Let's talk digital marketing, specifically how to utilize modern tools to improve your or your company's presence online. Everyone is online these days, from mindless TikTok scrolling, citing almost every academic paper ever written via Google Scholar and watching the best technology centric news show on the Burk it YouTube channel guaranteed. The internet is arguably the greatest tool society has ever created, and it’s responsible for both revolutions and atrocities. At its most basic though, the internet is simply a method of sharing content, and with millions of people creating billions of graphics, videos, blog posts, etc., it’s important to know how to stand out from all the noise. Noah and I have now spent the last couple of years totally reshaping Burk’s online presence, but despite making a few variations, we never changed the company’s logo, and there’s a good reason for that.
Besides the logo, one of the first things you’ll notice about Burk today, looking at any of our marketing material, is this design featuring two diagonal stripes.

It is a very simple design, but the simplicity of the design is the beauty behind it. The fact that the design is so simple allows all our marketing materials to have a unified theme that is extremely easy to implement. This unified theme allows our content to be more easily recognizable and quickly associated with the Burk brand. Plus, the design intentionally invokes racing stripes, symbolically representing Burk values like our rapid 30-minute response time and general efficiency. As you can clearly see from our design, you do not have to reinvent the wheel to create a uniform design theme for your own brand, just try and utilize what content is already present in your branding. Assuming you have a logo, there will already be some design elements you can extract from said logo. But what if you do not have a logo? Or are not satisfied with your current logo?
Logo design may be the most important individual aspect of marketing. A great logo should be simple, unique, and meaningful. Unique is self-explanatory and possibly most crucial. If your brand is easily mistaken for another, especially one of your competitors, it totally defeats the point of branding in the first place. However, uniqueness on its own is pretty easy to obtain; what’s harder is combining all three of these elements at the same time. For instance, a series of random lines using a dozen colors is certainly unique, but it is far from simple while being completely devoid of meaning. When making your company’s logo or brand unique, take note of what competitors in your market are doing. When we get to meaning, you’ll see why many similar companies share branding characteristics, but take note of how you might differentiate your brand from these other companies. For instance, many other technology companies feature blue as a prominent color, including us. We differentiate ourselves by using orange as an accent.
Now let’s talk meaning, and as a result, why so many companies in similar industries use the same colors and design elements. There are a wide variety of psychological studies that have sought to explain the effects of colors on the brain, and what colors brands have decided to feature over the years have only strengthened those associations. Broadly speaking, red is exciting and bold, orange is warm and friendly, yellow is optimistic and kind, green is peaceful and natural, blue is intelligent and reliable, purple is wise and creative, greyscale is neutral and calm, and using the rainbow is diversity and inclusivity, specifically today, it has an unavoidable association with the LGBTQ community and pride. Even more broadly, warm colors like these are associated with speed and energy, while cooler colors bring to mind patience and thoughtfulness. These are not hard and fast rules, but when establishing a brand identity, you should know the subtle effect colors have on the minds of your customer base.
With some colors in mind, we’ll move now to the actual design, still focusing on meaning, but also simplicity. One way to easily check all the required boxes is to just do a version of the company’s name as a logo. Plenty of the world’s most iconic brands have done this, think Coca-Cola and Google for instance. Even the brands who are known for just a shape or icon of some kind still have a specific way of notating the company name when that’s necessary; think Nike or Toyota for this. In every case, typography, or how exactly letters are designed and formatted, becomes very important. Many modern logos are literally just their name typed out in a specific font. Take Scotch Tape and Jeep, for instance, that are both just variations on Helvetica. Is this theoretically bad branding, since they aren’t unique or symbolic in some way? No, because there are factors surrounding the logo that make the brand unique and iconic. Jeep is not just the logo, but the design of their vehicles and the associations carried with Jeeps. Smaller companies and less-established brands do not have the benefit of 80 years in the public eye to build brand recognition.
What that means for companies and individuals trying to establish themselves today is that they cannot just be a generic typeface, but typography is still very important. Different fonts have different uses and associations. For the purpose of this discussion, we’ll focus on three broad types of fonts: serif, sans serif, and script. Serifs refer to these small features at the end of strokes within letters, hence serif fonts being those that include serifs, and sans serif fonts (from French sans, meaning without) do not have serifs. Script fonts imitate handwriting or calligraphy and are rarely used in bodies of text as they are harder to read than many serif and sans-serif typefaces. For the purposes of logo design, all three have their merits. Serif fonts are associated with traditional print media and have an air of professionalism and longevity. Think Altoids or most banks. Sans serif fonts are the fonts of the internet, as most webpages and computers default to fonts like Calibri on Windows or SF Pro for Macs. As such, they’re used for most tech companies and brands looking for a modern, relaxed look. Logos use script fonts to appear classy and/or traditional, such as Coca-Cola or Ford, though it’s worth noting that it is very rare for a company to use a stock script font for a logo. Typically, these logos are meticulously hand-designed by skilled calligraphers or graphic artists.
Hopefully, you now have some kind of idea about the colors and typography you want to use for your logo. What about the rest of the logo? This is getting into much broader and more subjective areas of design that are harder to explain in a setting like this. However, generally speaking, the best thing to do with logo design is keep it simple, both in terms of shape and color palette. Unless intentionally going for a rainbow color palette, stick to two or three colors, usually a primary color that you’ll use for 60-80% of your branding and one or two accent colors to use the rest of the time in addition to black and white. When designing the logo, a good rule of thumb is to make it a design that can be drawn from memory by a child or sketched by an adult in under twenty seconds. There are always exceptions, and it also depends on the various contexts where a logo will be seen. Just remember simple, unique, and meaningful.
We’ve spent most of this story discussing logo design, but there is a god reason for that. From the logo, everything else follows. The colors and design choices of the logo should be used to add a signature touch to the website and marketing materials. Using Coke as a positive example again, you can see their website is plastered with that iconic red, while the wavey design derived from the logo is used to break up the monotony of the otherwise all-white background. Coca-Cola has maintained its logo for decades now because it works, and once a company finds a good logo, it is vital that they stick with it. Logos are meant to be synonymous with their respective companies, and frequent logo changes really undermine that intention. However, that does not mean one should ever stick with bad branding just for sake of tradition. If you see some value in the marketing lessons we’ve shared here, but you don’t think it’s something you can handle right now, Burk I.T. does now offer graphic and web design services to our clients and other businesses. Just give us a call at 423.578.8000, or email me at mtlawson@burkitc.com.
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