Archive for August, 2010

Logos – The First Visual Introduction to Your Brand

Thursday, August 26th, 2010

Since a logo is the first visual that your clients and prospects see, have you thought about what your logo says to them? Here are some basic questions that should be asked when doing the research to prepare a new or revise an existing logo.

  1. Who is your target market?
  2. What products/services does your company provide?
  3. What does your competition do?
  4. Based on the above, how can you simply and effectively symbolize your brand?

Once you’ve answered these questions, you will want to keep the following lessons learned from others’ success in mind:

  1. Keep it simple! Every major global brand has a recognizable logo that bears a striking, yet simple graphic element.
  2. Make sure that it’s flexible. If your logo is simple and effective, it should transcend any media and reproduce well at any size. In other words, it will look equally good on a business card or a billboard, silk-screened or embroidered on a garment, wrapped around a vehicle and more.Consider creating your logo in black and white initially, as this allows you to concentrate on the concept rather than the colour.
  3. Font selection is also critical. If you use a tag line as part of your logo, you should test for legibility and memorability.

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Team Effectiveness

Monday, August 23rd, 2010

What is the ideal team size?
If you’re finding it tough to accomplish much with a team project you’re working on, ask yourself if you have too many heads and hands involved in the task. According to psychologist Ivan Steiner, “each time you add a person to a team,
productivity goes up, but so do inefficiencies”. Tasks such as group coordination gets trickier. This has and continues to be the case. Back in 1970, two Harvard University professors asked large and small teams to perform several tasks. They asked them whether they felt their group was too small or too large for the task. From the feedback, they determined an  ideal team size of 4.6 persons. Although it may be difficult to have less than a whole person working on your team (just kidding), the bottom line is that for maximum efficiency, smaller is better. Of course, as I mentioned earlier, with larger teams you bring more skills as well as more inefficiencies. You might find that the larger group naturally divides itself into smaller cliques. The solution would  either be to keep the head count between 4 and 5 people or to subdivide the project into smaller working pieces and assign subgroups from the larger group according to their strengths.

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