Your brand logo has to be ready to represent itself on a variety of screens, and it might have to shed some of itself to do that.

Life for website designers used to be easier and simpler. The world came to visit branded sites with a computer browser. Just about the biggest concern was designing content for smaller laptop screens.

Then along came smartphones. What works on computer monitors doesn’t work on the smaller real estate of mobile devices. Responsive design takes care of this, but you must be careful with your graphics when they resize. What happens when your logo reduces down to a fraction of the original? Intricate designs don’t always work, and this is why brand logos are changing.

Made for a different age

Brand logos are considered sacred to some folks. Mess with them and risk catching the ire of the company, and even some its customers. Before the Internet, companies only had to be concerned about what their brand logo looked like in print or television advertising. They had control over their logos, many of which used lots of detail in their designs.

But traditional media is no longer the gatekeeper. The Internet has transferred control. Now, each user decides how and where he or she will view your message. And the biggest platform of choice is now a lot smaller.

Mobile is king

You’re way behind if you don’t have a mobile-friendly site. Mobile usage has overtaken desktop, and Google now prioritizes mobile sites in rankings. It’s never been more important for companies to ensure that their logo and branding are consistent across the spectrum of full-sized computers to mobile devices. In fact, it’s crucial.

Subtraction

Alas, an intricate logo suffers within a responsive environment. Major companies discovered this early. Take a look at the detailed logo designs of popular companies such as Coke, Chanel, Walt Disney and others. These logo designs just don’t work when they’re reduced to, say, a width of 30 pixels.

If you’re not sure about what’s meant by a logo created for responsive design, head here with your browser. Then you have a choice:

-Bring up the website on your mobile device, and compare what you see there to what’s on your computer’s browser screen.

-Resize the browser screen on your computer. Keep shrinking the size.

Now you see the value of responsive logo design. It pushes logos to morph. They become simple and flexible, losing details as their sizes reduce but retaining brand identity.

The changing state of logos

After you look at what’s required to be responsive, you might wonder if it will push us all toward flat, simple icons with sans serif fonts (if fonts are used at all).

There’s no denying that responsive web design has a major influence on how brands have modified their logos to live in the new environments of mobile screens. The sacred rule of rigidity has been banished and it’s led to a new kind of design freedom.

Living in a smartphone world

Logos now must respond to living in on smartphones and even wearable tech with screens the size of a postage stamp. (And there are now consumers alive who might have difficulty identifying a postage stamp.)

No organization is immune. It’s not just the companies that were born in the cloud, or those that require technology to exist. Every business has increased online exposure, and needs it to thrive. Your brand identity will be impacted.

A professional design service can implement the principles of responsive design while keeping your logo and overall branding consistent. You’ll simply need to make sure you’re comfortable with how your logo appears when it’s reduced in scale.

The role of your brand in our responsive world

Keep these things in mind when envisioning your logo for the responsive age:

- Your logo is not a brand. It’s your perceived emotional image.
- Your brand is not a logo. A logo is nothing more than a reminding identifier of your brand.
- That identifier is a series of elements that continue to represent the brand whether they are added or subtracted.
- Your logo is a memory hook.

Have you made your logo responsive yet? It’s an exercise in scalability. What can it shed and still be familiar as an unmistakable representation of your identity?

There’s another option

Relax. Understand that you don’t own your brand. It exists in your customers’ minds. They want to take your product or service and fit it into their worldview. What do they want to do with your logo? How can you distill it as a scalable memory hook?

There’s a limit to this flexibility. But maybe the only thing you want to make sure of is that you’re not wasting valuable space on the screen. As long as it represents you in an unmistakable way, it communicates your brand.

If you’re looking to implement responsive design for your website, including a logo and brand identity that will adapt to all online environments, contact the professionals at Creative Technology Partners. We have the expertise to meet all of your content needs, providing expert software engineering, strategic user experience, and design services.

There’s more to it than simply throwing more money at technology.

Your business is under attack. A competitor is breathing down your neck. They do something better than your company. Maybe they’re just a bit more nimble in one specific area, but it’s enough to tilt the scale in their favor.

“Business as usual” is out of the question if you want to stay successful in business. You need to transform. And because technology is the engine of innovation, we’re told that the transformation we need to make is a digital transformation. What is this? What does it entail?

More than tech

There’s no hardware or a software program to precipitate this transformation. Digital transformation is a shift in thinking.

Your tools are digital. You’ll use social media, mobile devices, and other emerging technologies. And it must start with your leadership, which has to adopt the transformation and push it down.

Digital transformation is the process that closes the gap between what your customers expect and what you deliver. And you won’t be able to offer this if you act like an analog organization.

What does this gap look like?

It’s going to look different for each organization. To define it, you’ll have to ask and provide answers to these questions:

• Does your organization have a digital strategy? It must go beyond a philosophy. It has to be a practice. Everyone in your organization must be able to state the strategy, meaning it must be clear and simple.

• Can you measure the effectiveness of the strategy? Have you laid out a business case for your use of social media? What is the measurable return on your investment, in dollars?

Digital literacy

Digital transformation should make your business better. It starts with increasing the level of digital literacy at the leadership level. One executive might think this means moving everybody over to Office 365 and going paperless. Another might believe there’s nothing they need to do at all, and it’s just about online marketing.

Reimagining your business to create a digital transformation requires rethinking your business model. How do you create value? How do you make money by using technology to reposition your product or service so it’s consumed the way that customers prefer, rather than in the way you initially created it?

In search of the transformation

Many organizations believe they’ll transform by increasing their IT and technology budget. Others decide it’s just a redesign of their website.

These efforts wind up becoming a decorative layer on top of legacy thinking and operations. True digital transformation must accommodate customer behavior. In some respects, modern customers are assuming an operational role within your organization. Their behavior is vastly different than the traditional customers you had before.

The differentiator

Digital transformation puts people and processes above technology. This may seem counterintuitive, because isn’t technology the change agent?

Technology is actually just the tool and people are its consumers. Digital transformation uses digital technologies to connect, enhance, and focus attention where it should be: on the customer.

It’s the intersection where your business and customer value meet. It’s also about responding to the changes that digital technology has caused in our daily lives. We’ve already seen unexpected consequences. Disruption isn’t always such a good thing.

In his book Zero To One: Notes On Startups, Or How To Build The Future, Peter Thiel writes that disruption “attracts attention: disruptors are people who look for trouble and find it. Disruptive kids get sent to the principal’s office. Disruptive companies often pick fights they can’t win.”

Thiel also writes, “The most valuable businesses of coming decades will be built by entrepreneurs who seek to empower people rather than try to make them obsolete. But the most valuable companies in the future won’t ask what problems can be solved with computers alone. Instead, they’ll ask: how can computers help humans solve hard problems?”

Where transformation should occur in your organization

It doesn’t really matter.

Answer the gap questions above. You may discover that your focus should be on improving customer interactions. Or, you may determine that you need internal reorganization.

Adopting technology as tool for change makes no sense if you have something that isn’t broken. Transformation, digital or otherwise, requires only that you change what’s needed to improve the bottom line. And remember, the bottom line always connects to your customer. The more difficult the change, the more transformative it will be.

If you’re looking to implement a strategy for digital transformation, starting with an assessment of areas of your digital presence that need to evolve, contact the professionals at Creative Technology Partners. We have the expertise to meet all of your content needs, providing expert software engineering, strategic user experience, and design services.

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The trends that made a big splash in 2013 will become house-hold names in 2014, while emerging trends continue to get polished and refined by designers everywhere.

So what trends lie before us in 2014?

1. You may use the website as a comprehensive platform to showcase your products or services. The target audience can refer to your website for more information on your product or services.

2. Brand/product promotion: Good branding does not mean that you must follow traditional media. Your website can be a great platform to promote your brand. This is especially true for small business houses. And that’s not all. You can actually save a lot of money by updating new product information online rather than reprinting brochure or product catalogs.

3. Reaching out to target audience as and when they want: What do you do when you need something? Don’t you Google it even at midnight? Your website can do the same for your target audience.

4. Clear articulation and better communication: No other media provides so much flexibility as internet. You can use videos for product demo or virtual tour, text to highlight salient points, images to show the product, interactive charts to engage the user etc. All you need is to plan it properly.

5. Better customer satisfaction by listening to them: You need a website if you want to listen to customer feedback. Your website can offer you a huge pile of data on what the target audience needs and depending on that you can improve your product or business plan.

6. Direct relationship with clients: You can actually directly communicate with your target audience via your web interface and improve your relationship with the end-users.

7. Nothing is lost: In real world if someone appreciates your product or service, you can not normally store it to show other people. But you can actually showcase them in your website to attract more clients. Apart from that you can also showcase product reviews done by real people in different social networks like Facebook / Twitter / Orkut. Testimonials from real people do wonder to businesses.

8. Your Personal Channel: You need a website if you need a channel to fight against the negative feedbacks about your company or products. This can actually help you to actively communicate with your target market.

9. You need a website if you want to capitalize on word of mouth promotion of your products by your existing clients. Remember that, bees attract bees.

10. Enjoy a captive audience: If there is an opportunity for your business to sell multiple products or upgraded versions to the same client; you need a website and keep the audience around.