With a do-it-yourself logo created with clip art icons, you won’t be able to trademark your brand. It isn’t unique. Clip art logos give the impression that your business isn’t unique either. A good brand identity sets you apart from your competition.

Logo design contests sound like a great idea on the surface. After all, you’ll have lots of designers creating lots of choices for you. But your logo contest is only one out of hundreds or thousands out there. Contestants can’t afford to spend much time on each entry. You likely aren’t getting original concepts. Designers may just use clip art or recycle icons they’ve created for someone else and slap your name on them. Even worse, they may show you marks other designers created before — setting you up for a potential lawsuit.

There’s definitely not any research done into your organization. And without the benefit of talking with you to truly understand what your organization is, how can you expect a designer to speak for your brand?

Discovery

Only a professional designer will take the time to talk with you to find out what your business is. What sets you apart from your competition? Who are you trying to attract? What kind of visuals appeal to you? Your designer will research your competition to get a feel for your industry.

Brainstorming

After getting a good understanding of your brand, goals and personal taste, your designer uses techniques such as word association and sketching to generate ideas.

Refinement

After the brainstorming phase, designers review their sketches and decide which ideas are worth further exploration. This is when a designer moves onto the computer. Shapes and fonts are refined. Color choices are applied. Several concepts are brought to near completion. Your designer will ask for your feedback on a few well-developed concepts. Then your final choice can be perfected and become your brand identity.

Facebook has taken into account some of the design mistakes MySpace made. The blinking sparkly graphics, distracting patterned backgrounds and low-contrast text users chose to customize their pages have a lot to do with why MySpace is fading into internet history.

Facebook uses its own version of HTML called FBML or Facebook Markup Language for customized content. You can rename your FBML tab to be anything you like. However, unlike other social media networks, custom landing pages (or tabs) are only available for organizations’ accounts, not personal pages.

You can create content that only fans can see with FBML. Many businesses are taking advantage of this feature by offering exclusive Facebook fan discounts and information.

Welcome tabs encourage users to become a fan or “like” your page. Like a magazine ad entices the reader to action, your Facebook page can send users who aren’t fans (yet!) to a landing page instead of just dropping them on your wall. Use the welcome tab to tell users why they should become a fan.

Microsites give a wealth of information about your organization without forcing users off Facebook. You wouldn’t want to create one long scrolling page for your website; you’d want to separate your content into easy-to-navigate sections. You can do the same within one FBML tab.

Users don’t even need to visit your site to buy your product anymore. You can sell your products straight from your Facebook fan page. Considering that Facebook users want to stay on Facebook (there’s a 75% chance they’ll abandon your site if you send them away from Facebook), integrate ecommerce into your Facebook page.

Consider the feelings different colors convey to others. Keep in mind that colors have different connotations in different cultures. For example, white represents mourning in China and purity in most of the Western world.

Red gives off a lot of energy. It can mean danger (like a stop sign) or it could mean passion (like a rose). Many restaurant interiors use a lot of red because red makes people hungry. Red burns hot like a fire.

Pink is sweet. Pink reminds us of flowers, candy and bubble gum. Pink is also considered very feminine and girly likely because of its association with Barbie. However, in the Victorian era, pink was the color for baby boys.

Orange feels fresh. It has a lot of the energy that red has but it doesn’t feel as serious. Orange is a playful energy.

Yellow is bright and sunny. Yellow can give us hope like the sun bringing in a new day or can make us feel sick with jaundice.

Green is growth. It can be very natural and remind us of the environment and fertility. Green can also be wealth — especially in the US where it’s literally the color of money.

Blue is the most popular choice for favorite color. Not surprisingly, it’s also one of the most popular choices for brands. Blue is trustworthy and calm like a clear sky or the ocean. But blue can also be sad like you’re singing the blues. It’s also cold like ice or a refreshing sip of water.

Purple is majestic and was once reserved for royalty. As a cross between the hottest color (red) and the coldest (blue), it feels unusual and creative, a part of two different worlds. Purple is the color of mystery.

Brown is warm and earthy. It can feel rich like chocolate, spicy like cinnamon or grounded like a tree. Brown can be comfortable like a old leather shoe. However, brown can seem dirty.

Black is the absence of color. Black can be gloomy and frightening. Dark like the night, black exudes the sophistication and drama of an exciting nightlife.

White combines all of the colors mdash; like a prism. Like snow, white feels clean and pure, but very cold. White seems almost weightless like a beam of light.

Sometimes just changing the tone of a color slightly can give a completely different feel. A yellow with a hint of green might be described as acid; a yellow with more orange could be more tropical.

Word association helps when thinking what a color conveys to your audience. Green could make you think of a green thumb or being green with envy. What color phrases do you use?

Many designers rely too heavily on images or animations—both of which can make your site load too slow for impatient users and can’t be read by search-engine crawlers. Images should always have alt tags and descriptive names. Even better is image-replacement. CSS lets you have “real” text on a page that displays as an image instead of plain text, but is read by crawlers and screen readers the same way as regular text.

Check your site stats with a variety of website analyzers to see where you’re doing well and where you can improve. Simple things like submitting your site to directories like Technorati and ZoomInfo can help increase your site’s search engine ranking. Directories that specialize in what your site is about are especially good for improving your site’s rank in the search engines.

Some link directories specializing in design:
Web Designers Directory
Web Developers Directory
Web Masters Directory
Web Design Directory
Design Directory

Sadly, there are those who send html emails without realizing that most email browsers have images turned off by default. A well-designed email should look good even without images displayed. Especially now that the latest version of Outlook doesn’t support background images—and Microsoft has no plans to fix it.

Email marketing providers make it easier for designers to develop html emails. (And let the marketing people track users’ response to the email.) Some let you upload a style sheet with your html code and the provider inserts inline styles when sending the email. Most providers automatically create an html version and a plain text version of the same email. Now that so many people are checking their email by cell, it’s especially important to send plain text emails. Some cell email browsers treat the entire html as an attachment. How many users would really open an attachment on an otherwise blank email?

Veteran designer Michael Bierut offers advice on how to cope in Design Through the Recession. Much of his advice is common sense: cut back on unnecessary expenses, don’t resort to unreliable projects, realize that the economy will get better. But Beirut also gives designers something to think about when he points out that a slower economy means more time to work on designs. Designers have more time to work on their own projects as well as client work. Some designers may shift their focus from the commercial world to public works. The luxury of time creates an environment for designers to really contemplate and push design to a whole new level.

More time also means more time for socializing. Reconnect with old friends and acquaintances. Design is about interacting and communicating with the viewer . . . what better way can you improve your communication skills than by communicating with others?

Everyone wants a website; most organizations need a website. But they also need a site they can keep current. Not every organization is large enough to have a web design professional on staff. Frequently, the person in charge of public relations has little to no knowledge of editing HTML. And quite frankly, most of us are too busy to learn a completely new language. Yet, still, the organization needs a professional site that can be updated frequently.

The answer lies in content management systems. Less and less sites are being built as static sites. A content management system helps keep your site fresh and updated. If someone notices you spelled “comapany” wrong, instead of going back to a web designer to change the spelling, you can go in and change it yourself.

There’s more content management systems than you could ever dream of. One of the most popular is blogging software WordPress used by organizations as large as the NY Times. Laypeople can easily update pages with new text and images without any understanding of HTML. Designers can easily change the look and function of the site to maintain organizations’ unique branding online. New functions for anything you could think of are being added daily.

Designers with print backgrounds are used to their work being displayed in only one format at a time. With web design, users have more choice in browser and platform. Every browser, platform and monitor displays differently–unlike a print piece.

Beyond display differences for different users, the other challenge facing web designers is code that can’t be changed. Designers can’t always rearrange page elements because of programming constraints. For example, when styling a site with a content management system or specialized functions, it’s not always possible for designers to edit the code of the site without breaking the application. The CSS Zen Garden illustrates how designers can create compelling sites even under such constraints.

Comic Sans is misused more than nearly any other font. People (particularly non-designers) use it to make their message seem “friendly.” It just says childish to me. I wonder when I see a beer or cocktail menu set in Comic Sans if the bar really wants to encourage underage drinking. When a more serious message is written in Comic Sans, it feels like it’s making light of the situation.

If your intent is a more casual or child-like feel, there are many fonts that convey the message better. If you’re looking for something that mimics handwriting, using actual handwriting looks the best. A font that has alternate letters to break up the regularity of typed letters is second-best. Even if you’re looking for a font for your comic strip, there are better fonts than Comic Sans.