As a business owner, it's important to have a cohesive approach when it comes to your business logo and brand messaging.  This is often the first thing a potential new customer sees about your business and when done correctly, it helps separate you from your competitors the better these components sing the same tune.  

When Critchfield Consulting is analyzing a business, we take a close look at the business's branding components.  It's pretty simple, if we were to take your company business cards, your letterhead, an image of your websites home page, social media platform profiles, sales literature, or anything else a customer may see of yours and plaster it all against a white board together, will we see a cohesive branded look or what appears to be an amateurs ransom note?  

If your brand elements across the board look like an amateur's ransom note, your brand needs a refreshed look.  This doesn't mean you need to go out and change all your storefronts signage just yet, but it's worth the conversation to determine what the best approach forward looks like.  Before we dive into choosing a branding specialist to work with, it's important to identify the components of what good branding, overall, looks like.  

BUILDING A BRAND THAT WORKS

• Logo Design: There are a few components of your logo to pay close attention to.  Most good logos have three elements, a well-designed image that represents the company, the business name with a specialized font and a secondary position, slogan, or color scheme that ties it all together.  Logos really should be simple and the less words, typically the better.  Afterall, these might go on shirts, hats, and products like coffee mugs and golf balls so the smaller the font and verbiage, the more diluted the logo will look. 

• Color Scheme: It's important to also identify what color scheme your business will use to promote itself.  A good color scheme typically starts by identifying a primary color, followed by a secondary color and possibly even an accent color.  If you think about a website, your logo and its main color should be the color scheme you go with that is primary.  If there are secondary colors in the logo these will make sense to utilize as the secondary website colors.  Based upon these colors, choosing a third accent color to highlight call to action boxes or unique animation on the website might serve your business well collectively.  
  

• Type Face & Font: Another factor for building a brand that sets your business up for success is to use a font and type face that separates you from others.  This could be used for your logo, sales collateral, business cards, letterhead, website font, and social media profiles.   Part of the amateurs ransom note concept mentioned above applies here.  You want to keep things universal across the board and you want to shy away from using different size fonts, italics, and bold face if it doesn't make sense.