Strategic logo design to win customers

 

How does a designer create a strategic logo design? I’ll explain the approach I took for TaxJunction.

 

TaxJunction, helps e-commerce businesses gather their sales tax information from Internet sales and send it to TaxCloud, a sales tax compliance service. The makers of TaxJunction describe it best:

We can pull your transaction data from your online store-front
and pump it directly into TaxCloud,
The Internet’s only free sales tax compliance service

This is a mouthful of information to convey to an online business owner. This is why logo design is the most important strategic weapon from the arsenal in the battle for customers.

Logo Design – A battle to win customers

As a designer I know I have a split second to convey as much information as possible about the company/product I am designing for. I start by doing some reconnaissance about the business I am designing for and customers they are aiming their product at. I ask these questions:

Laying Plans

Customer is ________

• the person in charge of tax compliance for an online company
• Internet savvy
• needs a fast solution to their sales tax compiling needs
• wants stability
• requires a simple solution

The Business strengths are ________

• speed
• stability
• ability to gather and merge large amounts of information without crashing
• reliability

Maneuvering an Army

I have an arsenal of design tools and tricks at my disposal. I look at the words and meanings relating to this product. The name of the company gets me started.  Tax – That is clear enough. People hate taxes. They want simple solutions. Making tax compliance fast and easy is important to businesses and customers. Junction – This reminds me of trains at crossings. This suggests fast-moving streams of information being routed to the proper place without crashing into a jumble of numbers. Trains remind me of reliability. Trains also remind me that Metro-North keeps having train derailments. Ack! Let me try another approach…

Variation of Tactics

Junction also reminds me of electrical junction boxes. An electrical junction box is a container for electrical connections. It keeps them safe and isolated. It is a place or point of meeting. I decide not to put too much weight on the train metaphor. Instead, I chose to find an element that indicated a crossing of information without causing a disaster. I come up with the x element in the design. I think of rain tracks and lightning bolts.

This logo’s primary use will be onscreen. That gives me greater maneuverability in selecting my palettes and the use of gradients. The colors are based on the existing style of the web page and the personal preference of the business owner. We choose Blue. Hot pink just didn’t seem right. The bold font of the logo suggests stability and strength. A fancy script font obviously would not work. The gradient is meant to suggest trains, electricity, and speed, and mechanization.

Subtle changes in the design are based on use with a white or black background. It is an SVG so the web site can render quickly on mobile and desktop devices.

I hope this helps you understand the tactical planning that goes into the design to win the war for customers.

 

– Special thanks to David Campbell who is a great soundboard and inspiration for my design ideas.