Boyink! - Spring Forward on the Web

Wow…a blog post..how do I do this again? ;)

This week I’ve been involved with in a couple of conversations around the web that have served to remind me just how young the web is.  While other mediums of communication have had years to grow, evolve and be studied the web is still so young. In each conversation I found myself wishing some better research had been done to provide clearer direction.  Here are the two assumptions I’d like to see proved out with high-quality research studies.  If they exist and you can link me to them then I’d be eternally grateful.

1. A high-quality logo will deliver a return on investment.
This conversation started after FreeLanceSwitch.com posted an article entitled Cheap Logos: Not Worth the Cost.  That article brought to mind this blog post of mine from 4 years ago, wherein I asked:

• If people do literally see 5000 logos a day, then how important is a logo?
• If it’s hard to get people to notice or remember a bad logo, how hard is it to get people to notice or remember a good logo?
• Is the average consumer able to tell the difference between a “good” logo and a “bad” one?
• Can a small business really expect to create a logo that’s going to somehow stand out from a crowd of 5000 logos, many of which are owned by companies with huge advertising and marketing campaigns that serve to drive their logo into the consciousness of their target audience?
• Have you ever not done business with a company because you felt their logo wasn’t good enough?

I asked those same questions in the comments on the FreeLanceSwitch article and am not, as yet, satisfied with any the responses.  There are many mentions of “value” and “ROI” in having a good logo—but I still find myself thinking like a skeptical client and wanting proof that I’d actually see ROI on an investment in a logo. I find it hard to believe that the average person would choose to do business with a particular company based on strictly that company’s logo.

I’d love to see a properly-conducted research study where a business with what was considered a “poor” logo but had a predictable rate of sales get a new logo and see what impact it would have on sales.  It’d be interesting to see this broken out by type of business—so we could know if a high-quality logo was as valuable for a doctor’s office as a nightclub as a retail store.

Or approach the assumption another way and do this - take all the logos from a busy street in a decently-sized town and blur out any words on the logo leaving just the graphical elements and colors.  Then show those logos to people who drive that street every day and see how many they recognize. 

Or - take a section of an big airport, and remove all business logos leaving only wayfinding signage and iconography.  Allow businesses to have their names presented in text only.  Then find a way to measure the success rate of travelers in moving through the space, and in finding the products they were interested in buying.

2. That a fluid/elastic layout is better than fixed.  Or vice versa.
This is another area of great debate - and not one I intend to re-open here on Boyink.com.  Suffice it to say that while the current version is fluid I’ve never felt quite at home in it - I’ve found it harder to want to blog lately and I think part of that is just not enjoying what the finished product looks like.  So - the next version (which should be getting designed in the next 3-4 weeks) will probably be fixed-width.  It might be elastic, but overall I’m going to let that decision come after the design vs being a design requirement.

What bothers me about the entire issue though is that I have yet to see someone design a fixed and a fluid layout for the same site and do any sort of testing (usability, sales, accessibility) against the same set of tasks using the same audience and publish the results.  I’d also like to see user’s reactions/opinions plotted against their test results - so finding out it users “like” a fixed design better, but actually perform better on a fluid design.

There seem to be many intelligent discussion points on both sides of the issue - but I can’t seem to find serious support for one approach over the other that’s based on anything other than subjective opinion, the designer’s own preference, potential issues or commonly-held (but unchallenged) “best practices” .  The whole debate starts to feel like taking apart an old Jeep…just when you think you are done disassembling you find more issues to question and pull apart.

So there’s my blog post for today—color me a skeptic and prove what you say..;)

 

 

Comments are closed, but you can read the comments other people left.

1. Ben Carlson on July 30, 2009

   I definitely agree on the skepticism of the logo thing. I would bet for most companies that don’t have those large advertising campaigns that you mention, that it doesn’t really matter all that much. Sure, it’d be nice if the logo wasn’t ugly (and it’s not hard/expensive to do that), but having a large budget for one probably isn’t necessary.

   Part of that argument is probably propelled by agencies and firms that just want to make a buck; why not tell your client they need a logo, right?

2. salguod on July 31, 2009

   It seems the logo thing is misguided.  A logo needs to look professional, but it’s got to be part of a larger branding.  A company puts forth an image and companies with good reputations pay attention to their image and branding.  The logo is only a part of that.

   Of course, the product and service has to deliver, but there is something to branding.

   Think of Apple.  The Apple logo isn’t anything special, nor, frankly, is the shape of their products.  But they are consistent. Simple, attractive, clean and they work.  You look at them and know, before you see the logo, that they are Apple products.  They have a character and identity of their own.

3. GDmac on December 05, 2009

   Graphic-designers like fixed-layout because you can control the position and layout better and more fine-grained.
   If you look at, for instance, wikipedia (fluid) then the text does nicely creep up on wider screens, giving you more to read on a single screen. However, that’s up to the point, when lines get that long, where readability becomes an issue and when images start to punch into next paragraphs, etc.

   Overall, what’s missing, is a good control over fluid layouts like some desktop graphic-design programs do! If you resize the page, columns get added, images resized and extra information can be revealed. It should be possible to control this with CSS and javascript, but we’re far away from that at the moment. (yes, the internet is still in its puberty).

   CSS3 has some column-support for text but not for whole layouts. It would be tedious but awesome to do some test with javascript and reloading css on window-resizes. The simpler variant for this would be to have 3 or 4 fixed layouts for different screen-sizes. The more awesome javascript would be logic to go really fluid. max-width, min-width and logic to move stuff around. Automaticly load more articles in list-views and revealing (loading) accompanying photos when there’s more room, all in real time. :-)

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