Captain's Blog

Logo Design and Branding
Mar 17, 2011

A new business can be incredibly expensive, stressful, exhausting and time consuming to set up. This is one of the reasons I am constantly amazed by the number of businesses that seem to have had their logo and branding work done by themselves in Microsoft Word with the help of dodgy clip-art.

After having spent tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars on setting up the business, they have decided to give themselves an unprofessional, ugly public face to save themselves a few hundred.

A short walk down any high street can be a painful experience for a professional designer, as 60 to 80% of the branding on display is of an extremely low quality. The use of freely available software has allowed anyone to create their own designs, often with disastrous results. While in the short run the DIY approach may seem to save you money, the likelihood is that it will cost you far more than you will save. Your logo is your public face and will have a massive impact on how people respond. If potential clients see a badly designed, unprofessional logo, they will by association see a badly managed, unprofessional business, and find someone else.

Another mistake many new businesses make is asking their sign-writers to create their logo. While some of the larger operations create decent designs, the majority of sign-writers were not educated as designers, and to a trained eye this is obvious in their work. They know how to use the software, but that alone does not make them qualified.

Logo design and branding requires a good understanding of your organisation's place in the market, careful analysis of customer demographics, knowledge of colour theory and a love of typography, not to mention the spark of creativity required to create a clever, memorable trademark.

If you feel your organistation could do with a fresh new face, contact us today for an appraisal and quote.

You can check out some of our previous logo designs here.

Our Baby Is Born
Mar 17, 2011

Today is a very exciting day for me. I finally have a website that I can proudly point clients towards without any disclaimers. Thanks to a lot of hard work and sleepless nights by myself on the front end design and the unparalleled coding genius of Storm Jarvie (my new partner in all things web) who brought the beast to life, we now have a website that represents us faithfully.

My previous website had been designed and coded by myself (design professional, web amateur), which is fine when you are a startup business with a budget of exactly $5.35 (in 5 and 10 cent pieces), but now that the business has grown I felt it was time to bring in the specialist skills needed to create a website with comprehensive Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), a reliable Content Management System (CMS), contact forms and Javascript animation. We now also have email newsletter capability, so sign up if you'd like to receive all the latest design news from the studio.

We hope you enjoy browsing the site and that you find what you are looking for in these pages. Any feedback will be welcomed with open arms!