Big News! A New Logo
It’s hard to believe my consulting firm, ITM Group, will be celebrating its tenth anniversary next year. Wow. I’m sure I’m not the only consultant out there who’ll say there are certainly days it feels like forever and then there are days when you feel you’ve just started.
But actually, I didn’t start ITM on a whim. Mr. Bartender and I talked about the transition into consulting for years before we made the leap. That being said, there was one thing we did fairly quickly when we started: designing our company logo.
I’m sure we did what many people do – come up with a company name then sit in front of our own computer and create something. Don’t get me wrong, our logo has been nice and served us well. But for our ten year anniversary, we decided to give our company a new logo. Created by professionals.
We chose Groupmind Media to help us design our new logo. I can’t say enough good things about John Sexton and his team. They walked us though a very logical process that helped us create a new logo design we’re very excited to share with you. Yep I know, it’s not flashy. It does align with our company brand – pragmatic, straightforward and easy to deal with.
OK. I have to tell you straight up, I’m not a fan of crowdsourcing logos. Or company names for that matter. You have to own your company – in both name and spirit. It’s great to get feedback, but at the end of the day, if a client asks about the name of your company, IMHO it seems odd to tell them, “Oh, a bunch of my Facebook friends picked it out for me.”
Here’s an example of how you can use feedback to make decisions. Our company is registered as ITM Group, Inc. Our domain is www.itmgroupinc.com. But our logo also had what ITM stood for (BTW it’s Internal Talent Management and the story about it is here.) Sometimes clients would say ITM and sometimes they’d say Internal Talent Management. Most of the time, they said ITM. So based upon how our clients refer to us…we’ve taken the Internal Talent Management wording out of the logo design.
We also decided on using logotype design. If you’re not familiar with this, Jolie O’Dell did a great branding series over at Mashable on using words instead of pictures. You can check it out here. Being a leadership and management training company, we are obviously very people-centric. But we didn’t want to use cheesy clip art people in our logo design. So this logotype approach suited our needs.
Another change we discussed at length was color. I had no idea how many articles have been written about the science behind logo colors. Using the recommendations our clients give us, we were able to develop a list of keywords about our company – words like trusted, responsive, value, efficient – that align with certain colors. In this case, blue was the perfect choice.
Needless to say, developing a new logo – the right way – has been quite an experience. We’ve learned a lot. Not just about logo design but about our company and the image we want to portray in the market. Even if you’re not looking to start your own company, thinking about the image that represents you is important – whether that’s your company, blog, or the department recognition program you created.
You’ll notice us starting to change out the ITM Group logo on our marketing collateral as well as our Facebook and Twitter accounts. If you’re not already connected with us over there, I hope you will. And I think it’s safe to say we have a few other things in the works…but we’re not ready to unveil it just yet. Soon. Very soon.
Thank you for all of your support. Cheers!
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