Learn Success With Randy Brown

Anatomy Of A Logo

Image and “branding” are important for any big-business, and just as important for even the smallest of websites. If your visitors can’t remember your domain name you need to do your best to ‘burn’ the image of the website into their memory (think Coca Cola or McDonalds). Ideally, you would plaster that image or ‘brand’ of your website all over the internet with advertising and all over the real-world with T-shirts, mousepads and whatever else you can slap your logo on.

When I first started GrownUpGeek.com, I had zero budget, so I used my mad Photoshop skillz to throw together this logo:

This logo served it’s purpose for a few months but once the website was generating some income we figured it was time to invest in something better.

After some Googling we found George Coghill. George had a unique style that we liked so we commissioned him to come up with some ideas. We only specified to him that we wanted a sexy yet geeky female character based on my wife (aka “The Geek”). I sent him some photos and he came up with this draft:

We then used the final of that draft for our logo which we’ve been using for about the last 2 years:

Using George’s original artwork I was also able to hack this ‘haircut’ version that we’ve used in various places:

We’ve been using George’s logo for a while now and decided that we wanted a new look. We wanted the same character, but something with a “Web 2.0″ look to it. I had seen John Cow’s new logo that he had done last year and Tyler Cruz’s – both which were done by SOSFactory.com, and decided to see what they could come up with. A few hundred dollars later and Sergio sent me this first draft:

We liked the new look and told Sergio to press the “colorize” button and we got this:

He then added our text and tagline:

SOSFactory will provide layered PSD’s so we will be able to move things around as we see fit. Our finalized header will probably look something like this:

We will do the finalizing of the logo and put it live on the website (hopefully) in the next few days.

If you have not already “branded” your site you should consider doing so. Even with no money at all you can come with something on your own like we did, or you can find a struggling new artist to do something very inexpensive (like $10 or $20) over at the Digital Point Forums. If you’ve got a few hundred $ that you’re willing to invest you can’t go wrong with George Coghill, and if you want to take it to the next level (and spend even more), I highly recommend SOSFactory.