your logo? Take a look at the checklist below to see if your logo is ready to move as quickly as you:

Your logo is legible at any size

Image Courtesy of LinkedIn

Do any of the elements on your logo become less legible at different sizes? Some logos that look good on your computer screen are a little harder to read when shrunk to fit on the side of a pen or in an app icon. Print out your logo at various sizes to test the limits of your current logo design so that you’re prepared for any promotional opportunity.

Your logo works on any background

Image Courtesy of OpenTable

A logo that looks good on a light background may be impossible to read on a dark one, so most brands create two versions of their logo for these purposes. Try placing your logo on various backgrounds to make sure it is ready to be placed in a variety of locations.

Your logo is still effective in one color

Image Courtesy of Medium

Most business owners will run into a situation where they need to display their logo in only one color, whether this is due to the limitations of the printing method or even budgeting. It is important to have a logo that doesn’t rely on color to distinguish different elements of the design so that the brand’s identity remains intact even when one color is used.

Your logo fits in any format

Image Courtesy of Google

It’s almost impossible to design a logo that is the perfect shape for every situation, so brands often create two different versions of the logo: horizontal and vertical. The horizontal logo, which is considered the “standard” format, can be used on anything from web banners to promotional pens while a vertical or “stacked” version can be used on signage and social media avatars.

Your logo can be printed on different mediums

Image Courtesy of MJW Embroidery

Though it may be tempting to use complicated images, gradients, and effects on a logo that look great on a computer screen, it is important for a business owner to remember that their logo should be usable in the physical world just as much as the digital. Overly complex designs do not translate well to some mediums like apparel embroidery and sign printing which are great mediums for increasing brand awareness.

Flexible Branding

If your logo falls short in any of the categories above, it may be time to revisit your branding strategy. An entrepreneur’s ability to be flexible when growing a small business will be greatly reduced the first time a partnership or advertising campaign has to be put on hold to redesign the logo to fit.

You don’t have to start from scratch! Existing brands may be able to utilize their current logo to create alternate versions or a designer may just need to simplify the existing logos. In the situation where a designer may need to start fresh, the existing branding is a great starting point to create something new that is still true to the brand.

If you are just starting your business, you’re in luck! Just make sure that you get all the necessary variations designed from the beginning and take a look at our 10 Logo Design Tips for more insight on what makes a logo great.

By thinking ahead about all your branding needs and getting a truly flexible logo for your company, your branding can be just as agile as your marketing strategy.

If you need help creating variations of your current logo, or need to create a flexible logo from scratch , consider enlisting the help of our network of over 150,000 creatives to give you great options. crowdSPRING’s Logo Design Service offers a step-by-step creative brief that helps you outline your company’s needs and allows you to select from over 100 entries on average.

Naming a startup or small business is tricky. The company’s name sets the tone for how customers and prospects perceive the company and is a critical part of the brand. Of course, you also want people to remember your brand, so there’s a lot of pressure to find the perfect name.

When we name companies or products, we always see whether the corresponding domain name is available. Finding an available domain name is often more difficult than finding a great name. It’s one reason we turn to the crowdSPRING community when we need a new company name – leveraging the power of 200,000 creatives from around the world is much better than reading every dictionary in existence only to learn that every word in Swahili has already been registered. Trust me, I’m nearly fluent in Swahili (I say this only half-jokingly) after looking up thousands of possible domain names.

One reason domains have become more scarce is because today, it’s easier to create a website, and new names are being registered at an increasing pace. Suddenly your first twenty name choices already exist as a .com, and you may find yourself compromising on a name that doesn’t fit, or a domain that is too long to remember. Even worse, you might find yourself in a domain dispute- an increasingly troubling problem (10% increase in domain disputes in 2016 according to World Intellectual Property Organization).

One good strategy is to avoid generic names or domain/trademark lawsuits by using different top level domains (TLDs). A top level domain is the last part of a domain name- it’s everything that follows the dot (.com, .gov, .org, etc.). Typically, TLDs are separated into two categories: generic and country specific. TLDs like .fr for France or .biz for business have become more common over the past few years as companies looked at strengthening their SEO. Moz explains this in a post about CcTLDs, or country code top level domains:

Important in international SEO, ccTLDs are the single strongest way to show search engines and users where the site originates. This means that, all things being equal, example.fr will likely rank better in a French user’s SERP than example.us or example.com

But is this the only way to differentiate your company and strengthen your ranking?

You don’t have to resort to country level domain names to differentiate. In 2016, over 50 new TLDs became active, and more are expected to open in 2017. According to United Domains, TLDs like .music, .app, .sport, .hotel, and more gained popularity in 2016 in order to create more industry focus. New TLDs are gaining traction quickly, which means that they’ll become even more competitive with time. With more room for creativity in naming and more simple domains, it’s going to be even more important for entrepreneurs and small business owners to understand all of the new opportunities that come with the new TLDs.

Here are three things you should think about to take advantage of new TLDs:

1. Consider smarter domains.

It can be difficult to remember or spell a long domain, and even harder to put a one on marketing materials like infographics or business cards. With the availability of new, more specific TLDs, companies should consider switching to a smarter domain if their existing domain isn’t working for them.

We see many companies whose names are different from their domains – this creates a lot of confusion and frustration, and ultimately harms their brand. Today’s search ranking factors no longer give a huge boost to .com domains, even though most SEO practitioners continue to believe .com, .edu and .org TLDs do offer some advantages. Here’s an example of a recent anecdotal study showing that a new TLD can rank high on search results.

The main issue with non .com TLDs isn’t whether they can rank higher – it’s whether they’re commonly associated with spam. Certain TLDs are havens for spammers and as a result, tend to do worse in search results.

One of my favorite examples of a company that made the switch is American Health Associates, a veterinarian and animal hospital group from Oregon. They switched their domain from americanhealthassociates.org to aha.vet once the new TLD was available. Practice Manager Jim Johnson explains their reasoning:

“Actually, we changed our domain name not specifically because of the new extension, but simply because that allowed us to have a shorter name in general. Our domain used to be animalhealthassociates.org, which is hard to type, hard to spell over the phone, etc. When the new domain names became available we were able to snag Aha.vet which is obviously much easier to work with.”

In the end, the veterinarian group was able to better communicate with the community and introduce more people to their domain, making them smarter in their branding and marketing strategies.

2. Extended domain ownership.

With more TLDs to choose from, there’s now more options to extend your brand to more specific verticals. When purchasing a domain, it’s important to consider the different variations on the domain and TLD to make sure that a competitor cannot directly copy your company and confuse your customers. For a while, companies would simply buy the .com TLD and a few variations on spelling the name. But it is extremely important to protect the identity of your brand, making it imperative to think critically about the potential popularity of other TLDs and how those could affect your company if the name itself is hijacked. In addition to brand protection, extended domain ownership gives companies the opportunity to own product specific domains, which give companies the ability to differentiate and target their products/customers uniquely.

For example, a small record label may start in the United States with the domain recordlabel.music. As they sign more artists, they begin to expand to other countries. In order to increase their website ranking in other countries, they may use recordlabel.italy. Maybe they want to run a marketing campaign to sign artists in Chicago, for which they use recordlabel.chicago. The record label might even begin to sell merchandise, using recordlabel.fashion. To avoid damage to their reputation, they may register (and not use) recordlabel.isbad. No matter the reason, the record label is acting on the advantage that they bought multiple TLD variations of their domain when they purchased their original domain, recordlabel.music. With extended domain ownership, they can expand as quickly or as slowly as they want without the threat of competitors.

I’m not suggesting you register every TLD variation of your company’s name. There are way too many variations for most companies to do this smartly. But do think about the most logical, strategic variations and consider whether registering those could help you.

3. Brand specific TLDs.

In addition to the new TLDs released in 2016/2017, companies can now register brand specific TLDs. Unlike other TLDs which use common words or abbreviations we all know, brand specific TLDs are proprietary and can only be registered by the company that owns that name. Buffer, for example, cannot own social.hootsuite, since Hootsuite is company name. Buffer can own social.buffer, and use it for either specific purposes like special marketing campaigns, or simply to redirect customers in search results. Either way, brand specific TLDs create a larger opportunity for companies to create a focused, brand driven presence on the internet. Since there isn’t direct competition for brand specific TLDs, it’s easy to forget about them- making them even more intriguing when used.

With over 4 million companies already using the new TLDs, TLDs will only continue to expand. Startups and innovative companies looking to rebrand will make the trend more and more popular this year as they look to find something unique that makes them stand out in a sea of search results. Instead of paying large sums of money to buy an old domain, smart marketers can identify new TLDs to build a more cohesive brand identity.

Image source: Pixabay

If you need help naming your company, consider using our network of over 196,000 creatives to give you great options for a domain name. crowdSPRING’s Naming Services offer a step-by-step creative brief that helps you outline your company’s needs and allows you to select from over 100 entries on average.

Image courtesy of FreePik

Logo design is often one of the first tasks an entrepreneur needs to outsource when starting a new business. Used to doing most of the work themselves, it can be hard for a small business owner to justify the expense of a professionally designed logo. Though cheaper options such as ready-made design stores and designing your own logo exist, they rarely produce the type of quality design that is expected in today’s business landscape. In some situations, these options can even harm your business.

When it comes to design, investing in quality as soon as possible is the best way to get the most growth out of your business. Otherwise, you may find yourself working harder than necessary to earn customer trust and stand out from the competition. Here are five ways that investing in design early can influence business growth:

First Impressions Matter

Image courtesy of FreePik

During a study at Carleton University in Ottawa, participants were shown websites for only 50 milliseconds and asked to rate them for visual appeal. The participants were then shown the websites for a longer time, and asked to rate the websites again. The study found that the participants rated the websites’ visual appeal consistently, regardless of how long they were shown them.

What does this mean for small business owners? You have 50 milliseconds to make a good impression on your potential customer, and quality design will play a major role.

Communicate visually with your customer

When properly designed, your logo can say a lot about your company. It may be the only opportunity to identify what your company does or to separate you from the competition in locations like app download stores and social media. As branding expert and author of Designing Brand Identity Alina Wheeler puts it:

“To rise above the clutter, a symbol or a logo is the fastest communication known to man. It unlocks associations with your brand on sight, so it’s important to get it right the first time around.”

Make your business memorable

A memorable logo doesn’t just help customers create a relationship between your company and its services, it can actually make them more engaged.

An online study conducted by branding firm Siegel+Gale found that memorable logos are 13 percent more likely to get consumers’ attention, 7 percent more likely to make them want to learn more about the brand, and 6 percent more likely to suggest a company is more unique than others in its category.

What makes a logo memorable? Simplicity.

“Simple was the word that came up above and beyond, more than anything else,” said Brian Rafferty, global director of research insights for Siegel+Gale. “When people were asked what makes a logo memorable, it was simplicity.”

Simple design is harder than it sounds, and many low-quality logos have complicated elements to mask their shortcomings. Don’t make the mistake of confusing complication with quality.

Stand out from the competition

As mentioned earlier, ready-made and generic logos can harm your business. Ready-made logos can be purchased by other businesses and could lead to brand confusion when shown next to competitors that went the same ready-made route. The generic elements often used in homemade designs have been seen so many times by customers they can begin to ignore them completely.

As the visual representation of everything your brand stands for, it’s important for your logo to be unique. Professional designers take the time to learn about your business and create a logo that represents your company in a way that a generic option never could.

Invest now or spend more later

Spending little to no money on logo design might make financial sense in the early phases of starting a business, but it is a short-sighted decision. If the competitive advantages of investing in quality design from the outset aren’t enough, the financial advantage is also clear. Low-quality or generic design has a short shelf-life and will likely require a redesign in the future.

Whether it is because you are unhappy with what the design says about your growing business, or you found that your logo design is not as flexible as your marketing strategies, a logo redesign is an additional expense that can be avoided by making the decision to invest in quality design from the start.

 
Ready to invest in good design? It’s not as expensive as you think! Thousands of businesses have turned to crowdSPRING to create professional, unique designs for their company for as little as $199. crowdSPRING’s Logo Design Service offers a step-by-step creative brief that helps you outline your company’s needs and allows you to select from over 100 entries on average.

For decades, law firm branding in the United States was simple: take the last names of the key equity partners, pick a font, and you have a name, logo and a brand. Such  simplicity has one very important drawback – it’s ineffective.

Many law firms and lawyers believe that branding is optional. That’s not quite right. Whether you want to or not – you have a brand. Your brand impacts everything you do. In fact, although clients typically hire individual attorneys, the law firm’s brand is the second most important reason clients retain particular legal counsel.

Big firms spend hundreds of thousands of dollars (and over time, millions, to craft their brands). Smaller law firms and solo practitioners can’t afford to invest so much into branding. The good news is that you don’t have to pay thousands of dollars to have a great legal brand.

I was a trial attorney for 13 years (initially an associate and then a partner at two Chicago firms). I didn’t just believe branding was important – branding was the reason I left my legal practice in 2007 to start crowdSPRING (more about that in the video below). Since then, crowdSPRING, with 200,000 designers and writers, has helped law firms and lawyers in the U.S. and around the world with logo design, web design, and other graphic design needs.

In the short video that follows, I offer five tips to help you brand you law firm or practice. Investing in your legal brand today will pay dividends later.

Ready to invest in your legal brand? It’s not as expensive as you think! Many law firms and lawyers have turned to crowdSPRING to create professional, unique brands for as little as $199. crowdSPRING’s Logo Design Service offers a step-by-step creative brief that helps you outline your firm’s needs and allows you to select from over 100 entries on average.

Image source: William Iven

Marketing is constantly evolving. Over the past few years, we’ve seen new social media platforms, new strategies, and new tactics. Everyone from entrepreneurs to experienced marketers/CEOs have had to rethink their strategies and tactics.

Among other changes, in 2016 we saw increasing interest in “content marketing” and a huge increase in noise on social media. The below graph from Google Trends shows that interest in content marketing flattened in the second half of 2016.

It seemed like everyone was writing about content marketing in 2016. We too wrote a few posts in 2016 on content marketing on the crowdSPRING blog: How To Create Content Marketing Unicorns, A Mile In Their Shoes: Framing Your Content Marketing Strategy, and Repurpose Great Writing With Visual Content Marketing.

And of course, everyone was content marketing. This created a lot of noise and many companies found themselves struggling to stand out.

2017 will bring a new set of marketing changes and opportunities. To learn more about what we’re going to see happen in marketing in 2017, we reached out to six marketing experts and asked them for their insights.

Content Marketing

William Harris, Founder of Elumynt

According to Harris, content marketing is going to continue to trend into 2017- expanding well beyond blog posts. Harris, the CEO of Elumynt, a digital marketing agency, thinks that it won’t be enough for companies to hire strong writers or have their own employees write from experience:

Every startup is trying to create an “epic” blog post, which is making it harder and harder to rank (and harder and harder to outdo each other). The savvy ones will need to bring on experts to help with their blog strategy, but they will also need to spend time creating many other forms of content — such as video, graphics, podcasts and more. Hiring a “writer” to be your content strategist simply won’t work in 2017.

We couldn’t agree more. Trying to write an “epic” blog post is like trying to become a Silicon Valley unicorn overnight. It’s the modern version of trying to create a viral video, five years ago, that would be seen by tens of millions.

Instead of focusing on the attention grabbing, potentially explosive content, companies should focus on creating high quality content that people will actually want to read. In 2017, your content will have to stand out on its own in a sea of tweets, posts, and emails.

Value Driven Marketing

Josh Steimle, CEO of MWI and author of Chief Marketing Officers At Work

When asked about the next year in marketing, Josh Steimle focused on three key points: influencer marketing, empathy, and speed. Ultimately, Steimle emphasizes the idea that marketing in 2017 will focus on empathy, because it’s the way that customers differentiate high quality and low quality content. In 2016, there was a lot of useless content being pushed to consumers every day. Low quality content quickly becomes annoying and turns people away from your brand. But Steimle says that 2017 will be different:

In 2017, one advantage great marketers have that will become more clear is empathy–the ability to truly understand consumers. Many marketers just don’t “get it” and they’re trying to push what worked in the past, the “interruption marketing” as Seth Godin has described it. The ultimate victory will belong not to marketers who figure out how to interrupt consumers and get in their face, but the winning marketers will provide what consumers want, the way consumers want it, and there will be more of a win-win mentality.” Great marketers are concerned less with protecting what they create, and more concerned with connecting with consumers in an authentic way and moving fast to maintain that connection so somebody else doesn’t take their spot.

Steimle believes that companies will need to have a more clear idea of why they are asking for something and how they are going to provide true value to their customer outside of the product. In 2017, consumers will become more picky and smarter.

Video Content

Roberto Blake, YouTuber

Videos and YouTube will become even more important in 2017. In 2016, we saw an increase in companies and influencers using videos on social media or on different “live” platforms. For SMBs and entrepreneurs, video content will be especially important in 2017, according to Roberto Blake, a YouTuber focused on teaching people how to leverage the platform:

In the context of YouTube you will see more people take advantage of YouTube Live now that Hangouts on Air has been retired. Another trend you will see this year is serialized content. Whether they be produced and formatted shows, such as the AskGaryVee Show, or Docu Series like CreativeSpaces TV from Sara Dietschy, serial content in the form of series have a disproportionate amount of value as opposed to one-off videos, and content creators and companies are starting to take note of this.

Blake believes that smart SMBs and startups will ask influencers to help tackle video marketing. According to Blake, Google’s acquisition of FameBit is evidence that consumers and companies will want more practical, accessible content in 2017.

If you want to learn more about influencer marketing, we recommend that you read How Influencer Marketing Can Pay Off for Small Businesses in 2017.

Google

Brian Halligan, CEO of Hubspot

Brian Halligan, in a recent post identified four trends to watch in 2017. According to Halligan:

Companies should start to create content not just intended to rank in search, but also to be pulled into Google’s quick answer box…Quick answer boxes are not the only way Google is changing. Ten years ago, paid AdWords results took up about 50% of the screen “above the fold.” Today, because of a layout shift Google introduced earlier this year, AdWords ads have moved from the right column to the center and take up nearly 100% of the “above the fold” space on both desktop and mobile. All of which means: If you have the budget, it’s worth integrating ads into your inbound strategy.

This is important, because smart companies will need to go beyond content marketing to reach their goals in 2017.

Speed

Ann Handley, Head of Content at MarketingProfs

Ann Handley wasn’t the only expert that commented on speed. Josh Steimle touched on speed when he told us about empathy, quoting the CMO of GE, Linda Boff: “Speed is the new intellectual property.” But Handley has a different perspective on speed in marketing – she asserts that speed is going to look more like timing in the world of marketing:

In 2017, I believe modern marketers need to challenge what we think we know. Poke holes in what we’ve always done and the way we’ve always done it. Challenge ourselves to think of alternatives. Simplify our marketing by putting quality above quantity. Say no sometimes. Aim for sustainability over the quick-hit. Ask “What if…?” Challenging our content marketing assumptions starts with slowing down. The gist is this: There is such a thing as a bad slow in marketing, but there is a critical need for a good slow, too. In 2017, the smartest companies will slow down at the right, necessary moments.

So in 2017, take a moment to slow down and think about your strategy. If you keep running, it will be impossible to take a breath. The takeaway is that marketing is like a marathon, a good pace (respecting that it’s a long race) will differentiate the winners from the rest of the pack.

SEO

Arnie Kuenn, CEO of Vertical Measures

Arnie Kuenn and his team at Vertical Measures constantly monitor marketing trends. Kuenn highlights several search engine optimization (SEO) changes he anticipates in 2017. He says that while traditional marketing strategies like pay per click (PPC) will still pay off, SEO strategies have begun to revolve more around website quality and content marketing:

There are several interesting SEO areas that we feel will be impactful to our clients in 2017, and our team is watching closely. The first is moving to HTTPS. Google has been serious about security and for several years have forewarned that this was on their radar. It’s very likely that we will see an escalation in penalties to unencrypted websites this year. The second is mobile search. It’s going to be even more important to make sure that your web pages load fast for mobile search. Also, all interstitials should be re-evaluated, as intrusive ones will reportedly be penalized starting this month. And the third is quality content. As always, if you want your site to remain “algorithm proof”, continue to develop strong content that answers searcher intent and is robust enough that visitors will engage with it. True journalists have entered the field and content marketers are officially publishers, this type of marketing is becoming much more agile.

Kuenn says that the most important aspect of these trends is that they aren’t fleeting- companies are spending a lot of money to improve their websites and create high quality content. Today, marketing is becoming more of an investment and is about involving the right people.

So get ahead while you can, and look for ways to smoothly integrate these new trends into your marketing strategy. You have to evolve your thinking, marketing and your business to stay ahead of your competitors.

If you need help with marketing materials for your company, consider using our network of over 196,000 creatives to give you great options for logo design, web design, naming, and more. crowdSPRING offers a step-by-step creative brief that helps you outline your company’s needs and allows you to select from over 100 entries on average.

When perusing our galleries here on crowdSPRING, we see some amazing work submitted in the projects. Today, we noticed this gem submitted in this logo project:

The challenge of this project was to create a thorny rose logo that is Fun. Dark. Gritty. Realistic. Deep. Powerful. Innovative.

Let us start the slow clap for greymatter. Check out more great work on greymatter’s profile page.
Nicely done, greymatter, nicely done!

Branding is not optional. Every law firm and lawyer has a brand. But the vast majority of law firms and lawyers spend little or no time thinking about their brand. In fact, as I wrote previously:

For decades, law firm branding in the United States was simple: take the last names of the key equity partners, pick a font, and you have a name, logo and a brand. Such  simplicity has one very important drawback – it’s ineffective.

In today’s legal marketplace, increasing competition and the commoditization of legal services has put more pressure on attorneys and law firms to stand out from the crowd. Simply put: it’s impossible to differentiate when your potential clients don’t notice you.

Your brand impacts your business and your potential to grow revenues. It’s not surprising, then, that the chief marketing leaders at some of the nation’s top professional services firms regularly review their firm’s brands. In a 2013 survey by Greenfield/Belser, the vast majority of professional service firm CMOs and CEOs planned to change their brands within three years.

In an updated survey of law firm branding (2016), Greenfield/Belser emphasized that branding is critical for law firms:

We have seen branding and positioning theory emerge as an effective route to understanding the complex psychology that results in name recognition, visual memory and loyalty between clients and their lawyers. On a practical level, we have watched branding at work in a few law firms—and we are impressed by the results and the quick acceptance by lawyers and management committees.

It’s true that your law firm’s brand is more than the firm’s name and the logo. A successful brand has many elements (to learn more, we recommend you read the following (and watch the video): Five Tips To Help You Brand Your Law Firm or Law Practice). Contrary to popular belief, branding elements don’t include generic phrases. Nearly every law firm claims “they’re client-focused”, they “achieve results”, they “are innovative”, etc. It would be nice if that were true, but it’s not and prospective clients simply ignore those bombastic claims.

Even though a brand is more than a logo, a strong brand starts with a strong logo.

Below, we’ll discuss ten important things you must consider in getting a great logo design for your firm. But first, I want to be sure you understand why you should pay attention.

Why is the logo is an important foundation of a strong brand?

A strong brand will create an expectation and an emotional reaction in your prospective clients. Think about the brands you most admire. When you see the Apple or Nike logos, what expectations do you have about their products (even those you haven’t yet seen or touched)? What emotional reaction do you experience when you see logos of the brands you respect and love? On the other hand, if there are some brands that you strongly dislike, what emotional reaction do you experience when you see their logos?

Poor branding is the reason I left my midsize law firm 10 years ago when I founded crowdSPRING (where 200,000 designers and writers from around the world help law firms, startups and businesses with logo design, web design, graphic design and naming).

Shortly before I left my law practice, I led a redesign of the firm’s website, working with a leading vendor in the legal space. But after several months and a big reveal, I was very unhappy with their work – it made our firm look just like tens of thousands of other firms in the U.S. and made it impossible for us to stand out. In frustration, I looked for a better way to help law firms, startups, businesses and agencies with logo design, web design, graphic design, and naming. That’s how crowdSPRING was born.

Large firms spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on their brand. Most smaller firms don’t have a budget that size. The truth is that you can get a great logo for under $1,000 (logo design projects on crowdSPRING start at just hundreds of dollars).

Whether you work with an agency, a freelancer or post your project on crowdSPRING, here are 10 tips to create a great logo for your law firm or law practice:

1. Be sure your logo is strong and balanced.

A logo can be just text, just a graphic symbol, or both of those elements. It should reflect your firm – its heart and soul – its personality. Keep your audience in mind because you want your logo to reflect your prospective clients. If you’re a civil rights firm, your logo will likely have a different look than a firm that focuses on public utility work. Favor logos that have a strong, balanced look. For example, Apple’s classic logo is balanced an iconic. You don’t need to see the name “Apple” to know this is Apple’s logo.

2. Strong logos are simple.

Simplicity is vital. A complex logo will be difficult to read, to print and reproduce and may not fully engage your audience. Take a moment and think about brands that are successful and/or famous. Most likely, you’ve thought of companies like Nike, Apple, McDonald’s, etc. What do they all have in common? They all have logos that are simple and easily recognized when printed by themselves, and when printed in solid black and white. Their logos also stand out from the crowd. Imagine looking at a page with 50 law firm logos, consisting just of printed names. It would be impossible to differentiate one logo/name from another.

For example, Shaban & Shiliwala LLP, a firm focusing on corporate, real estate and wealth planning services, asked crowdSPRING for help with their logo. Here’s what they said:

It is important that the brand reflects the high end and top quality positioning of the firm. At the same time it needs to convey that the attorneys are business savvy and up to speed in terms of modern business practices.

In their logo design project, they paid $600 and received 337 logo concepts from 90 designers. Here’s the winning logo, which incorporates a simple graphical elements and a clean layout.

3. Simple logos are memorable.

Your logo does not always need to describe what your law firm does. Have you ever seen a car manufacturer with a picture of a car as their logo? How about a shoe manufacturer? It would look silly to have a picture of a shoe… on a shoe. It’s so common to see small firm logos with gavels, scales of justice, and similar legal elements. They’re generic and don’t stand out from the crowd.

When using icons in your logo, consider icons that could communicate your brand without the name. (examples: Y! for Yahoo! or the Swoosh for NIKE). This will allow you to use the icon as a stand-alone image (on marketing materials, for example). For a person to retain and identify with a mark (your icon), a little mental tennis match must be played. If an icon is too blatantly obvious or easy to ‘read,’ the viewer often feels no sense of discovery or personal equity with it. But remember that too much abstraction can be dangerous because your message can be lost.

4. Memorable logos are flexible.

A logo should be visible and distinguishable on a big billboard from 250 feet away or on a small business card from to 10 inches away. It should also work well in different size formats like for example on business cards, marketing brochures, etc.

A good logo will work well in many colors and in just one or two colors (yes, black is a color). A good logo will work well on light backgrounds as well as dark backgrounds, even on multicolored backgrounds.

Many law firms use their logo on a few marketing materials but use something else on other materials (often, simply their name). Be sure that you use your logo consistently and be sure that your logo allows you the flexibility to do so in multiple formats.

5. Flexible logos have appropriate colors.

If you are looking for a color logo, consider the messaging that color sends to your customers. Do the colors reinforce and strengthen the intended core message/personality/mood you’re trying to communicate through the logo, or do they distract or neutralize? For example, blue often communicates trust, loyalty and freshness. The color blue is common in banking or finance. Green represents life, nature and cleanliness. Also consider colors that work well with dark and white backgrounds. Because logos are often printed in black and white, chose a logo design that is viable and as strong or stronger in black and white.

Although gradients provide an aesthetically-pleasing effect on computers, consider possible future uses of the logo such as on letterheads, business cards, and merchandise. Will the logo provide ease of printing and reproduction in and on all types of media? A logo for a website or a band, or a one-off project can be more rasterized and colorful than something that’s going to be printed in many different ways for a professional services firm.

Think twice about including more than 3 colors in a logo – too many colors will increase the cost of production when printing and may make the logo more difficult to reproduce. Although such costs have decreased considerably, this remains good advice.

6. Great logos are timeless.

Trends are good but innovation is better. (And fads are often deadly). A logo should have a long life expectancy. It will evolve and change over time, but the longer it stays the same at its heart, the better brand recognition you will get over time. Examples: Coca-Cola, Dior, Rolex. A good logo will have a sense of timelessness about it. A logo that feels anchored in a certain time period is more likely to feel outdated or need substantial repurposing fairly quickly. The best logos change very little yet feel fresh and vibrant every time. (Nike, IBM, Apple).

For example, Balfour Emonet, a personal injury and criminal law firm, asked crowdSPRING for help with their logo. They wanted to incorporate a column in the logo – a symbol of strength and perseverance.

In their logo design project, they paid $300 and received 97 logo concepts from 27 designers. The winning design incorporated an airy, simple column element that works nicely with the logotype.

7. Great logos are unique.

Does your logo stand out among the clutter and the crowd? Does the mark distinguish itself in a unique way from the competition, or is it predictable / default / bland — and thus unmemorable and ultimately invisible to the intended audience? With thousands upon thousands of fonts, billions of color combinations, and an infinite flow of design ideas, choose the logo that is most unique. Try to avoid common logo cliches like “swoops,” “swooshes,” and “pinwheels;” these techniques are perhaps the most commonly used practices in the logo industry (just look around your house, you’ll see). Avoid clip art like the plague. It’s quite disturbing when you start noticing your logo, and things that look like it on many other people’s brands. That’s the quickest way to look low-budget and second-rate.

For example, Taylor Lamb Law, a small firm with an estate planning practice, asked crowdSPRING for help with their logo. They wanted to stand out from the crowd. Here’s what they said:

This law firm is extremely talented, competent and professional but not uptight. The principal lawyer is sincere and genuine, and the firm is primarily focused on families. The firm is located in New Smyrna Beach, Florida which may be used in-part as inspiration for the general feel of the logo. You do not have to consider the location as inspiration…IF you do, please keep in mind that it is still a law firm…not a beach resort. However, the law firm is not a New York city dog-eat-dog or Los Angeles superficial kind of business. It is a family-friendly, law firm in a quaint Florida beach town that serves local families as well as those in neighboring cities (Orlando, Daytona).

In their logo design project, they paid $700 and received 127 logo concepts from 48 designers. Here’s the winning logo, which combined typography with elements reflecting both law and the location of the firm.

8. Great logos have strong typography.

Typography, Typography, Typography. Ask yourself what you’re trying to communicate. Depending on the type of application; typefaces with serifs convey a sense of dignity & power, sans serifs are often more clean looking and offer either a sense of stability or whimsy (depending on the character of the face). Will the face work with what you currently have? Can it be read at small sizes? Is the letterspacing/word spacing well adjusted? (the larger the wording gets, the more obvious the flaws will be) Typography is a craft in itself- it’s the first voice of stating who you are. Beware that there are some truly horrible typefaces out there, make sure you’re getting your money’s worth.

9. A brand is more than a logo.

Don’t compare the logo you will be choosing to already famous brands in the world. Those brands are famous not because of their logo, but because of the people/vision behind that logo. So, always remember that the branding behind the logo is very very important. The logo is a starting point.

10. Be sure your logo is vectorized.

Always request vector based graphics when hiring people to create a logo design for you (we do this automatically in all logo design projects on crowdSPRING). It’s often tempting to ask for complex illustrations in a logo. However, unless you plan on never using your logo outside of an on-screen/online application, a JPG or PSD isn’t going to cut it. A properly drawn vector design (typically an AI or EPS file) will provide you with the ultimate flexibility.

Branding is not optional. Your brand impacts your law firm’s business and your potential to grow revenues. Invest in your brand today to be more successful tomorrow. You can start by refreshing your existing logo or creating a great logo for your new law firm.

Ready to invest in your law firm brand? It’s not as expensive as you think! Many law firms and lawyers in the U.S. and from around the world have turned to crowdSPRING to create professional, unique brands for as little as $199. crowdSPRING’s Logo Design Service offers a step-by-step creative brief that helps you outline your firm’s needs and allows you to select from over 100 entries on average. You’ll work with dozens of designers to find the perfect logo that reflects you and your brand.

Many people use the idiom “don’t judge a book by its cover” to remind others that people should not prejudge the value of something based solely by its outward appearance. Yet when it comes to actual books, few heed that advice.

The simple truth is that today, nearly everyone judges a book by its cover. Covers matter. A lot.

Fierce competition has made standing out from the crowd incredibly difficult, especially for indie authors. Smart indies know that a striking book cover design can help to differentiate in a noisy marketplace, particularly when competing against traditionally published books. In fact, it’s entirely possible today to create self-published book covers that are impossible to differentiate from books released by traditional publishers.

Below, we’ll offer 10 smart tips to help you get an amazing book cover design for your upcoming book. But before we get to the tips, let’s be sure you understand why book cover design is more important today than it has ever been.

Traditionally, when books were purchased at retail, a striking book cover was necessary to get the reader’s attention when placed on a shelf next to hundreds of other books. But because most retail stores displayed just the book’s spine, it was impossible for authors to differentiate unless the prospective reader picked up their book or the book was displayed in a more appealing manner. Great book cover design has always been necessary to get the attention of retail merchandising managers if you wanted your book featured – and that remains true today.

Today, however, particularly for indies, the vast majority of sales occur online. This has allowed indies to compete against traditional publishers but has also made it clear that to get the readers’ attention, a great story must be matched by a great book cover design.

A typical reader will do a search on Amazon and will look at a handful of books. Sure, content and reviews are important, but the book cover is the first thing a potential reader sees and the cover can either make or break that initial impression. This is not surprising. Great images create an emotional reaction in people. Because images are processed by our brains 60,000 faster than words, a great cover is critical to make an amazing first impression. A poorly designed cover not only fails to create the emotional reaction you want to create in your readers, but also implies that the contents of the book are also sub-par.

Covers can lead to more (or fewer) sales, can allow you to price your book higher (but underscoring the message of quality), and can lend you credibility as an indie author.

Don’t just take my word for it. Smashwords founder Mark Coker tells a story in his ebook, The Secrets to Ebook Publishing Success about R.L. Mathewson, a romance writer, who went from selling five or six copies a day of her romance novel, to selling over 1,000 simply by updating her book cover image.

The creatives on crowdSPRING (nearly 200,000 from just about every country on earth) have helped many authors and both non-traditional (CreateSpace, among others) and traditional publishers (Random House, among others) with amazing book cover designs.

Here are 10 smart tips to help authors create an amazing book cover design:

1. Be sure the design looks professional.

Whether you create your own book cover design (some authors are talented artists and can create effective covers without professional help) or get professional help on crowdSPRING or elsewhere, the most important element of an amazing book cover design is that it looks professional. Great book covers are easy to read – typographical elements are distinctive and clean. Images on the cover are connected to the story and audience. A book cover for a thriller shouldn’t be confused with a romance novel. We’ll offer plenty of examples below and you’ll find other examples in our recent look at some great book cover designs of 2016.

Look at book cover designs of other books in your genre. What color palettes do they use? What kind of imagery do they have? How are they using type in the design? Don’t copy – but look for examples as inspiration for what works.

Here’s a good example from a recent project on crowdSPRING for the book Bogeyman. The book is about a serial child-killer and the lawmen who tracked him down.  This book was to be published through Amazon’s CreateSpace, so it had some special requirements (which are easy to accommodate on crowdSPRING). The winning designer, faucetana, did a nice job capturing the drama and the dark elements of the story.

Often, even if you can design your own cover, consider whether you should. A great design doesn’t need to cost thousands or tens of thousands of dollars. Focus on your strengths – writing – and let professionals help you with the other critical elements that will help your book succeed.

Advanced Tip: When you’ve created a few variations of a book cover design, send these out to trusted friends and colleagues for their feedback. It will help to have some objective feedback from someone other than you. This is one reason we include free focus groups in every project on crowdSPRING, including all book cover design projects – so that authors can easily and quickly survey their friends or others (privately or publicly), to get some feedback to the cover designs being considered.

2. Design for large and small screens.

The book cover image will be reproduced on large monitors and mobile devices. In fact, when you’re searching for books on amazon, you see just a small thumbnail of the image. That makes it especially critical that the design is simple. Simple designs are more memorable and less confusing, especially when viewed on a smaller screen. Take the iPhone, for example (or any comparably sized phone), a typical book jacket will be about 1/2 inch wide by 3/4 inches tall. That’s not a lot of space.

As an example, here’s the winning design from RedOne22, who prevailed over 27 other designers and over 100 book cover design concepts with their winning design in this book cover project on crowdSPRING. The book had to appeal to a broad audience:

Our primary audience is our existing clients and their families. Ranging in age from 6 – 96. The largest concentration is in the mid west. Our goal is to present an image of “not your usual financial book” and success.

Notice how the designer kept elements simple and clean. The imagery is visually interesting, not literal. The typography is clean and readable and there’s a lot of space for the design to breathe.

3. Focus on one image.

It’s tempting for some authors to get carried away by trying to represent all the symbolism in their story. But when it comes to book covers, less is definitely more. Remember that the cover will be typically seen as a small thumbnail and you want your reader to understand what they’re seeing. You don’t want to confuse or overwhelm the reader with conflicting or busy imagery.

While you may have three story lines, five characters, twenty scenes and several plot twists, pick one strong theme for the cover. Is there one constant to your story? One lesson? One value? One message?

Good design is about balance. Pick one constant and tell it visually through the cover design. Here’s a great example from Andy Weir’s book, The Martian (a terrific read, if you like science fiction). (This design wasn’t done through crowdSPRING but is a nice example of crisp focus in a cover design).

Here’s another good example from a book cover design project on crowdSPRING from the BroadStreet Publishing Group. Here’s the anticipated audience, as defined in their project brief:

The audience is readers of books like Pilgrim’s Progress, The Alchemist, Hinds Feet on High Places—Christians or spiritual seekers who enjoy an allegory or fictional story. The cover needs to feel like this is an epic story.

Here’s the winning design, from moonlighter, who prevailed against 17 other designers in the project. (incidentally, if you work with crowdSPRING for your book cover design, you can crowdsource a design and work with multiple designers at once, or you can work directly with a single designer in a 1-to-1 project).

Advanced Tip: Don’t be literal with your images. Don’t take away the reader’s imagination by selecting an image that tells the reader what a character or place looks like. Show, don’t tell. Think of the cover like a movie trailer – hint at the elements of your story but don’t give the whole story, including plot twists, away.

4. Pick Colors Smartly.

Colors are important because colors create emotional reactions. The colors you pick should be connected to the story and mood. For example, a book best suited for the beach should consider incorporating cool blues and jade greens to give a tranquil feeling. Dramatic books should consider using black, bold red, and similarly dramatic colors to underscore the mood of the story.

As an example, take a look at the winning design in this book cover design project on crowSPRING. The winning designer, JMJ, did a nice job using only a few colors, to emphasize the name so that it stands our sharply on the cover (and spine). JMJ prevailed over 32 other designers, who collectively submitted 172 cover design concepts.

Advanced Tip: Don’t use more than three colors in your cover design. If your design looks like a crayon box, you’ll confuse the reader. If you need some help with figuring out what colors work well with others, here’s a helpful site that can help you get started. Also, keep contrast in mind.

But do keep your audience in mind. If you’re writing for a broad audience and using photos, colors can help tell a story. Here’s an example from a recent project on crowdSPRING for the design of a book called A Bicycle Built for Two Billion. The winning designer, nealio, prevailed over 16 other designers who collectively submitted 79 book cover design concepts. Notice how the image creatively stretches across the front and back of the jacket to underscore the theme of the book. More than three colors are incorporated in the design, but the color palettes work well with each other.

5. Text is important. Don’t ignore it.

Colors and a great image are critical to effective book cover design, but you also need text and an effective font that matches the cover and the story. For example, if your audience is mostly women, you might prefer fonts that have more feminine flairs, such as scripted fonts. But don’t go overboard – some fonts are easier to read than others. There are thousands of fonts and not all of them are clean and readable on a small screen. Use a simple typeface and be sure you’re not using many typefaces on the cover. It’s OK to use two fonts on a cover, but more than two fonts will make the cover look busy and less readable.

Here’s a good example from a recent project on crowdSPRING for the book How To Finally Win. The author, John Lee Dumas is the host of EOFire, an award winning Podcast where he interviews today’s most successful Entrepreneurs 7-days a week. Dumas explained that his audience consists of:

those in their late 20’s through early 40’s who are ready to break out of status qou and into the world of Entrepreneurship. My audience skews male, and they would also be reading entrepreneurship experts Tim Ferriss, Gary Vaynerchuk, Lewis Howes, and Pat Flynn. The primary connecting attributes of the audience are ambition, determination, creativity, and dedication to excellence.

The winning designer, jendralpiggy, prevailed over 20 other designers who collectively submitted 131 concepts. Notice how the winning design focuses on text, and especially the word “WIN”, a critical theme for prospective entrepreneurs.

Advanced Tip: For some books, a properly typeset design can be powerful without the use of images. Sometimes, all you need is text. But selecting the right colors, fonts, and kerning is important, not just when you use images, but even more so when you decide not to. Take a look at some examples in the book cover archive – you’ll see some very effective text only options.

6. Consider a subtitle or a teaser.

A short subtitle or a teaser could give readers a little more context about the book. Remember that most readers looking at books online won’t have the opportunity to read the synopsis on the back of the book. A subtitle or teaser takes very little time to read but can motivate the reader to take a closer look. Be sure that the subtitle or teaser doesn’t compete with your title – you need to have hierarchy on the cover and the title should, in most cases be the most prominent text readers see.

Here’s a great example from a recent project on crowdSPRING.  The winning designer, henrytagalag, prevailed over 49 other designers who collectively submitted 207 concepts for a book about retirement. Retirement is a broad topic. Notice how the design uses a subtitle “Stop Worrying & Start Planning” to provide more context about the book..

7. Create a brand if you’re creating a series.

If the book you’re publishing is part of a series, you need to also focus on creating the brand because people will more easily identify related books if there are common elements in the book covers (even if the images are different). These common elements can be tied together through colors, imagery, style, etc.

8. Pay attention to intellectual property when using images and fonts.

If you don’t have permission to use an image or font or you don’t know who owns it, you should not use it. Just like you wouldn’t want someone to steal your writing, don’t abuse the work created by others. Professional designers can help obtain royalty free cover images (or can create original illustrations, where appropriate). If you must use a free images because you don’t have a budget for a book cover design, you can use a site like this one.

This is a particularly sensitive subject for books about law. Here’s a great example from a recent project on crowdSPRING.  The winning designer, sumit_s, prevailed over 19 other designers who collectively submitted 91 concepts.

9. Don’t be afraid of white (empty) space.

Some authors worry that they need to fill the entire cover with images or text. But when this happens, all of the elements compete for priority and nothing stands out. The best way to draw a reader’s attention to something is to help it stand out by giving it space to breathe.

Think about it – if you use too many complicated words in your text, or have too many adjectives, the text becomes confusing. That’s the equivalent of visual space.

Here’s a great example from a recent project on crowdSPRING that nicely incorporates clean white space.  The winning designer, scott_mcroy, prevailed over 32 other designers who collectively submitted 219 concepts.

10. Type size and placement matters.

The author’s name doesn’t have to be in huge letters on the front cover. This is very common with self-published works, but far less common with works published by traditional publishers. There’s a reason for this – people will remember your name based on your written work, not because you put your name in big, bold letters on the cover. If you’re James Patterson or Dan Brown, your name in big letters can help sell new books. But for most indies, the title and imagery are far more important.

Here’s a great example from a recent project on crowdSPRING.  The winning designer, godfreyw, prevailed over 21 other designers who collectively submitted 99 concepts for Turkish translation of “The Great Cat Massacre” by Robert Darnton. Especially when creating cover designs for foreign markets, cultural nuances, color preferences, style preferences, and other variables become very important. That’s why you typically find books originally published in America republished with different book cover designs when introduced to foreign markets.

Can you suggest other tips and best practices for amazing book cover design? If you have a question about book cover design best practices, we’d love to hear from you in the comments.

Image source: Geralt

In a recent post, we asked six US-based marketing experts to predict the key digital marketing trends they expect to see in 2017. When we published their answers, we were curious whether the trends highlighted by the experts were universal. The UK is one of our leading markets and we wondered how digital marketing trends in the UK differ from those in the US. After all, while some businesses focus on a specific geographic market like the United States or North America, many businesses, including crowdSPRING, have a global focus. For example, crowdSPRING works with clients from over 100 countries and creatives from nearly 200 countries.

In many respects, marketing is marketing, whether in the US or across the pond. Much of the digital marketing conversation last year, in the US and in the UK, focused on content marketing. In fact, there were globally, probably more posts published in 2016 about how to do content marketing than actual content marketing posts. We wrote a few popular posts about content marketing in 2016 on the crowdSPRING blog: How To Create Content Marketing Unicorns, A Mile In Their Shoes: Framing Your Content Marketing Strategy, and Repurpose Great Writing With Visual Content Marketing.

But beyond content marketing, everyone – from entrepreneurs to experienced marketers/CEOs have had to rethink the way they approach marketing, at home and abroad. While most marketing trends impact businesses and marketers around the world (after all, there aren’t really any borders on the Internet), some trends impact different geographic regions in disparate ways. In today’s noisy world, it’s more important than ever to understand not only the big picture, but also geographic marketing trends.

After recently publishing an article about 2017 digital marketing trends from six U.S. marketing experts, we reached out to six UK marketing experts to see whether marketing trends in the UK mirror those in the US for 2017. Here’s what UK marketing experts had to say:

Exclusivity

Sam Hurley, Founder of Optim-Eyez

As a highly respected digital marketing influencer, Sam Hurley knows a thing or two about digital marketing trends in the UK. In fact, as an influencer, sometimes he even helps set those trends! In 2017, Hurley believes that there will be four majors factors that impact marketing: highly enjoyable user experiences, owned influencer marketing campaigns, “pay to play”, and private social channels. While the first factor is more self-explanatory, Hurley emphasizes the idea that more competition means an increased demand for anything that cuts through the noise:

Everything is pushing marketers towards advertising on Google and social. Social Media ad budgets alone have doubled worldwide over the last 2 years — going from $16 billion in 2014 to $31 billion in 2016. The only way to beat that is through solid presence built through stand-out personal branding and relationships with those of high-status…but with wide-spread use of intelligent programmatic ads on the horizon, ads should certainly be part of ANY strategy.

Whether it’s paying more than your competitors in ads, “buying” exclusive rights to an influencer, or even targeting customers through unique social apps, Hurley says that tailored outreach will become more important in 2017:

Facebook Messenger, Slack, WhatsApp, WeChat and now Google Allo…these are the apps of the future, holding colossal advertising potential. Closed social is the new kid on the block and it isn’t going anywhere. 1 in 7 people are active on WhatsApp – every month. Expect to see ultra-targeted promotion within such platforms, completely tailored to personas through monitoring of your conversations and phone calls. Facebook already began using WhatsApp data for ad targeting, which is a clear indication of what’s to come.

It seems like 2017 will mean a more tailored, potentially more time consuming approach as customers realize they have lots of options- forcing the companies to go directly to customers.

Breaking Trends

Tony Wood, Founder at X Factor Communications

When talking to Snapapp, Tony Wood cautioned that some of the trends we saw develop in 2016 will be broken in 2017. For example, Wood says that social media and content marketing will see a new twist or reversal of trends, because marketers have taken social media and content marketing too far. The graph below from Google Trends confirms Wood’s prediction. According to Google Trends, interest in “content marketing” in the UK fell flat in 2016 and has yet to recover.

Wood similarly predicts that the types of content shared by companies will change in 2017. According to Wood, the shorter content we saw in 2016 only made it harder for companies to differentiate. Wood predicts that in 2017, companies will resort to more detailed, longer blog posts and brand messaging in an attempt to capture the customers who truly care.

The trend to bite-size content to appeal to ever-shorter attention spans and crowded schedules may seem unstoppable but my belief is that the pendulum has swung too far. There’s still a place for more in-depth, considered thought leadership content and this should be seen as a source of differentiation…especially when savvy B2B marketers know they can actually have the best of both worlds with a single, high-quality white paper spawning multiple blogs & articles and countless social media posts.

We’re definitely seeing this trends in early 2017, in the UK and US.

Wood also predicts that while Twitter and Snapchat will stay hot, LinkedIn will gain some more attention with their sponsored updates:

LinkedIn sponsored updates have been around for a few years now and they should be at the heart of every B2B marketer’s social media marketing strategy. Pinpoint audience targeting, payment by results and direct access to the best-quality B2B audience by a country mile. What’s not to like?

Social Media Battles

Daniel Knowlton, Top 100 Digital Marketing Influencer and Co-founder of KPS Digital Marketing

Daniel Knowlton, a digital marketing influencer and co-founder of a UK digital marketing agency predicts that 2017 will be the year of intensified social media battles. Knowlton emphasises the importance of social media in a company’s connection to their customers, talking about how it adds to the narrative and creates a perceived dialogue. But with so many platforms, customers will choose- and nobody wants to be the next Myspace of social media.

2017 is going to be an intense social media features and functionality battle. Platforms will continue to go head to head to outdo one another’s storytelling, video and creative feature capabilities. As an example, take a look what happened at the end of 2016 with Snapchat, Instagram Stories, and even Facebook Messenger. They continue to clone each other’s features; it’s almost as if we’re heading into a direction where every social platform will have every feature you can imagine. To me, this is brilliant. Why? Because this increased competition means every platform will work even harder to ensure they are ‘the chosen one’. This means better features, better UX & UI, more value for users, better customer service – the whole shabang! Right now, Instagram is bringing out some incredible features which Snapchat users have been waiting years for. Who wins this epic battle in 2017? The market will decide.

So in 2017, keep an eye out on what the different social media platforms are doing- even if you aren’t using one of them. Make sure you know the changes- because it seems like they’ll probably end-up your platform of choice anyway!

Diversified Media

Loz James, Founder of Content Champion

Content marketing expert Loz James says that in 2017, varied media content is going to be extremely important in executing effective content marketing strategies. James explains that it won’t just be enough to release videos on YouTube or audio bits on SoundCloud. Companies will have to carefully think through and leverage several audio/video platforms in order to create high-quality content and attract large audiences.

Leverage the power of online teaching through video – consider platforms such as Thinkific and Teachable to get up and running quickly. Also, go all in on podcasting – the interest in podcasts is evergreen and continuously growing, and in my experience there’s no better way to build your brand authority. But remember to be usefully original when creating your content- add some unique research into your content and develop a consistent style signature so you truly stand apart.

Originality

Peter Masters, Business Communications and Business Development Manager at Supreme Landscaping Products

Another UK marketing influencer and business owner, Peter Masters, told us that what we’ve seen in marketing in the past few years won’t go away. Instead, Masters said that marketers will have to work harder in 2017 at being more original and pushing their level of quality to be even higher. So while content marketing, social media, and video will continue to grow- just jumping on the bandwagon isn’t a good enough strategy anymore. Only having “high” quality content won’t cut it either- the content has to be focused, specific, and helpful based on the industry and customers.

When I say ‘Content marketing’ I mean good blog posts, good Tweets, good LinkedIn articles, good Facebook posts, not just half hearted, predictable efforts. I’m getting 50 clicks a day and more on one of my most recent blog posts, this is great website traffic. If I’ve got 20 posts, that’s a lot of clicks over the course of a month and will help our Google page ranking for sure. But the quality has to be good. People MUST keep their websites and blogs looking contemporary, loading quickly and responsive to mobile telephone connectivity. It’s 2017, and speed will be a huge factor- as well as improved social media connectivity. So many people ignore these things and send 3 Tweets a week, wondering why Twitter doesn’t bring them any business. Or they post irregularly and leave their blogs slow and difficult to read. It’s the same on all platforms; it’s time to get real, learn what works best for you and focus on that. You’ll never do well trying to use all the platforms, there’s too many!

Masters also continues to believe that video will be very valuable to businesses. He says, “All communication adds value”, but still emphasizes that the video content has to be well done. Even though video can be cheap and can be filmed with a simple mobile phone, there has to be some added value for the customer for video content marketing to succeed.

Back to the Basics

Nigel Temple, Founder of The Marketing Compass

As a marketing trainer and expert, Nigel Temple says that for the most part, what we saw in 2016 will continue to grow and be amplified in 2017. His main focus areas were SEO, social media platforms, and original content- nothing new from last year. Temple does caution that smaller business will not be able to simply work harder and break beyond the barriers that large companies set. He breaks it down into three, simple trends that UK businesses should monitor:

1. The advent of Google semantic search means that top rankings will go to enterprises that share their expertise, in considerable depth.

2. The number of promotional channels continues to rise. If you engage with more channels, you will reap greater rewards.

3. You can’t bore customers to death. 2017 marketing needs to be even more creative and engaging in order to get attention

It’s clear that 2017 will be the year where companies demonstrate just how serious they are about bringing additional value to their customers. As a bonus, Paul Lancaster, author of Small Business Marketing For Dummies and founder of Plan Digital UK, gave us a hint at the additional value people in the UK will be looking for:

Personally, I think the two biggest trends in 2017 are a wish for more ‘Localism’ and ‘Authenticity’ in the UK and it would seem in the US too. Although ‘Brexit’ and the election of Donald Trump were a shock to many media commentators they make sense when you understand the growing resentment towards Globalism and a concentration of money and power away from communities that are still suffering a hangover from the decline in heavy industry. Any business that offers ‘Handmade’ or ‘Local Made’ goods and services should do well in 2017 and beyond if they make a point of highlighting this on their marketing materials, both to a local and national audience. This is one of the reasons I created the #ThisIsMINE (Made In North East) campaign to promote things that are unique to the North East of England.

Are you noticing other UK digital marketing trends that marketers and businesses should be leveraging in 2017? We’d love to hear from you in the comments below.

If you need help with marketing materials for your company, consider using our network of over 196,000 creatives to give you great options for professional logo design, web design, naming, and more. crowdSPRING offers a step-by-step creative brief that helps you outline your company’s needs and allows you to select from over 100 entries on average.

A good logo is a major contributor to making that crucial first impression on a customer. They convey your company’s values, tell a story, and even help people trust your brand. If your logo does not convey the right message to a prospective customer, your company is at an immediate disadvantage. It could even mean the difference between selecting the competition over you.

We asked some of our best creatives to collaborate on guidance to help entrepreneurs create the perfect logo for their brand. They came up with 10 key elements that are essential to every good logo, regardless of industry or application. When reviewing your current logo or getting started with a new business, make sure your logo has these 10 elements:

1. Strong/Balanced

A logotype is an icon, whether it’s made up of just text or just a graphic symbol, or both of those elements. It should reflect your company – its heart and soul – its personality. Keep your audience and products/services in mind because you want your logo to reflect your business. Favor logos that have a strong, balanced look.

2. Simple

Simplicity is vital. A complex logo will be difficult to print and reproduce and may not fully engage your audience. Take a moment and think about brands that are successful and/or famous. Most likely, you’ve thought of companies like Apple, Volkswagen, Target, McDonald’s, etc. What do they all have in common? They all have logos that are simple and easily recognized when printed by themselves, and when printed in solid black and white.

3. Memorable

Your logo does not always need to describe what your business does. Have you ever seen a car manufacturer with a picture of a car as their logo? How about a shoe manufacturer? It would look silly to have a picture of a shoe… on a shoe.

When using icons in your logo design, consider icons that could communicate your brand without the company name. (examples: Swoosh for Nike). This will allow you to use the icon as a stand-alone image (on product packaging, for example). For a person to retain and identify with a mark (your icon), a little mental tennis match must be played with it. If an icon is too blatantly obvious or easy to ‘read,’ the viewer often feels no sense of discovery or personal equity with it. But remember that too much abstraction can be dangerous because your message can be lost.

4. Flexible

A logo should be visible and distinguishable on a big billboard from 100 meters away or on a small business card from to 20 millimeters away. It should also work well in different size formats like for example on business cards, brochure, t-shirt design and other marketing materials such as embroidery, stamping, embossing, etc.

A good logo will work well in many colors and in just one or two colors (yes, black is a color). A good logo will work well on light backgrounds as well as dark backgrounds, even on multicolored backgrounds.

Many start-ups and smaller companies use their logo on a few marketing materials but use something else on other materials. Be sure that you use your logo consistently and be sure that your logo allows you the flexibility to do so in multiple formats. You can learn more about flexible logos in our guide on the subject.

5. Appropriate Colors

Image courtesy of Pourya Pouzesh

If you are looking for a color logo, consider the messaging that color sends to your customers. Do the colors reinforce and strengthen the intended core message/personality/mood you’re trying to communicate through the logo, or do they distract or neutralize? For example, blue often communicates trust, loyalty and freshness. The color blue is common in banking or finance. Green represents life, nature and cleanliness. Also consider colors that work well with dark and white backgrounds. Because logos are often printed in black and white, chose a logo design that is viable and as strong or stronger in black and white.

Although gradients provide an aesthetically-pleasing effect on computers, consider possible future uses of the logo such as on letterheads, business cards, and merchandise. Will the logo provide ease of printing and reproduction in and on all types of media? A logo for a website or a band, or a one-off project can be more rasterized and colorful than something that’s going to be printed in many different ways.

Think twice about including more than 3 colors in a logo – too many colors will increase the cost of production when printing and may make the logo more difficult to reproduce. Although such costs have decreased considerably, this remains good advice.

6. Timeless

Image courtesy of Consumerist

Trends are good but innovation is better. (And fads are often deadly). A logo should have a long life expectancy. It will evolve and change over time, but the longer it stays the same at its heart, the better brand recognition you will get over time. Examples: Coca-Cola, Dior, Rolex. A good logo will have a sense of timelessness about it. A logo that feels anchored in a certain time period is more likely to feel outdated or need substantial repurposing fairly quickly. The best logos change very little yet feel fresh and vibrant every time.

7. Unique

Will it stand out among the clutter and the crowd? Does the mark distinguish itself in a unique way from the competition, or is it predictable / default / bland — and thus unmemorable and ultimately invisible to the intended audience? With thousands upon thousands of fonts, billions of color combinations, and an infinite flow of design ideas, choose the logo that is most unique. Try to avoid common logo cliches like “swoops,” “wooshes,” and “pinwheels;” these techniques are perhaps the most commonly used practices in the logo industry (just look around your house, you’ll see). Avoid clip art like the plague, unless it’s significantly modified by the artist. It’s quite disturbing when you start noticing your logo, and things that look like it on many other people’s brands. That’s the quickest way to look low-budget and second-rate.

8. Quality Typography

Typography, Typography, Typography. Ask yourself what you’re trying to communicate. Depending on the type of application; typefaces with serifs convey a sense of dignity & power, sans serifs are often more clean looking and offer either a sense of stability or whimsy (depending on the character of the face). Will the face work with what you currently have? Can it be read at small sizes? Is the letterspacing/word spacing well adjusted? (the larger the wording gets, the more obvious the flaws will be) Typography is a craft in itself- it’s the first voice of stating who you are. Beware that there are some truly horrible typefaces out there, make sure you’re getting your money’s worth.

9. Branding

“Design is the silent ambassador of your brand.” – Paul Rand

Your logo has to derive meaning from your brand, not the other way around. The world’s best brands are not well-known because of their logo, they are known because of the people and vision that the logo represents. When deciding on the direction of your logo, make sure that you have already thought about your brand and the direction of your company. This guide on building your brand identity from the ground up is a good start.

10. Vector is Best

Image courtesy of MJ Claybone

Always request vector based graphics. It’s often tempting to ask for complex illustrations in a logo. However, unless you plan on never using your logo outside of an on-screen/online application, a JPG or PSD isn’t going to cut it. A properly drawn vector design will provide you with the ultimate flexibility.

Good branding provides a unique opportunity for small businesses to stand out from the competition. With the right logo, you are communicating your brand’s values from the first moment a customer sees it. You only get one chance for a first impression, so make it a good one.

If you are ready to create a quality logo for your business that inspires trust and confidence in your brand , consider enlisting the help of our network of over 150,000 creatives to give you great options. crowdSPRING’s Logo Design Service offers a step-by-step creative brief that helps you outline your company’s needs and allows you to select from over 100 entries on average.

Many thanks to the following talented creatives working on crowdSPRING for their collaborative effort to bring this guide to you: Jabraulter, MadRooster, Engage, KS_Knight, Typecast, OpenHead, marckohlbrugge, entz, romasuave, jellopudding, nisha0612, ciotog, graphxpro, fackhir, fredK, haetro, hollter, DWNees, Rambler001, squarelogo, MGDboston

When perusing our galleries here on crowdSPRING, we see some amazing work submitted in the projects. Today, we noticed this gem submitted in this logo project:

The challenge of this project was to refresh this technology blog’s existing logo. The blog’s owner did not have the original logo designed by a professional, and wanted to see what could be done by the talented creatives at crowdSPRING. The project received 500 entries and while tomblue’s design didn’t take the prize, it was a standout in the crowd.

Let us start the slow clap for tomblue. Check out more great work on tomblue’s profile page. Nicely done, tomblue, nicely done!

In today’s legal marketplace, increasing competition and the commoditization of legal services has put more pressure on attorneys and law firms to stand out from the crowd. Simply put: it’s impossible to differentiate when your potential clients don’t notice you. Even worse, if your online presence isn’t professional, your clients will choose another firm. Paradoxically, it might be better not to have a website at all if the alternative is a poorly designed site with bad content and missing information.

Your brand, including your website, impacts your business and your potential to find new clients and grow revenues.

Poorly executed website design is the reason I left my midsize law firm 10 years ago when I founded crowdSPRING (where 200,000 designers and writers from around the world help law firms, attorneys, startups and businesses with logo design, web design, graphic design and naming).

Shortly before I left my law practice, I led a redesign of the firm’s website, working with a leading vendor in the legal space. But after several months and a big reveal, I was very unhappy with their work – it made our firm look just like tens of thousands of other firms in the U.S. and made it impossible for us to stand out. In frustration, I looked for a better way to help law firms, startups, businesses and agencies with logo design, web design, graphic design, and naming. That’s how crowdSPRING was born.

Large firms spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on their brands and often, tens of thousands of dollars and sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars on website design.  Smaller firms don’t have a budget that size. The truth is that you can get a great website design for much less (small web design projects on crowdSPRING start at just $899).

Whether you work with an agency, a freelancer or post your project on crowdSPRING, here are 10 essential web design best practices and tips. We’ll point you to great  resources and examples and highlight recent changes in web design. And if you already have a website but are considering a website redesign, it’s a good idea to start with your homepage.

Here are our top 10 tips to help you create an awesome website design for your law firm or legal practice:

1. Keep the design simple, fresh, and unique.

Your website reflects your brand. It is the first impression a visitor will form when they visit your site for the first time. If you use an off-the-shelf template and your website looks like hundreds of other firms on the Internet, you’ll miss an opportunity to create a unique impression. Why would a potential client remember your site when she has seen dozens of other sites that look just like your site?

Take a look (above) at the homepage for TSMP Law Corporation, a boutique Singapore law firm. The page is airy, engaging, and different. In fact, if you visit their site, you’ll see that the main image rotates and shows a few variations, including highlighting their women attorneys.

The site looks different from most law sites and that’s a good thing.

Consider the impression you want to make and the message that you want to communicate to your clients and potential clients.

To simplify the message, incorporate large Hero areas in your homepage design. Even if you are not familiar with the term, you’ve seen “hero areas.” Hero areas are large blocks (typically an image and text or just an image or text) on a website’s home page. Their size and prominence draws the visitor’s immediate attention. It also sets a visual tone for the rest of the page and site.

Here’s a great example from Kain & Scott P.A., a Minnesota bankruptcy law firm. It’s pretty clear what type of law the firm practices.  In fact, if you visit their homepage, you’ll see that the Hero is actually a rotating video, giving you a fresh, unique look at the firm’s attorneys.

Another terrific example is Ylaw Group, a Vancouver family law firm. Take a look at how effectively they use rotating Hero images and simple text to underscore the types of issues people worry about when dealing with divorce.

Even big firms strive to keep things simple and focused. Take a look at how Clifford Chance focuses on a few core things in its Hero area. But notice how their Hero is less readable and not nearly as crisp as the two examples above.

Global firm White & Case takes a different approach, incorporating several Hero images in its homepage, as you can see on the right, below. This is less effective because the page is more noisy and not nearly as easy to read.

When you consider the content to include on your homepage, keep one very important fact in mind: visitors typically read only 28% of the words during an average visit. Don’t overload your homepage with a lot of text and images. Again, compare the examples above and see what you find to be more readable and more powerful.

Consider the most important content and images you want your visitors to see and get rid of everything else. Many people mistakenly try to include too much content on a homepage – and this creates confusion and a poor user experience. In this case, less IS more.

Consider too that your visitors might be visiting from laptops and mobile phones, so try to avoid designing pages for a large monitor size or pages that use more complex features such as flash animation (you should NOT be using flash in 2017) or complex navigation.

Tip: As you consider your site design, be sure you have a professional logo design. A logo created from clip-art or a template won’t be unique and will create a poor  impression. Even worse, it may expose you to substantial legal risk.

Tip 2: You can implement modern design trends to make your site look current. For example, flat design has become popular. If you’ve used iOS 7 and later versions of iOS on an iPhone or iPad, or Windows 8, you’ve seen flat design first-hand. Flat design eliminates gradients and shadowing, making images and fonts smaller and easier to read. Other 2017 design trends include simple animations (including cinemagraphs – live animated images/video), bigger images, illustrations, more scrolling, and bigger fonts. You can see these features in the examples we share in this post. For even more about recent design trends, I recommend you read Ten Sensible Web Design Trends for 2017.

Advanced Tip 1: Once you design your homepage, you can run very simple tests to figure out which buttons, colors, and pieces of content earn the most clicks. After all, marketing is as much a science as it is an art. For more about A/B testing, I recommend you read 7 Dead-Simple A/B Tests You Should Run on Your Homepage.

Advanced Tip 2: Particularly on your homepage – but also on any pages where you’re trying to persuade the user to take some action – think about what action you want the user to take and create a prominent “call to action” button. For tips on creative effective calls to action, I suggest you review 10 Techniques For An Effective ‘Call To Action’. You should incorporate minimal textures and subtle gradients, where appropriate, to highlight different areas of the site.

The call to action (CTA) on your homepage is an important element to draw visitors deeper into your site. You should consider a few important factors when you design your CTA, including: (a) location (above the fold – visible on the monitor when the page first loads is typically ideal), (b) make sure the CTA stands out from the other content on your site (notice how the crowdSPRING “START A PROJECT” CTA is pink?), (c) create a link to another page so that your call to action will draw the visitor deeper into your site, (d) create a less-emphasized alternative variation (notice the “How it works” link below crowdSPRING’s primary CTA, (e) and test design, content, and placement.

It’s important not to overload your homepage (or any page, for that matter), with CTAs. Pick one or two and focus on those. If you have too many, you’ll create a tremendous amount of noise for visitors and that will lead to much confusion.

2. Showcase your services and attorney profiles.

You’re selling a service. Make sure that you clearly showcase that service on your homepage. Ultimately, prospective clients are looking for two important pieces of information when they visit a law firm website: what services your firm offers and attorney profile pages.

I’ve seen many law firm web designs that failed to effectively show their products or services and many others that tried to showcase far too many services on one page, creating a lot of noise and confusion.

You have only a few seconds to make a first impression and you should make sure that the impression you make is professional.

For example, Loevy & Loevy is a successful civil rights & whistleblower firm. When you visit their homepage, it’s pretty clear that they focus on civil rights and whistleblower cases. This is reinforced throughout the homepage design (and on other pages). In fact, “A Civil Rights Law Firm” is left of the main header navigation, right above their logo, to provide further emphasis.

If your service is web-based, consider using images of phones or computers and embed your showcase images within those images. That will help people anticipate how they’ll engage with your service. For example, take a look at how Quickly Legal (Smart, Simple Business Contracts – helps entrepreneurs, small businesses and freelancers create, sign and manage legal agreements on any device) shows their product on their homepage being used on a laptop screen.

The examples continue lower on the page, showing examples of the product in use.

Tip: Don’t overload your site with photos or graphics. Although it’s been said that a picture can say a thousand words, pictures can also confuse and diffuse attention. Pick a few good shots and feature those.

Advanced Tip: Use testimonials to create a positive image for your firm. Testimonials (as a design element) can effectively communicate with prospective clients. Sure, you can have a dedicated testimonials page, but consider sprinkling testimonials throughout your design.

3. Pay Attention To Site Load Times.

People are impatient when browsing websites and slow load times impact conversions (getting people to buy your products or services). If your site design is graphically intense, you need to make sure you’ll have the hardware infrastructure and bandwidth to support the designs. You can improve your site load times by picking good hosts and making sure your design is simple.

The cheapest monthly hosting option does not typically offer the best value. It might be cheap, but is also likely to be slow and unreliable.

Tip: want to compare how quick two sites load in comparison to each other or see how fast your site loads? Here’s a free tool you can use: PageSpeed Tool from Google.

4. Make your site easily accessible.

Keep the web design and navigation consistent throughout the site. Don’t create unrelated designs for different pages on your site. All the pages should have a similar overall layout and design. This is one of the most common reasons attorneys and law firms will consider a site redesign for 2017.

5. Organize your site to provide a better user experience.

Search engines prefer websites that are properly organized. People also prefer good organization. Keep in mind that when your prospective clients visit your site, they’re typically looking for specific information. They’re rarely going to read entire pages – they’ll skim headlines and small portions of text and look at photos or graphics (but not all of them on the same page). A properly structured site that presents information in an orderly and organized way will be much more successful than one that appears chaotic.

Take a look at how Clifford Law Offices, a Chicago based personal injury law firm organizes their site using the navigation menu.

As you scroll the homepage on the Clifford Law Offices site, you’ll see additional organization, focusing on specific types of cases that Clifford Law Offices handles. Remember, that a prospective client is initially looking to see if your firm handles certain types of cases, so it’s important that your homepage answer this question effectively.

Tip: Use bold, easy to read fonts and bullets to present key information or to stress things you want the readers to notice.

Add text color to stress the most important information, but try to keep your use of text color and fonts to a minimum. You want to emphasize, not confuse. Also, keep in mind that most people will ignore content if the headline above the content doesn’t interest them – so don’t ignore good headlines (more on that in tip 6 below).

For example, take a look at how Arnold & Itkin LLP, a law firm focusing on maritime law, emphasizes client testimonials on their homepage.

Advanced Tip: action buttons/links should be clear and unambiguous. For example, “Save” is not the same as “Submit.” Consider a visitor’s expectation when they click a button or link and make sure that your labels properly set those expectations. Whenever possible, make sure your copy reflects complete sentences and not isolated words or phrases. For more about effective CTAs, I recommend you read 17 Best Practices for Crazy-Effective Call-To-Action Buttons.

6. Content is important.

You probably already know that search engines index sites based on the quality of content (and links). The more content on your site, the more attractive your site becomes for search engines (more about search engine optimization in tip 9 below).

People also like content. In fact, poor content can quickly cause a visitor to leave your site. Don’t ignore headlines – they can be very powerful and can mean the difference between a visitor reading the rest of the content and leaving your site.

Take a look at how Robert Weinberger deals with this on his law firm site. The content is clean, crisp and easy to read.

Keep the content fresh and current. If your 2017 website has content dated from 2013, your visitors may quickly leave your site.

For example, take a look at how the C.A. Goldberg firm, a law firm focusing on internet abuse and sexual consent, uses counters as you scroll their page to give you a flavor of their successes, “by the numbers” (visit their page to see this live).

One other small insight from the C.A. Goldberg site. Notice the “Fast Exit” button in the top left? It’s a nice  touch because victims of internet and sexual abuse might be living with their abusers and benefit from a quick way to exit the page. Clicking that link takes you to the weather.com site.

Ultimately, you should focus on user experience (UX) when you consider what content to include on your site. There’s one question we should be asking when we consider UX, and rarely do.

Why?

Why do you want that button? That page? That section? That call to action? That image?

Let’s say you want to put a “Like Us on Facebook” button on your law firm website. Makes sense, right? Most folks, when evaluating whether that button is working are going to evaluate the numbers and then try, try again. They’ll change the color. They’ll put it somewhere else. They’ll make it bigger or smaller. They’ll tweak the text.

But if the data consistently shows that next to no one is clicking that button no matter what changes are made, it becomes clear that you missed asking yourself why you need it there in the first place. Just because all the cool kids are doing something doesn’t mean it’s right for you.

Content can also support navigation. As an example, take a look at how Quinn Emanuel, a successful trial law firm keeps its homepage clean, simple and focused. The secondary navigation (to the right) emphasizes the most important information that prospective clients want to know when they visit a law firm site: what do they do, who the attorneys are, and is the firm successful?

And don’t forget that you’ll want have robust attorney profiles. Remember that prospective clients choose attorneys before they choose a firm. A good attorney profile should include awards, publications, experience, education, and highlight successes in prior transactions or cases. Custom photos will help because people connect with images more than with words.

Tip: Study your successful competitors, firms you admire, and the examples shared in this post. Look at their websites and study how they present their services to their clients and potential clients. Study their site colors, voice, use of graphics, illustrations and photos, and the overall site organization. Don’t be afraid to use bolder colors. In the past, people have used muted colors, but we’re expecting to see more saturated and vibrant colors in 2017.

Don’t be afraid to be different. For example, take a look at how Oblon, McClelland, Maier & Neustadt, L.L.P., a full service intellectual property firm, showcases technology on their site in a video (you’ll need to visit the site to see the animation).

Advanced Tip: Consider using larger, more readable font sizes for your content. As screen resolution has improved, many displays show smaller fonts in a too tiny to read size. Take a look at some of your favorite websites and consider which font sizes you prefer for viewing/reading. With few exceptions, you probably prefer sites that use larger fonts. Too many firms use tiny fonts on their pages, making the content unreadable.

7. Understand the difference between design and development.

To build a website, you’ll need both design for the site and development of the site. Although some agencies and freelancers can do both, the skills for design and development are typically different and you may want to leverage different people for each part of the job.

Frontend developers tend to focus on the client side – what your visitors see when they visit your website. Backend developers usually focus on the interaction between the server and databases.

Backend developers often work on a number of things, which include scripting to permit your visitors to interact with the site, web server configuration, and developing e-commerce features, such as a payment system. Good freelance web developers are skilled in multiple areas, including web design, information architecture, usability engineering, web content management systems, web server administration, database administration, software engineering, project management, network security, and search engine optimization.

Today, every website design benefits from an easy to use content management system (CMS). Such systems allow the firm’s non-technical staff to maintain and update content on the site. Bigger sites might require custom systems or modifications of existing systems.

Tip: If you decide to hire a freelance web site designer and/or developer, you should look for at least three people (or shops) and ask them for detailed quotes. You should also remember to ask for a few examples of their prior work so that you can evaluate their style and experience. crowdSPRING has some of the most talented web designers in the world who have helped over 1,000 attorneys and law firms with logo and web design – we’d love to help if you want to consider us as one of your options.

8. Consider the domain but don’t obsess about it.

In the past, some firms tried to get exact word matches to take advantage of search engine rankings. When URLs were more easily obtainable, this was easier to do. For example, an attorney specializing in personal injury law in Chicago might get the domain chicagopersonalinjuryattorney.com. But search engines have made numerous algorithm updates over the years and this is no longer a recommended practice. If you’re unable to find a URL that matches your business name, you can consider changing the name or finding an alternative URL that includes the name – or or one that complements the name.

Avoid domains that are too long. Your firm might have five named equity partners but that doesn’t mean your domain should include all of their names. A good example is Oblon, McClelland, Maier & Neustadt, L.L.P. Their domain is simply oblon.com. A shorter, simpler domain is easier to remember and easier to type.

I’ve been through the naming process many times and it can be a very frustrating experience. If you need help, consider leveraging the 200,000 creatives on crowdSPRING to help you find a great new name (including a domain).

Tip: Consider how the URLs on your site will look to search engines and people. Where you can (this is not difficult to do when you use content management systems – such as a WordPress blog), use natural sounding names for your URLs and titles. For example, the How It Works page on the crowdSPRING site has the following easy to read ULR.

9. Don’t forget search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM).

For a law firm, just like for a small businesses, efforts spent on one marketing initiative typically take away from other marketing initiatives. Search engine optimization and search engine marketing are highly specialized fields and require a substantial investment of time to learn. But SEO and/or SEM campaigns can provide great leverage to attorneys and law firms and as a result, should not be ignored. We’ve written about this for small businesses, and you might find some of those posts helpful. We recommend 10 Practical Small Business SEO and SEM Marketing Tips. For additional tips, I recommend PPC Tips for Small Business Owner and How To Leverage Rich Media SEO for Small Businesses. If you’re new to SEO, this is a terrific guide from Moz: The Beginners Guide to SEO.

10. Use a responsive design.

A responsive design fluidly changes and responds to fit any screen or device size. This is becoming increasingly important because mobile devices are accounting for an increasing percentage of web traffic. In fact, some businesses, like Facebook, have more people accessing their sites via a mobile device than a desktop computer. This trend has been going up for years and will continue in 2017. There’s no turning back.

Your prospective clients will access your site from desktops, laptops, tablets and mobile phones. In many cases, 50% of prospects access law firm websites from mobile devices. In fact, Google and other search engines offer numerous search engine ranking benefits for websites that are responsive.

Above and to the right is the Ylaw Group site (discussed above) when viewed on a small screen. Notice how the menu is collapsed into what’s called a “hamburger menu” on the top right, and how the text and images adjust to the screen size.

To learn more about responsive web design (and see examples how sites implement responsive design), I recommend you read The Pros and Cons of Responsive Web Design vs. Mobile Website vs. Native App. For some interesting stats on why responsive design is important and more background on responsive design, I recommend you read The Web in 2016: Long live responsive design.

Can you suggest other tips and best practices for attorney and law firm web design in 2017? If you have a question about web design best practices, we’d love to hear from you in the comments.

Ready to invest in your law firm web design? It’s not as expensive as you think! Many law firms and lawyers in the U.S. and from around the world have turned to crowdSPRING to create professional, unique website designs for as little as $899. crowdSPRING’s Web Design Service offers a step-by-step creative brief that helps you outline your firm’s needs and allows you to work with multiple designers to find the perfect web design that reflects you and your brand.

In our 12 Questions blog series, we feature interviews with someone from the crowdSPRING creative community of 196,000+ designers & writers from 200 countries. Today we feature Dino, who goes by the username AVARTDE.

Dino is a self-taught designer from Indonesia that has been on crowdSPRING since 2012. During that time, Dino has participated in over 600 projects with a focus on logo design and redesign. We asked Dino 12 Questions about design, creative inspiration, and what it’s like working on crowdSPRING:

1. Please tell us about yourself.

My name is Dino, aka AVARTDE. I was born in Indonesia and lived in a small town called Padang Panjang for most of my life. For the past few years I’ve been living in Pekanbaru, Riau with my lovely wife and two amazing daughters.
 

2. How did you become interested in design?

I quit my study in high school and never received any formal graphic design training. My informal learning began when my parents gave me a computer while I was still in middle school. The first time I used Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop my life changed because I realized I could channel my hobby, drawing, into something more. I could do anything in Illustrator and Photoshop, and I could eventually learn to master it.

Over a 5 year period, I taught myself how to use design software without the help of the internet because at the time there was no internet connection in my town. Once the government began providing internet service in my town, it was a new chance for me to learn more about design. I learned everything I could about design techniques, illustration, and Photoshop to make myself a better designer.

I am still learning every day. When someone asks me who taught me, I answer “Google.” When someone asks me where I studied, I answer “Google.” When someone asks me who I work with, I answer “My computer.”
 

3. What led you to start using crowdSPRING?

After six years of using Illustrator and Photoshop, I started thinking I could earn money from my design. It is hard for someone like me to find work, especially because I did not finish high school. I tried searching for options on Google and came across crowdSPRING and some other websites. I was most interested in crowdSPRING because of the requirements and rules for a design project. crowdSPRING also has friendly a staff that responds quickly, and with all the talented designers, I can learn from others even when my work is not selected for a project.
 

4. Describe your typical work day.

My day usually starts with waking up, taking a bath and drinking coffee. After I drop my daughters off at school, I read creative blogs and check my email to see what’s going on for the day. I then browse and participate in projects on crowdSPRING or work on other personal projects until dinner at about 8 PM. After that, I just relax with my family until bed.
 

5. What inspires you?

Everything around me inspires me. Video games, movies, my environment and especially music is inspiring. When I work on a design, I always start with the concept while I listen to music. I always match the perfect music to the design that I will make.
 

6. How would you describe your style?

I’m driven by the freedom creativity brings. I love learning and always being able to adapt and try new designs and styles.
 

7. What is the design process like for you? How do you start?

Besides reading the creative brief I start by looking at the company’s background like competitors, locations, and even the history of the company. I research a variety of things to help read the mind of the client in order to create good design results. After I know what kind of design they looking for, I begin drawing the concept with my concept book and pencil. When I get the perfect concept, I draw the vector art in Illustrator. For finishing, I use Photoshop to make it perfect.
 

8. What is your most memorable project on crowdSPRING?

I randomly decided to enter a project that had a big award. I read the entire creative brief carefully to understand what they were looking for and asked the project owner some questions. This caught the project owner’s attention and I worked with her on some design feedback. I ended up winning the contest, beating out 114 designers and 403 design concepts. It was very exciting and early on in my crowdSPRING career.
 

9. Tell us what you’ve learned since joining crowdSPRING.

No matter how good you think your design is, it may not be what your client or buyer wants. I have learned a lot from creatives in crowdSPRING about creativity in design and also the authenticity of design. I am always happy to see a design that beats me because it is an experience for me to learn more from the winner and what kind of design the client likes. When we lose we learn a lesson for the future. Defeat is delayed victory and the beginning of great things
 

10. What is your favorite part about working on crowdSPRING?

By working on crowdSPRING, I can just focus on logo design. I am not asked to fill any other position or design anything else, just great logos.
 

11. What do you do with your free time?

I like to go on vacation with my family, and read as many design blogs I can.
 

12. How do you see graphic design changing in 2017?

From what I saw in the last part of 2016, there will be more geometric-style designs and an increase in the use of broken letters and cropped elements in graphic design in 2017.
 

See more of Avartde’s work here.

Start a 1-to-1 project with Avartde here.

Thousands of businesses have turned to creatives like Avartde to create professional, unique designs for their company for as little as $199. crowdSPRING’s Graphic Design Service offers a step-by-step creative brief that helps you outline your company’s needs and allows you to select from over 100 entries on average.

Image source: JuralMin

Successful entrepreneurs know that good branding is a vital factor in determining our success, but with so much advice and so many statistics on the topic, it’s not easy to figure out what’s actually important.

Branding is the way that we communicate with consumers, differentiate from our competitors, and create a name for ourselves in a world full of startups and great ideas. A brand is much more than the company’s logo or the product or service being offered. A brand is your company in the present, future, and perceptions of the public. Essentially, branding is about communication.

Startups and small businesses communicate through their names, logos, and messaging. It’s becoming increasingly important to have a strong brand (for example, there are over 30 million small businesses on Facebook alone), a recognizable name, and a logo that rises above the rest. This is one reason why so many companies regularly rebrand their businesses.

With all that in mind, we collected 2o important insights on branding that every entrepreneur and marketer should know.

1. 78% of consumers believe that companies focused on custom content are more trustworthy than companies who simply churn out generic content. When companies create custom content, their audience is more likely to believe that the company cares about the consumer’s time.

2. Companies that have blogs generate 67% more leads per month than companies who don’t have blogs- and companies have noticed. Blogs account for 434% more of indexed pages on Google.

3. In the last 3 years, email rates on mobile devices have increased by 180%, pushing companies to focus more on creating mobile-friendly email campaigns and newsletters.

4. Marketing messages reach 561% more people when shared by employees rather than by the brand itself. This is because people are more likely to trust other people, rather than a faceless company.

5. 70-80% of consumers ignore ads on the sides of websites or search results- regardless of the search engine they are using. Often, they find those ads to be less trustworthy.

6. 84% of people purchase a product because of a referral– even if they didn’t directly know the person. Recommendations are extremely important, which is why consumers turn to Yelp or Amazon for reviews and ratings. Nobody wants to pay for a 1 star product or service.

7. 90% of consumers expect that their experience with a brand will be similar across all platforms and devices. They expect a seamless transition between web and device-native applications through color, flow, and overall quality.

8. First impressions are incredibly important to develop loyalty; 48% of consumers report that they are more likely to become loyal to a brand during the first purchase or experience.

9. The right color can improve readership by 40% by making messaging easier to read and more visually appealing. Color is one of the first things our brains perceive from a brand, so it’s often the first thing that pulls us in.

10. 91% of consumers said that they are more likely to buy from an authentic brand than from a dishonest brand. But, it’s still important to understand what your specific target demographic values as honesty, because this perception changes between generations.

11. Recognition equals value: out of 40 million images posted to Instagram every day, over 10,000 of them are of the Starbucks logo- and for the most part, not on purpose.

12. It only takes consumers 10 seconds to form a first impression of a brand’s logo, but it takes 5-7 impressions for consumers to recognize the logo.

13. Our brains process images 60,000 times faster than we process words. That’s why so many companies choose to include a glyph or visual in their logo.

14. Color is a huge factor of brand recognition. A signature color can increase brand recognition by 80% (like the Starbucks green).

15. 33% of the top 100 brands use the color blue in their logo. The color blue is said to relate to one on one communication and personalized messaging, which helps customers feel more personally connected to the logo.

16. 77% of consumers make purchases based on a brand name. We don’t really call Kleenex tissue, just like most people don’t say tablet- they say iPad. A great brand name will become synonymous with the product or the service.

17. 72% of the best brands are named with made up words or acronyms. While it’s important to stay away from anything too abstract, a name should create an original image in someone’s head.

18. In the age of Twitter handles, Facebook pages, and competitive URLs, picking a name is even trickier. 71% of consumers say that they are more likely to buy from a brand that they follow on social media– making it crucial to choose a name that is available across multiple platforms.

19. According to Reuters, 82% of investors believe that brand strength and name recognition are becoming more important in guiding them in their investment decisions.

20. Emotion is an important part of a name. 90% of all purchasing decisions are made subconsciously, making it vital for companies to choose names that evoke positive emotions.

Just like anything else, branding is a huge investment in your company, both financially and in sweat equity. By focusing on some of these statistics, entrepreneurs can be more informed when making key decisions that will affect the perception of their brand. Understanding consumers’ preferences with colors or even with their use of social channels can help entrepreneurs focus more on the channels with which their audience interacts.

We hope these insights help you to get started building your brand or motivate you to take a closer look at how you can improve your existing brand. It’s never too late to make an impact!

If you are ready to create a quality brand for your business that inspires trust and confidence in your brand , consider enlisting the help of crowdSPRING’s network of 200,000 creatives to give you great options. crowdSPRING’s Logo Design Service offers a step-by-step creative brief that helps you outline your company’s needs and allows you to select from over 100 entries on average.

Naming your company can be challenging and time-consuming. If you need help or simply don’t have the time (it took us nearly 50 hours to name “crowdSPRING”), you can leverage crowdSPRING’s community of 200,000 designers and writers to come up with your company name or a product name.

Whether you leverage crowdSPRING’s community to help name your startup or small business or find a name on your own, you might find the following 10 tips useful:

1. Think about what you want your company name to convey.

Your company name is an important part of your company’s identity. The name will appear on your business cards, letterhead, website, promotional materials, products, and pretty much everywhere in print to identify your company or your company’s products and/or services.

Service oriented businesses should consider whether it will be easy for their prospective customers to recognize what services the business provides, based on the name of the company (example: Friendly Dog Walkers or Bright Accounting).

Businesses located in rural areas and serving rural communities may want to project a smaller, hometown feel with their name. However, businesses planning to focus on bigger markets or bigger customers might want to project a larger, more corporate image with their name.

2. Brainstorm to identify name possibilities.

Once you understand what you want your company name to convey, you should set aside some time to brainstorm. Think about words that describe your industry or the products/services you offer. Think about words that describe your competitors and words that describe the differences between your products and services and those of your competitors. Also, consider words that describe the benefits of using your products or services. Finally, think about words (and phrases) that evoke the feelings you want your customers to feel when they see your company name.

While brainstorming, look up Greek and Latin translations of your words – you might find new ideas from doing that exercise. Look at foreign words too (we spent some time with a Swahili dictionary looking for strong names).

Expect this process to take some time (it took us about 40+ hours to brainstorm and then another 10 to finalize names – we went through MANY possible names). Don’t forget to leverage resources, including a dictionary, thesaurus, and any other resources that you think may help.

3. Keep the name short, simple, and easy to write and remember. Also – consider acronyms of the name.

Think about the names of companies you admire. They typically have a few things in common: their names are short, simple, easy to write and easy to remember. (Examples: Apple, Google, Virgin, Southwest).

Obscure business names are often difficult to write and even more difficult to remember. This is a problem because for most startups and small businesses, word-of-mouth advertising is the most successful form of marketing. If your customers can’t remember your name or can’t spell it for others, it will make it difficult for them to help promote your business.

While it might be tempting, avoid using a “K” in place of a “Q” or a “Ph” in place of an “F” when coming up with your company name. Such letter substitutions make spelling the name very difficult.

Also, don’t forget to consider the acronym of your company name (an acronym is composed of the first letter of each word in a phrase). You might not use an acronym, but your customers might refer to your business by an acronym. A name such as Apple Support Services can result in an unfavorable acronym – ASS.

4. Avoid names that are too narrow or too literal.

Think about how your company may evolve over time and make sure that the company name can evolve with the business. For example, if you name your company iPhone Accessories and later expand to sell accessories for other products, your original name will be too narrow and restrictive.

The same advice applies even if your company sells a niche product. For example, if you sell antique lamps, you should consider whether you might sell more than lamps in the future. Naming your business Joan’s Antique Lamps may be too limiting when you later start selling antique clocks and furniture.

5. Avoid decisions by committee but do “test” your company name with others.

It’s tempting to involve our friends, family, employees and customers in finding a name for our company. Sometimes, this can work out really well. But there are risks. People might be upset if you don’t pick a name they think is great. You’ll also find yourself trying to find consensus – which can lead to a very plain name. If you must involve others, pick a small group of people who understand you and your business (and pick a mix of right-brain types and left-brain types so that you can have some variety.

Once you’ve selected a few possible choices, you should share them with a few trusted friends, family and customers to get some feedback about the name.

6. Avoid plain words.

Plain words make it very difficult to differentiate your company from your competitors. For example, there were hundreds of thousands of logo design businesses around the world when we started thinking about “crowdSPRING”. We knew that we would be expanding to many different industries (graphic design, web design, industrial design, writing, and many more) and so we didn’t want to name our business Great Logo Design or manyDesigners – it would have been descriptive, but not memorable and certainly not sufficiently unique.

There are exceptions. General Electric is one of the most successful companies in the world and its name is composed of two plain words. But, General Electric was one of the first companies in its product/service category and was able to get away with a plain name.

7. Be careful with geographic names.

Some people use their city, state or region as part of their company name. If you plan only to work in your city, then this might serve you well. But a geographic name could hinder you later. One great example is Minnesota Manufacturing and Mining. Initially, the name worked because the business was focused on Minnesota. But once the company grew beyond their industry and the state of Minnesota, they needed to find a new name – 3M.

8. Avoid obscure words.

Company names that help tell stories can be powerful and memorable (think about Google, for example). But obscure words or references might be difficult to spell or pronounce. Be especially sensitive if you’re trying to reach a mass audience (such as on the Internet). Obscure or invented names can work – Xerox is a great example – but this often requires a huge marketing budget and tremendous effort.

9. Avoid trends.

You’ll want your company’s name to evolve as trends evolve, so be careful to identify the trends and to avoid following them. For example, in the late 1990’s, it was trendy to use a .com after your company name if your company was an Internet business. After the Internet “bubble” burst, the “.com” became synonymous with having no business model and those companies who survived very quickly dropped “.com” from their names.

10. Consider whether you can register a domain and obtain a trademark.

It’s important to make sure that your competitors are not using the same name in your industry. It’s not uncommon to find similar (or even identical names) in different industries, but this can result in confusion for your customers and vendors. If your competitors are using the same name – you’ll expose yourself to possible litigation and you’ll likely be unable to obtain trademark protection for your company name.

So, look for a company name that is also available for registration as a domain (ideally, as a .com domain). You should understand that .com domains are very popular and you’ll struggle to find available domains that match your company name. Many people obsess during this process.

While it’s not an unimportant process, Tate Linden, CEO of Stokefire (a firm that specializes in branding), says that people often place too much value on the domain:

The number of people who type in URLs is shrinking every day.  Small business owners still seem to be obsessing over getting the pure URL as MyCompanyName.com, but the larger organizations have adapted.  We’ve done quite a bit of research that indicates the URL is becoming much less important.  Nowadays people are putting the name into Google to find sites.  We see this as a great thing.  The sad fact is that the vast majority of names we consider are ‘camped’ by squatters hoping to make a quick buck.  If you don’t have deep pockets or a convincing story to share you’re going to get taken to the cleaners.

Google is a great tool for getting around this issue—if you’ve got a strong brand and you’re getting links from people you’ll end up as the number one response for your name even if it isn’t the pure dotcom domain.

Last, there are some promising developments on the horizon.  There’s talk of opening up the area to the right of the ‘dot’ that would at least temporarily help businesses get their own domains.  There are also some processes in place where business owners can go to ICANN and file a complaint based on the fact that their trademarked domain name is being held for ransom.  I’ve heard some success stories of businesses going through the process and winning the domain rights from people whose sole intent in owning the sites is to sell them.

You’ll also want to make sure that you select a company name that you’ll be able to register for trademark/servicemark protection. Trademark rights arise only through commerce (such as when you offer items for sale and use the trade name or logo in your marketing materials or on the products). You are not required to register a company name – you can acquire common law rights simply by using the name in commerce.

What additional tips would you suggest to people looking to name their startup or small business?

In today’s legal marketplace, increasing competition, advertising noise and the commoditization of legal services has put substantial pressure on attorneys and law firms to develop unique brands that stand out from the crowd. Smart lawyers and law firms know that it’s impossible to differentiate when your potential clients don’t notice you.

Yet when you look around at the logos of small law firms and solo practitioners, it’s hard to ignore that most attorneys and law firms do a poor job when it comes to branding their legal services. In fact, most firms give their current logo a “C” average. Ask yourself: would your clients hire you if you were just an average attorney?

Unsure if your current logo is helping your firm stand out? Learn what makes a good logo and common branding mistakes in the legal industry in this infographic designed by crowdSPRING creative tina_chelle:

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