I am going to design a website for a colleague of mine. Which, I am excited about. I love designing and I want to make him happy with a new website that he can be proud of. As we were discussing this new venture, I told him that I could not start on the website until we redesigned his logo. He was on board. I was very careful with my approach, from experience, for some reason, business owners are reluctant to change their logo; the logo that they started their business with. The logo that has ridden with them on their old pick up truck for years.
When I asked my colleague how long he designed his logo, he answered, “over 30 years.” There are a few reasons as to why you need to update your logo.
In this situation, he is asking me, a 33 year old to design a website for him. His website will be done in Word Press, a modern content management tool. Frankly, I don’t feel that my design style, my design era and a modern day design tool, can work with a logo that was designed 30 years ago.
I enjoy Interior Design and one of the things that I enjoy doing is taking pieces from different cultures and eras and meshing them together to create a personal design. So perhaps there are some logos designed in the 80′s that could mesh into modern day design, but I have failed to find one in the construction industry. I also think that the 80s was a horrible year for design.
What inspired me to write this blog entry was the young lady that I met yesterday at the INC. Magazine event with Dan Heath as the speaker. Ms. Lameisha sat next to me and was very energetic. She told me that she had just recently graduated from the Academy of Arts in Graphic Design and handed me her business card. As we were chatting I made the comment that our business cards looked a lot alike and we had a similar design style. I found it funny, that we were similar in age, but had never met before, and have very different training backgrounds, but our design style was very similar.
If you take a look at the cards below, even though very different concepts, the look and feel of the card is very similar. The actual printed card also shared similar paper and coating. I am a business card snob and feel that it is a first impression and you want to be proud of it when you hand it over to a new contact.
Which brought me back to my original thought of designing a website for my colleague. Who is from a different generation, before I was even born he was already in the groove of work life. Not to say that it will happen here, but I find myself playing a psychologist many times with my clients. They not only have this deep rooted affection for their business that they created and a logo that they approved, but they also have this younger person sitting in front of them trying to convince them how to modernize their business. And this is not a logo only problem; this is every aspect of a business. I have had conversations with people as to why using a fax is obsolete and frankly, a bit silly.
Just as the younger generation needs to embrace the knowledge and experience that the older generation has retained, the older generation needs to embrace the energy and modern ideas that the youngsters bring to the field. If it were not for the younger generation, and their “outside the box” ideas, we wouldn’t have Silicon Valley, and I wouldn’t have this great tool Word Press to post this blog entry. Sometimes we need to step outside of our comfort zone in order to make room for innovation and creation.
Let the designing begin.
