Designing your logo is one of the first fun things you get to do when starting a new company. I have gone through the process several times, but a few years have elapsed in between each so I am a bit rusty.

Here is a funny story that reminded me how careful you need to be when communicating your vision to a graphic designer, especially when you have no design skills to speak of yourself.  I should preface the story by saying that I have worked with this designer for a few years and she is very talented and incredible fast, so your laugh is totally at my expense. Below is an excerpt from the high-level list of requirements we sent.  Try to guess where we screwed up and what could have been misinterpreted by a designer:

High-level Logo Requirements:
•    The company name is SalesCrunch – one word, capital S, capital C.
•    Below is a poor attempt of a logo I mocked up in illustrator as a placeholder. I like the light gray/bright red color combo, but I don’t like the logo.
•    I like modern fonts. The one below is Eurostyle. I am not in any way married to it, but wanted to use it as an example.
•    I like the idea of “Crunch” being taller and more narrow than “Sales”, but honestly I have no design skill so I leave it up to you to come up with better ideas.
•    I definitely want a bug or icon as a separate element in the logo.  I have included a few logos below that I really like: FeedBurner, Technorati, LinkedIn.

Did you figure out where I went wrong and what the consequences might have been?  It was using the word “bug” in the description. I have heard this term used to describe an icon in a logo that is separate from the name. The idea is to have a symbol that, as your brand becomes more established, can be recognized even when used without your company name. Think of the bitten apple in Apple’s logo as a good example. Well, clearly the term “bug” is not all that common, because it was interpreted literally by our designer!  As you can see below, many of the first logo concepts came back with bugs in them!  When I first opened them I was immediately puzzled as to why there where bugs in the logos, but then burst out laughing when I realized where I goofed.

There is a happy ending to this funny story, which is that we really like one of the (non-bug) concepts and we will be using it as the basis for the next round of concepts. I will post the next concepts when we get them. In the meantime, have a good laugh at my expense and learn from my blunder.