02 03/2012 Propeller Welcome the New Year with a New Look

You may have noticed something a little different about Propeller – yes we’ve changed our logo! As this is our 8th year in business – we figured it was time to do a little soul searching, revisit our core philosophies and refresh the brand to better reflect what we represent.

As part of this exercise we worked with marketing company Sustainable Marketing to batten down our brand positioning by looking at our values, conduct some client feedback interviews and generally get an outside perspective of our brand development to date. This gave us some great insights into where we were going as a business and played a big part in how the new logo was developed.

So what’s the story behind the logo?

Propeller have never sought to be a huge, world beating corporation. When we started the agency, we did so with the goal of enjoying our work and the people we worked with and being able to take the time to produce high quality, bespoke websites and creative design work. We also like to think that we work hand in hand with our clients to move (or propel), their businesses forwards and/or upwards. In short, we wanted the logo to reflect our personal approach, our quality, custom-made work and resulting boost to our clients businesses.

After much deliberation we decided to go with the hand drawn spring design for our main company logo, along with two off-shoot logo’s for the separate parts of our business: Web Design (Digital), which features the rocket ship to denote technological advancement and Graphic Design (Creative) which features the toy piggy on a spring to represent creative play.

A lot of people ask us if it’s a good idea to change an existing logo and if it’s worth spending money on going through a ‘brand development’ process to come up with a unique logo when an ‘off the shelf’ generic symbol may seem to fit the bill. Whilst it may seem like a painful exercise in terms of consuming time and expense, it really is so important to get it right.

Logo’s speak volumes about the organisation they represent. Sometimes it’s the only statement you’ll get to make about yourself to a potential customer, so you’ve got to make sure that the message it’s sending is on target.

Logos should:

• Convey credibility
• Symbolise the business they represent
• Convey trust
• Be interesting not distracting
• Communicate a message

In summary, logos are very, very important. Never take them for granted, update them, show them off and ensure they’re working for you, not against you. Is it time to look at your logo, does it need some work?