Raven's Work From Home Resources
Your LOGO
Your LOGO
As a small business or freelance, you will need business cards. You will need your own letterhead. And if you want those to look professional you will need to have a logo. It doesn't have to be anything elaborate, especially if your business tends toward the technical side or if it deals with more than one speciality. Having your name or business name in a distinctive font or creatively drawn is enough.
For other enterprises a separate logo is appropriate. There are plenty of places where you can get logos for free or use standard clip art. Other places will make them for little money, especially if you use their business to print your items afterwards.
These are convenient, but don't just accept a stock logo with little thought. This logo will need to be your visual identifier used to tie all your business and promotional materials together. It will be on your letterhead, your cards, return address labels or preprinted envelopes, and any ad copy you purchase (yellow page ads or bill boards). It needs to have the visual presence to be in all those places and look right.
It also needs to adequately reflect the tone of your business. Clip art of fuzzy bunnies is cute for business which are creative, child oriented, deal with pets or stuffed animals. However it would not look right alone as a logo for a cleaning service or computer repair operation, even if your name is Bunny. (In those cases I'd combine the bunny with something like a broom or monitor)
The logo needs to represent your business in a memorable way, but it need not have to do so in a complicated way. Think of various "branded" logos we see in everyday life. Walmart and Target have very simple and familiar logos. The FTD Florist is also memorable, but is a little more elaborate. All work though, because they reflect something about the character, name or mission of the company they represent.
Consider also that your logo will appear in various settings. The above mentioned symbols work in all settings because they can easily be made in about any size. Make sure that yours is capable of doing so also. This is one reason why stock clip art is often substandard, as it will not represent you well on a billboard of fullpage ad in the paper. Perhaps you're not planning this sort of advertising now, but you may decide to do so in the future and changing your logo to suit that situation is not preferable.
Remember, it is your logo that people will remember when they think of your business. Make sure to put some effort and thought into the design of the visual symbol of your company/enterprise so that it will suit you well into the future.
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