Your Practice Brand: The Importance Of A Good-Looking Logo and Stationery
If you don’t have a professional looking logo for your practice, you need one. A logo is the visual anchor that holds all your marketing, advertising and communications pieces together.
Think Starbucks, IBM or Nike. Just the thought of any of those logos instantly brings to mind an image of what that company stands for. That is the kind of branding power you should be striving for in your own modest way.
Your logo can be a unique design such as the Nike swoosh or the Essilor ‘e’. Or, it can be just a stylized treatment of your practice name such as Microsoft, Marchon or Acuvue. The best logos tend to be clean and simple.
Online Design Services Are Cheap And Very Good
One of the excuses for not having a good-looking logo used to be that it was too expensive to hire a professional designer to create one for you. No longer. Great looking custom logos are now readily available on the Internet for $100 and up.
I recently had a good experience with logomyway.com. I opened my account online, put in my specifications and prepaid $250 with a credit card. I think the minimum is $200 plus a small service fee.
My project was posted and designers from around the world started submitting drafts based on my specs. I would check my password protected site every day or two and rank my favorite designs.
When I found something I really liked, I emailed the designer, told them what changes I wanted ended up with a nice final version. I have used logomyway.com twice and was pleased both times.
Stationery And Business Cards
Once you get a nice logo, there is no excuse to have bland or poorly designed graphic materials in your practice.
Another site I have used with great success is guru.com. While logomyway.com is pretty much focused on logos, you can hire a variety of professional services on guru.com. This includes stationery and business card design.
The guru business model is slightly different from logomyway in that you name a budget, such as $100, and then a variety of designers bid on your job.
Unlike logomyway, the guru designers show you samples from previous projects. But, they don’t actually create designs until you award them the job.
I have had success with both online services and there are others out there for you to try. Guru.com and logomyway.com just happen to be two of the better established ones.
Regards,
Jerry Hayes, OD
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Disclaimer: The information and opinions contained on this site are for discussion purposes only and are NOT intended to serve as legal, accounting or investment advice. ©2010 Jerry Hayes, OD. Not to be reproduced without written permission of the author.
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Logo
Jerry,
I have used the "optometric caduceus" since I began practice in the mid 90's. I purchased a practice that did not have a strong medical optometry background and chose the caduceus to impress upon patients my medical approach.
Has a caduceus become antiquated? I do not see it displayed much in medical marketing anymore.
What are the thoughts of my fellow ODs?
Conway Cox OD
Logo treatment
I think in designing a logo, it is critical for most small businesses to include the name of the business as a part of the logo.
While Target or Nike logos are very cool, the cost of getting someone to instantly identify a graphic with a business is dramatically higher than getting someone to identify a graphical treatment of your business name (think Intel or Microsoft).
Even Red Tray has it's name as an integral part of the logo, rather than the red quadrilateral as the sole component of the logo.