Logos and Design | Travel Research Online

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Logos and Design

Dear Stephanie,

I am redoing my logo but not sure where to start. What are some things I should be thinking about?

– Jessica S.

Hey Jessica!

Congrats on the logo revamp!

My first advice is to make sure you use a professional graphic designer – don’t fall prey to the DIY logo maker sites. Just like travel agents bring their expertise to the table, so do graphic designers. If you can find a local graphic designer, I’d keep it in the community; if not, take a look at 99designs.com, a website where designers compete in design contests for your business.

Next, colors and fonts can communicate a lot. Before you approach a designer, think about what emotions you want evoked when a client thinks of your company. Warm, easy-going, fun, business-oriented? Your designer will be the one that will put everything together, but doing research prior to meeting with a designer can help the designer get a feel for what you’re envisioning. Here’s a few websites to check out:

Color:
www.colourlovers.com
www.colorschemedesigner.com

Fonts:
www.whatthefont.com

The more clearly you’re able to communicate what you want for your brand to the designer, the easier the process will be for both of you.

Final piece of advice is to request a style guide from your designer so you can keep things consistent. A style guide is just a resource that lays down some standards on how your brand should be appearing. It helps you know what font to use and what complementary fonts are recommend.

With a style guide, you’ll be able to use the exact font colors across your advertising, so that clients begin to associate those colors with your business. Can you picture the blue used by Facebook? I bet you can and I bet if you saw that exact blue with white beside it, you’d immediately think Facebook. That’s what you want for your company. You want people to see the colors and immediately know it’s you.

Most small businesses can’t afford to hire a designer for everything, a style guide allows you to at least keep the brand consistent, even when a designer hasn’t been involved.

Best of luck on the redesign!

For the rest of you, if you have any questions on host agencies, getting started in the travel industry, growing your home-based agency, etc. drop me a line: Stephanie@hostagencyreviews.com

Until next time,
Steph

 

PictureAfter a 6 year stretch as director of a national host agency, Stephanie Lee started Host Agency Reviews – a resource website with host reviews and articles to help travel agents start and grow their travel agencies. She was awarded the ASTA’s Young Professional of the Year and Travel Agent Magazine’s 30 under 30 award. As time marches on, the dates of the awards have been surreptitiously left out to avoid drawing attention to the fact she’s aging. She’s not.

You can connect with Steph on Facebook, Twitter, and Google+.

  2 thoughts on “Logos and Design

  1. Mark Newsome says:

    Great advice Stephanie!

    We were able to trade some services with a local designer and ended up with two super logo designs that cost nothing but some time and advice. Our designer also does wedding invitations, resulting in a honeymoon referrals! Great relations with other small business people can really pay off.

  2. Mark Hanse says:

    We have released the free WhatTheFont plugin for Photoshop, Photoshop Font Detector Plugin: http://www.layerhero.com/photoshop-font-detector/, which enables designers to identify fonts directly from Photoshop.

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