Startup Logos and First Impressions
When I see a startup’s logo I size it up. It often makes the first impression. Hokey? Terrible? Awesome? Do these guys get it? Do they understand how important design and customer-centric thinking has become today? Are they the sort of entrepreneurs I will get along with, that I will want to sit across the table from?
I spend more of my time meeting with enterprise, SMB and financial services startups than pure-play consumer, but these sensibilities are still important in my mind at least.
The problem is that they are not important 100% of the time. In some businesses you can over-think UI and UX. But I still analyze the logo. These days I do it consciously and try to handicap how much weight I put on the logo by the type of business I am looking at. I try to always account for stage too. If a team is in alpha or beta, they obviously get more slack.
But then there’s the question of what to do with, what to think of Twitter’s original logo. Even for an early stage company that thing was bad. (Note: If the first words that pop into someone’s head upon seeing your logo are “sinus infection” this is not good.)
In the end here’s where I come out, logos are first impressions; it is just better to get them right. Get them wrong and you just have to dig yourself out of a hole whether you like or not. It’s a small hole but a hole nonetheless.
