Category: Articles

I was reading this article http://www.fubiz.net/en/2017/01/05/2016-year-best-brand-logo-redesigns/, the 10 top logo redesigns of 2016, and while there’s a lot of interest in there, I’ve got a little to say about a number of these designs, so in no certain order.

 

Instagram

A lot was made this year of Instagram redesigning their logo, and to tell the truth I didn’t like it, not because of the design (rainbow colours they’re on our wavelength alright), but because the old logo is so good as to make the new one pale in comparison. Some times not changing is the right choice.

Budweiser

Drank a whole load of Budweiser in my youth, when I thought that buying an American beer was an exotic cool foreign choice. But what were they thinking, simplifying a logo can be a good choice, but they’ve take it too far, again with the changes not being necessary and couldn’t you have at least left the crown for “the king of beers”.

Mozilla

Now the Firefox logo has been quite iconic for the past decade or so, therefore making such a large change is going to be jarring. But, honestly, why? What’s going on here, it looks 70’s, it looks like it’s supposed to be on a Mechanical Digger or other piece of industrial equipment. What’s a Web Browser got to do with this? What’s going on? Why? I’m just confused, and I’m willing to bet that no one cosplays as this new logo.

Kodak

Now this one I agree with, completely, but I’m putting it here because of one thing. Why was it not this before, I’m sure I remember this one from my youth, hasn’t this always been the Kodak logo, and which idiot changed it away from this in the firstplace. Good choice.

Mastercard

Really. Why do mastercard (avoiding the capital letter for their name, because apparently so do they) bother redesigning their logo every few years into something almost exactly the same. Now the update is nice, I like the font, the merging of colours rather than interlacing them is also nice. But nice enough to redesign the logo, reprint all the stickers on cash machines, business cards, stationery, etc . . . Not really worth it surely.

Netflix

Again I’m conflicted by this one, I like the ribbon N, it’s a nice bit of design, and black on red is a really attractive colour scheme, but is it better than the old logo . . . Not really.

Uber

And finally, Uber, what the flying hell is going on here. The old logo, looks like a car manufacturers badge, you could see that as the badge on a bonnet of a car, it’s simple, yet the gradation on it gives it weight and dignity. The typography below the logo even looks like little roads. Together these connect to this being a company connected with cars and roads and getting places, nice design. The new logo, well . . . sorry . . . . all it makes me think of is the lament configuration (the puzzle box out of the Hellraiser movies), taking you straight to hell. Oh, and why is the symbol in the middle on it’s side, it’s obviously supposed to be a stylised U, but its orientation is wrong and now it’s a weird Pacman.

Doing a bit of reading on this design, apparently you’re supposed to concentrate on the “bit” in the middle, as across all of Uber’s services, you’ll always find that “bit”, but still, why’s it on its side?

Well, thanks for reading, and Happy New Year to you all. If you want to talk about logo design, whether you want a new one, or whether you want to just chat about design in general, get in touch.

This is something I’m terrible at, maybe because of the company I’ve spent the majority of the past decade working for, but the always brilliant Sell Your Service has laid out putting an agenda in the video below, and I’m going to try to stick to this, maybe it’s of use to you too.

We’d like to take his opportunity to announce we’ve just launched a new website for one of our clients, 420 Junction Growshop, based in Irvine. They’re a hydroponics shop, who have a massive range of items available, nutrients, vaporizers, medium and pumps, everything you might possibly need for Hydroponics and Vaporizing. 

So why not check out their new website http://420growshop.online/ , or pay them a visit in Irvine Harbourside for expert advice.

We would like to take a moment as Christmas draws ever closer to wish all of our friends and customers a very merry christmas and a wonderful new year.

The always great sell your service has started a new series, as well as his usual excellent posts about marketing copy that I’ve mentioned before, he’s had a bit of a problem in his business and is rebuilding from scratch, and is video blogging every step of the way.

I find this wonderful to see someone in a very similar position as myself, whose career has taken a massive step off the cliff into uncertain territory and he’s building back from there. While I don’t agree with every step, I’m finding it fascinating seeing his priorities and how he’s building a plan.

Plus it’s is always fascinating to watch someone talk about a subject they’re really into and really knowledgable. I hope this is of some use to some of you out there, and I hope you enjoy.

We all receive loads of Spam and Marketing Emails, but one of the unforeseen side-effects of setting up a web design company, is that as soon as you start registering domain names for clients, you begin getting lots of emails offering you websites to go with those domain names. Now usually I read these with Interest, as Scruffy Dug is a small company and its useful to see what the market is saying to potential customers so we can compete on level ground.

Now, this morning I received the following email, and while it’s actually fairly competently put together (I’m no expert, and I’ll bet a professional copy writer could have a real fun time with what I write), it’s got a number of glaring errors, have a quick read through and join me below for my comments.

Hi There,

I am Jassica Horner Digital Marketing Manager, Hope you are doing great,

Are you looking for Low Cost Digital Marketing Services?

We are a Digital Marketing Agency with our primary focus on SEO, Web Design and Development. Would you like to increase on targeted high quality visitors to your Website every day? I just tell you that we are offering our Digital Marketing Services on Affordable prices and promise to deliver what we commit.

We can help people find you on Google and other search engines through Digital Marketing (SEO + SMO).

I am sure that you will get good experience with us.

Our Digital Marketing services:-

• Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
• Social Media Optimization- SMO (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and MySpace etc.).
• PPC (Google Ad words)
• Web Design and Development
• Mobile Apps Design and Development

If you are interested, then I can send you our past work details, testimonials, affordable quotation, samples, price list with best offer.

Please let me know if you need further information.  We look forward to helping you grow online!

Please share a little brief about your requirement and leave us your phone number and website address, we will review your requirements and further discus it over a call with you.

Hope to catch you soon for taking this discussion forward.

Kind Regards,

Jassica Horner

Digital Marketing Manager

Okay, so the first thing is, why is Jassica putting her name in Bold right there at the top? It’s obvious that her name is important, but I’m afraid I’ve never heard of her and highlighting it only highlights the fact to me that I’ve never heard the name Jassica before, is it a real name? Or is this one of those situations where a company in India has chosen an anglicised name and made a mistake? I don’t know, and that’s what’s sticking in my head, not anything else she says.

In fact, doing a search for Jassica’s name and “digital marketing” brings up no results, and Google automatically changes her name to Jessica, even after telling it that you’re definitely searching for Jassica, but lets carry on.

She says they’re a digital marketing agency, but what are they called? She never mentions who they are. The email was sent from a GMail account, so not even the sender’s email address helps me. Who are this mystery Digital Marketing Company? Giving me a name would allow me to just google and find out more, now you’re making me work, sending an email to find out, where I could just google “digital marketing company” and see who comes up.

The grammatical errors go without saying, although I’m hardly in a position to speak, but give the impression that english isn’t the writers first language.

While their list of services seems pretty standard, it doesn’t seem sure who it’s talking to. Are you speaking to a professional who’ll know what PPC (Pay Per Click) is? If you are, why do you define what SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is? Or were you speaking to non-experts and just forgot to define PPC?

The list of Social Media seems just a little off. If you’re listing all Social Platforms, then where’s Instagram and Tumblr? If you’re just listing the popular platforms then what the hell is MySpace doing in there? 

She again goes a little crazy with the bold text, putting three full paragraphs in bold, rather than just using it to highlight something, so reading through I’m not entirely sure what I’m supposed to be paying attention to here.

This is made worse by the fact that two of these three bold paragraphs are asking me to do different things. Am I supposed to be replying to get the sample work, testimonials, quotations and price list? Or am I supposed to be sending a brief, my web site url and my phone number? I’m confused, and the second one seems like a load of work when I don’t even know fully what you can do for me!

Anyway, just thought I’d point out a few rookie mistakes that Jassica made, and hopefully learn from them myself.

I’m a big fan of Roberto Blake, he’s a little American for my dour Scottish attitude “Helping you create something Awesome today!”, but he speaks a lot of sense, and has a wealth of experience which he is keen to share. Which is indeed Awesome.

Anyway, here’s one of his most recent videos, which surprised me as I thought he was going to talk about graphical branding, where he’s really talking about communicating. Excellent video, and definitely worth 5 minutes of your time.

Now, I know that I’ve gone on and on about Responsive Web Design, in fact it’s been over six months since I wrote about it. However it’s more important now than it was six months ago to make sure you get mobile web right. In fact if I was asked if someone could only have a mobile site OR a desktop site, which one should they get, I’d recommend the mobile one, something I certainly wouldn’t have six months ago.

With Google now making the way a site presents itself on mobile more important than desktop, and the continuing decrease in market share for desktop compared to tablets and phones, making sure your website is responsive is absolutely vital now. So we’re offering

A Free Web Site Audit

Domain names are the start of every website, whether it’s what you type in to reach the site (or find in the google search), or what you’ve purchased to build your site around. But for such a basic part of online life, there’s a lot of misunderstandings about Domain Names.

.com is Key

While the .com Top Level Domain (TLD) still holds a lot of power and most people will assume that companies will use it (so if your customers remember your company name is Really Good Cars, they’re going to assume that your website is reallygoodcars.com), but few people actually type domain names directly into their browsers any more. Most people looking for Really Good Cars, will just search for it and will probably just click on the top link. So in reality it doesn’t matter if you use the .com, the .co.uk or the .xyz, as long as you get listed on the search engines.

People don’t trust new TLD’s

While there are many reasons to distrust new Top Level Domains, and I’ve written about a few myself, peoples trust isn’t one of them. With many people using mobile devices, where screen space is at a premium, address bars have begun to be hidden, so users aren’t even aware if you’re on a .com or a .xyz, they don’t see the address, just your site.

You can always change your TLD

While many people believe that you can just change the address of your website, and experiment with the various TLD’s to find out which is best, in reality that’s more problematic than it sounds. Changing the address of a site means that the search engines won’t necessarily treat it as being the same site, and your rankings in the search listings may start from scratch again. Worse, the search engines may treat your site’s new address as duplicate content of the sites old address (also a danger when running a site on multiple TLD’s), and duplicate content gets penalised heavily on search (a reason you should never copy and paste material of anyone elses website). While there are ways around this, it’s far easier, less time consuming and better for your visitors to just choose a domain and stick with it.

.com is Dying

Many think that all the good domain names in .com are taken, and while it’s clear that the most common words are already gone, there are still loads which haven’t yet been registered. When founding our own company, getting the .com was a key issue in naming ourselves, but to tell the absolute truth, we were still left with dozens of names to choose from. With a little creativity, you can still get cool, interesting and unique names in .com.

.com is going to dominate forever

While .com’s have been the mainstay of the Internet since the founding of the Web, there’s no way to predict if they’re going to remain important. But with the move to a more search based web, with automated systems searching out the information for the user, it is likely that domain names of all types will become less and less important in day to day use.

No Major Brands use new TLD’s

While a .com is a badge of pride for most companies, a surprising amount make sure they’ve got the alternatives available too, and in fact where it suits many companies deliberately choose a different TLD, to match their name, so for example Bitly, originally registered their domain name in the TLD for Libya, “bit.ly”, although they’ve gone on to register bitly.com as well. So if it suits, go for it, register something that makes you stand out from the crowd, be different to the rest of the ,com’s.