Erik Akers

So should you totally redesign(or rebrand) your cur­rent iden­tity or should you just make a few changes and evolve it into the present and future?  I think that comes down to what your cur­rent iden­tity and logo are and if you have set dif­fer­ent or addi­tional goals for your business.

For exam­ple, I think most web sites get bet­ter as they evolve over time then just com­pletely tear­ing it down and start­ing over with some­thing brand new. However, there are plenty of times occa­sions where the sites’ con­di­tion or appear­ance has reached a point where it needs to be totally redesigned. Many times I have found a really great site with tons of really good infor­ma­tion that I will check peri­od­i­cally. Then they go and totally redo every­thing and now my book­marks won’t work because they removed the old addresses of those pages with­out a redi­rect to tell me where the new pages are. In this day and age it is pretty easy to change the over­all look of a site through the CSS styles so that a total redesign is not nec­es­sary unless the site is at a point where it’s not usable any more. Once you get vis­i­tors con­formable with the way the site flows and how to nav­i­gate it, you should respect that and be mind­ful not to change the site so much that it would dis­rupt that flow.

A web­site is the one thing that can be viewed 24 hours a day and with so many web sites out there, if vis­i­tors can­not find what they are look­ing for on your site are just as likely to move on to the next. That is why I believe changes over time that improve the usabil­ity of the site are gen­er­ally the best way to go (noth­ing that will effect the struc­ture of the site, mean­ing where the infor­ma­tion, pages and con­tent are located on the server). If the site was designed and coded robustly in the first place, changes to CSS and basic HTML cod­ing shouldn’t cause any prob­lems and would still allow you to have a site that is never out­dated froma design standpoint.

Logos on the other hand can be a very dif­fer­ent story. There is a point in a logos’ existance where it has become so dated that a redesign or refresher is needed just to make the com­pany or prod­uct look more modern. Now, really great logos will not have this prob­lem. There are some logos today that look just as good today as the did when they were designed 20,30 or even 40 years ago. Another deter­min­ing fac­tor to update ver­sus replac­ing a logo and art­work for a busi­ness or com­pany is ask­ing ques­tions such as,“is  the busi­ness or com­pany going to be tak­ing a new direc­tion?” or “do I need an update to catch up to the times?”. This is some­thing that only the busi­ness owner can decide but it should be some­thing that is thought about before div­ing into any design process.

Busi­nesses that are tak­ing a new direc­tion or have merged to cre­ate a new com­pany is where the com­plete iden­tity redesign nor­mally takes place and that includes web­sites for the com­pany or com­pa­nies. This iden­tity con­ver­sion lets present and future clients know that you are chang­ing and that process nor­mally begins with the major out­ward change of redesign­ing every­thing that iden­tify the com­pany. Also in this cat­e­gory would be com­pa­nies that have had major growth and are ready to reach new clients and or make the move to a national or world­wide stage. This could be a defin­ing moment to redesign every­thing to cre­ate a new image for your company.

I feel that evolv­ing logos should hap­pen when a start up com­pany that has a cou­ple years under it’s belt and may have been rushed in the design­ing of their iden­tity in the first place. This is a good can­di­date for a “fresh­ing up” of their graph­i­cal needs. This can include new col­ors, some changes to the cur­rent logo and updat­ing web­sites with all the new changes. If a com­pany has not done so in the past, this would be a great time to bring in a designer to have them take a look at every­thing and allow them to use fresh thoughts and ideas to improve on what you cur­rently have.

These are my gen­eral thoughts on this sub­ject. This topic is some­thing that I could go on and on about for pages/hours. Really it comes down to the sit­u­a­tion and the state of the cur­rent art­work. It is always a good idea to reeval­u­ate what your com­peti­tors are doing in art terms and decide if you need to make a total change or refresh your cur­rent logo.

Whats your view? Do you pre­fer to redesign or evolve?