How important is a logo or brand?

Of course, there’s more to a brand than just the logo, but the logo sums up and represents your brand, and becomes the heart of it. The real brand is a combination of your style and business attitude. That said, a logo or some kind of visual branding, like a site header, is pretty darned important. It’s how you “brand” your presence on the web – it’s the visible symbol of your difference from every other professional on the web in the same industry.

Logo vs. Header

The old way of doing things might have been to get a toll free number, stationary, fax line, etc. The new way is nationwide long distance on every cell phone, e-mail templates, and electronic fax or e-mail and PDF. It’s probably a given, then, that things would change graphically too.

The change is this: not every company needs or wants a logo. Believe it or not, it’s not automatically one of the signs of professionalism anymore. What a lot of companies do instead is get a graphic header for their site that contains their company name, but also other information, and is graphically rich or stylistically significant. Neither way is right or wrong. There are still plenty of logos being made. It’s a matter of direction, taste, preference.

The main value of a logo is branding. You can brand everything from your facebook and twitter accounts to your e-mail campaigns to print materials.The consistency is a marketing technique that starts building brand trust and can help business growth.

The main value of a web site header is memory. If it’s catching enough, people land on your site and it immediately visually imprints in their mind. So if they’re looking at several sites (from search engines), or they are making a decision to act later, arresting colors or catching graphics tend to stick in their remembrance, and they tend to look to come back to the same site again, which can often be what turns the hit into a contact.

Other types of graphics that can be relevant these days are anything from avatars (little symbols that represent you when you comment on a blog site) to custom-designed Twitter and Facebook icons for your site. It’s a fun time for graphic design!