A quicker and dirtier guide of branding yourself

You have heard of a quick and dirty way of branding yourself from our resident contributor, Brian Ling aka Design Translator. In the first article, he first discussed the necessity and the know-hows to brand yourself in our competitive world. In this sequel, he proposes a quickier and dirtier strategy to brand yourself with a web 2.0 feel on your company logos.

Know thy enemy and know thyself, find naught in fear for 100 battles. Know thyself but not thy enemy, find level of loss and victory. Know thy enemy but not thyself, wallow in defeat every time.
– Sun Tzu

Well in our case it’s not really the enemy but our competition. From our last article, we know a little branding goes a long way. But it’s not only about differentiation, which means to be different, what we need to now is to have distinction, which means to be better. So we need to study our competitors in the web 2.0 world and their branding standards they subscribed to.

Thanks to Uniquely the epitome and The Font Shop.

This is an absolutely amazing collection of all the best web 2.0 logos out there. Well it looks like the Design Sojourn logo still needs a lot of work, or does it? At least now we have a much better idea and direction on where to go.

The big question really is to follow or not? Its seems the Web 2.0 logos today all have a similar feel and you can easily create your own if you follow this list:

• Bevelled edges
  
• “Chicklet” or rounded corners
  
• Bright colours or a range of complimentary colours
  
• Glossy highlights
  
• Clean fonts
  
• Drop shadows
• Ground and horizon reflections
  
• Gradient fills