Web Design Tips and Tricks

Branding through Logo Design

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The preliminary lack of customers and abrupt cash flows often causes new small business owners to put off designing a well made logo and promotion resources professionally 'until they achieve a clientele' or 'unless they get themselves started'. Unluckily, designing their own promotion materials when they initiate their businesses instead of having them professionally produced will make getting those early clients more difficult and may outcome in a business that will not be successful.

Countless entrepreneurs prefer to design their own promotion materials when they initiate their businesses, particularly by their first business card and a Logo or sometimes they will have an amateur designer, who creates the design for them which is yet again not professional. There are a number of reasons why this is not the best of the used practices. An amateur logo design and business card can definitely cause your business more likely to be unsuccessful.

Your business will likely to be taken as unstable by the audience.
Your business will present more likely to get failed or folded and because of this clients will not get interested in doing business with you. Naturally no one would like to do a business with someone who seems be unstable by any possible means.

You will present yourself as a very small business entity
Large span and well fashioned businesses will never choose to go with an unprofessional set of promotion material. In order to present the audience with a vote of confidence first you need to groom yourself and for that matters large business units choose to go with professionally designed, well targeted and well branded promotion material. Low quality and poor in-house design materials will result in a perception that you aren't that competent enough to meet the standards of business world.

You will give a feeling of unpolished image
Not having a professionally designed 'Logo and Promotional Material' might disseminate a feeling to the customers that your clients doesn't matters to you or that you don't put much emphasis on your customer relationship management and will eventually result in having a business failure, even it leads to a misimpression that the quality of work which you do isn't up to the mark.

The audience will presume that you are unfocussed
Lack of co ordination in the look and feel of the promotion material will show your clients that you are unfocussed and lack vision. This is predicted in a way when you have a different theme of your logo and a completely different theme of your website. This creates confusion in the minds of your customer and hence results in a business loss.

It has been noticed widely that yes there are certain logos that always stand apart; grabbing eye catch for such logos isn't really a hard task to endeavor. You can take the live examples of giant brands like Pepsi, siemens, star bucks and cocoa cola, you just glimpse a logo and there you had the complete history of the company lying in front of you.

It's no longer a secret that each of these Fortune 500 companies dedicate millions of dollars each year to build up their brand and uphold their corporate identity.

By themselves, these corporate logos also have convinced inborn qualities that make them more unforgettable and easy to differentiate from other corporate symbols. These qualities are based in the designs themselves and in the techniques and study used in developing them.

A great logo can make or break a business. Little kids as young as the age of one recognize McDonalds when you drive it, not because they read it on the sign, but because they remember the logo. As for older people our minds are clogged with many other things and a great logo will always be remembered if created properly. These kind of errors are very excellently skipped by firms like http://www.impact-corporate-logo-design.com

A professionally designed custom logo can be very powerful in representing the company profile, the nature of job they do and the attitude of the company. It helps to build the identity of the company and distinguishes your service from your competitors in the industry. Overall, a good logo is a vital part of a successful business, and much more influential than many people realize. Since individuals are often unaware of the effect logos have on their own decisions, they may also be unaware of the influence a well designed logo will have on their own business. By taking time to evaluate the different aspects of a logo, business owners can ensure that their company logo will have a much greater impact.

This post was originally published on May 13th, 2004. As others are writing about the topic, I thought bringing it out of the archives would be worthwhile.

A little recap

The idea of placing multiple states of buttons and other elements that are used in background images took its roots, I believe, from Pixy's Fast Rollovers. The CSS Zen Master extended this to another purpose in CSS Sprites: Image Slicing’s Kiss of Death. Didier Hilhorst came up with a nice application of this method, and I worked it backwards in Responsible CSS - Recycle your background images.

The idea behind the 'sprites' method can obviously be extended to any html element, and there are tangible benefits for doing this, just as long as the designer does his or her usual homework.

Benfits of using the 'sprites' method

What are the possible the benefits of using this method? Essentially it lies in faster download times for your web content.

Readers of Andy Kings book, Speed Up Your Site: Web Site Optimization will notice that this method reduces http requests and makes more efficient use of the data packets used to transfer files to the users computer, and that that is a good thing.

Packet size and http requests

From Web Page Design and Download Time, by Jing Zhi of Keynote Systems (seen here - pdf), cited in Andy's book:

The basic performance principle is therefore to make fewer requests and transmit fewer packets. From this principle, we can derive two basic design rules for wellperforming Web pages. First, reduce the overall size of the page, thereby reducing the number of bytes (and packets) to be transferred over the Internet. Second, limit the number of embedded objects on the page, such as images, each of which must be requested and transferred separately from server to browser.

They also found that it was the number of packets and not necessarily the overall size of the page that was important. If a packet could hold 1460 bytes (the figure given in the article) and your object was 1600 bytes, it would require two packets. They found that this object would transfer at the same speed as another object that was greater in size but still fit in two packets.

Potential payoff

The potential payoff for using this method versus individual images, then, is a faster download time due to reduced number of packets and fewer http requests.

Reducing http requests is easy. One file instead of two or three etc. is simple. But packet requests? That depends...

An example

The number of packets sent will depend on the size of the file and the users internet connection.

As an example, lets look at the fiftyfoureleven.com logo at the top of the page. When this design was first being coded, that link consisted of two 3.34kb images, one for the link state and one for the hover state. Now, by using one image that contains both states and simply bumping it back and forth depending on the hover state, that has been reduced to one 5.35 kb image. Right there is a savings of 1.33 kb. Good news.

Now, for arguments sake lets say that a packet can hold 1460 bytes (packet size for connections greater than 128kb/s = 1500 bytes -40bytes for tcp/ip headers). The two image method used 6 packets, 3 for each image (3.34/1.46, rounded up). The single image method uses 4 packets (5.34/1.46, rounded up).

Things are looking good.

How to optimize

In his alistapart article, Dave refers to the image that holds all of the sprites as his 'master image'. The key to benefitting from this method is to ensure that the file size of your master image isn't a bloated equivalent versus the sum of its pieces.

Conclusion

Great benefits can be realized when combining a master image from slices that fall well below the size of one packet, as that unused packet space goes wasted.

After doing a little more research, it seems that packet size can vary depending on the connection rate. That being said, it may be rather difficult to come up with a firm rule here. To play it smart and safe, try and:

• build master images that are smaller then the sum of their collective slices (by combining images of similar colors, for example) or
• rather than use a different distinct image for a certain element, reuse one that you already plan on using elsewhere.

This isn't exactly groundbreaking advice, however having seen the results acheived with the logo on this page, it can be seen that using the sprite method versus individual images at minimum does reduce http requests and even further it can reduce file size which in turn can reduce the number of packets sent.

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