
Does Your Product Logo Actually Matter? - duck
http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/08/04/does-your-product-logo-actually-matter/
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tptacek
I think I actually "chose" this logo (in that it was one of 5 logos I
suggested to Patrick when we started this bet). My hypothesis was that _any_
professionally-designed logo, generic or otherwise, would outdo Patrick's
bespoke logo, which positively screams "April 19th, 2002!".

... and I was wrong. Teach For America an acceptable charity, Patrick?

Someone in this thread suggested that this shows-t'-go-ya that geeks shouldn't
pick logos. It says the exact opposite to me: that no matter what your eye for
design is, engineering will always beat aesthetics. No pro designer would come
up with what Patrick has now, and yet it works.

~~~
samdk

        No pro designer would come up with what Patrick has now, and yet it works.
    

No pro designer would have come up with the new one, either. Any designer
worth anything could have told you that the old logo was way better than the
new one. The old logo has its problems, but it communicates exactly what it
needs to. (And I think it's actually the strongest point of the entire page.)
The 99designs logo is such a step back I really have no idea where to start.
It communicates _absolutely nothing_. The image is generic, meaningless, and
(in my opinion) ugly. The text is small and (especially in the context of the
whole page) very hard to find and read.

It's really important to realize that design doesn't mean "nice looking" and
it doesn't mean "professional". Those are the means to an end, not the end
itself. Design is about _purpose_ , and the reason the original logo is so
much better than the new one is because the old logo makes clear _exactly_
what BCC is and what it's for and the 99designs logo doesn't.

It's also really important to realize that you're designing for an audience,
and Patrick's audience is teachers. They aren't generally going to care if the
logo (or the rest of the site, even) screams 2002. If you're trying to sell to
artists and designers you're going to have to put more work into making your
logo look nice, but here it's really not what's most important.

Design is a lot deeper than aesthetics, and there are a ton of different
things that have to go into a logo design. The takeaway from this shouldn't be
that engineering trumps design: the 99designs logo is hardly designed at all,
and you're not going to find many genuinely good designers at a place like
99designs.

~~~
alsomike
In other words, a lot of time is spent attacking straw men that don't resemble
what professional working designers actually do. The attitudes and beliefs
attributed to designers sounds more like it comes from people who pass
themselves off as designers because they have a pirated copy of Photoshop, so
the only lesson here is that people who are clueless about design hire
clueless designers.

~~~
tptacek
We hire pro designers for everything, and while I don't love the 'B' logo
Patrick chose, I can easily make a case that it is more professional than his
current logo. I think your comment crosses way over the line into hyperbole.

~~~
pmichaud
I don't think it's hyperbole at all. That the 99 Designs "logo" is as terrible
as it is, proves nothing about the almost-as-terrible logo that is in use now.

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antidaily
The 99Designs logo is a serious downgrade. It's washed out and the type choice
is boring and immediately forgettable. Not having the little bingo card in the
logomark is also a mistake IMO.

~~~
noodle
i agree. the 99designs logo just doesn't look right in that position, with
that site design. i could imagine that if the site itself were designed
differently to match the logo better, it might find a higher level of success.

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jnorthrop
Honestly I'm really surprised that the logo made that much of a difference in
sign-ups. To me this indicates that you should try even more logos to optimize
your sales. Maybe both logos are performing poorly and a "good" one might
double your customers.

If there is anything to take from this experience it isn't that bespoke is
better than generic designs -- its that the logo matters, potentially a lot.

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pclark
those logos are exceedingly ugly - both the old one and the new one.

on the old one the text looks squashed, the blue background has a funky hue,
you duplicate the word bingo, the white glow overlaps with the background of
the page - leading to odd white spaces ...

just me?

~~~
ugh
The old logo gets the job done, the new one tries too hard to be trendy and
fails (it also looks very generic). Sometimes the literal approach is a good
idea, even if the production value isn’t there.

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cheesemuffler
The _key_ lesson - the thing that gets glossed-over in opinion, assumption,
and fluff = all that matters are the actions taken by individuals from his
target market.

How the thing looks to _you_ is neither here nor there. It's what it does
subconsciously to middle-aged women teachers that counts... Wrong as that may
sound.

Assumption, anecdote, opinion - back it up with data! We're engineers
(literally or metaphorically).

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nollidge
> I’m very, very open to the notion that there exist circumstances under which
> this test would have come down the other way.

There almost certainly are circumstances in which result would have been
reversed. Testing the hypothesis that logo A is better than logo B, he did get
a significant result (n = 17,000, p < 0.01). But if he was attempting to test
the hypothesis that logos from population A (custom-designed) are better than
logos from population B (off-the-rack), his results are completely
insignificant, since n in that case was 2. You'd have to test many more logos
to reach that sort of conclusion.

~~~
patio11
OK, quick stats 101:

The hypothesis isn't that A > B, it is that A = B (the null hypothesis). 99%
certainty is to reject the null hypothesis, leading to the conclusion that A
is better.

The second experiment you've outlined is gibberish, which involves a series of
words spelled similar to ones you can find in a stats book, connected in a
manner which leads to nowhere.

~~~
nollidge
What's gibberish about it? I'm saying if you want to know if off-the-rack
logos are, on average, better than custom-designed ones, you have to compare
lots of them, not just one example of each. What's the problem with that?

~~~
patio11
Let's not talk A/B tests and talk medicine for a moment, shall we? Here we
have aspirin, here we have a placebo. There isn't a population of aspirin
pills and a population of placebo pills. There aren't many different
populations of placebo pills. The populations are of _people_. We're trying to
make inferences about the population of _people_ exposed to aspirin versus the
population of _people_ exposed to a sugar pill, but since it is not possible
to bring all of them in, we make those inferences based on random samples of
those two populations.

Now here is where I start getting murky: results for the particular things
we're interested in are binary: the aspirin worked or it didn't. You converted
or you didn't. The Central Limit Theorem says that, if you sample n individual
unconnected random binary events from a population, and you keep repeating
that sample, the distribution of your measured percentage of success will
approximate the normal distribution, centered around (with the mean on) the
true population statistic.

That is important for a couple of reasons, but the most immediate one is that
it gives us a statistical figleaf to hide under for using two samples to make
inferences about whether the population mean for the first distribution is
highly likely to not be the same as the population mean for the second
distribution. i.e. whether the A and the B are likely to be materially
different.

So let's walk this back to where we were talking about potentially testing
multiple different types of sugar pill. Do you get why that is sort of
incoherent in this framework? There are key assumptions like "independence"
that two different types sugar pills surely do not share, but I don't know if
you can even get to that objection before you deal with the notion that there
is no coherently cognizable population made out of sugar pills.

It is 4 AM in the morning. I am not sure that is stats class talking and not
sleep deprivation. This is probably covered in a good Stats 101 book -- if you
have further questions, they're likely more coherent than I am. (Or ask btilly
-- he has a gift for explaining this.)

~~~
nollidge
I've got Stats 101 knowledge, biostats in fact, but perhaps I've misapplied it
here. I'm at work now, so I'll maybe revisit my thinking later.

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kenjackson
The problem with the new design is it looks like a logo I'd see on a squatters
page. Relatively bland. Not really linked to the site.

The original logo, while not extremely attractive, at least lets me know, "OK,
this is really about bingo cards, there's a bingo card in the logo. Not just
someone who got the name to the domain."

If I hit the new logo, I'd probably retype the URL or go back to a search
engine to make sure that I was at the site that I intended to go to.

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k33n
Every time I see this product referenced or talked about, I consider spending
3 days creating something better, with a better website, and undercutting
their price.

~~~
tptacek
Try. But before you do: are you sure you know what Patrick's business actually
_is_? It looks like "Hello world" hooked up to a random number generator...
but it isn't.

Here's a tip: when you've figured out what it is Patrick is actually doing,
you'll see why it's kind of silly to consider competing directly with him.

~~~
patio11
Thomas is presumably artfully phrasing "If you can do organic SEO and AdWords
well, you can make a lot of money, so why the heck would you enter bingo
cards" to avoid hurting my feelings. He isn't wrong about the money, though my
feelings are pretty much impervious. I mean, I sell bingo cards to elementary
schoolteachers: it is highly unlikely you're going to say something I haven't
heard in the last four years.

(Though if you want to compete, can you do picture bingo cards? I'll send you
customers. They don't know what files are and they'll need to crop the images
they want to use. If you want to teach them how to do that, they're yours.)

~~~
tptacek
I think you're stripping what you do down too far.

Organic SEO and Adwords are tactics, but your business is a strategy that
addresses the needs of a very narrow group of people who will pay to make
study exercises (and occasionally family entertainment) easier and more
effective. There are lots of other tactical moves you make, like figuring out
how to demo your product, moving customers to the web version of the app,
keeping metrics on task completion inside the app, etc.

But, yeah, the underlying theme here is that if you can execute these tactics
and knit them into a coherent strategy, there are thousands of other niches
you can address besides "people who will pay money so they can easily spend
class periods playing bingo". Why waste time fighting over the bingo pie?

I'm not even a little bit worried about hurting your feelings. ;)

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chaosmachine
It seems blindingly obvious to me that getting rid of the bingo card would
hurt sales. It doesn't matter what you replace it with, nothing is going to
communicate "I have bingo cards" better than a picture of a bingo card.

Here's a much more interesting question: Have you found the optimal bingo
card? What if you ditched the blue circle, and just made the card bigger? What
about the font/colors? Can you get a 1% increase in sales just by iterating
your existing logo?

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kylemathews
Moral of the story, don't let geeks pick the logo.

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drtse4
The new one flattened the design of the page, giving a scamsite-look to the
site. The old one make it clear (not that it's necessary) what bcc sells and
is more inviting for the target imo.

~~~
johnrob
Agreed, this test also shows how websites need a certain amount of complexity
to seem legit (even if the experts consider the complexity inferior). If the
design is too bland it definitely gives me a scamsite feeling.

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angumagu
I'm concerned on two fronts: 1) if quality of visual design is the thing being
tested, then it might be more useful if the objective information in the two
logos were the same. As it is, the difference here could be entirely
attributed to the bingo card image being in one logo and not the other. (I
know, the choice to put it in is a design decision, but it's useful to
distinguish between testing the design/look-feel and the information in the
logo) 2) I don't see in the write-up where brand confusion is accounted for
here. What percentage of those shown the new logo had seen the previous one on
a previous visit, and turned away because they thought they had the wrong
site, or had otherwise diminished their view of the brand because of
confusion?

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DotSauce
Commented on blog with some personal logo design tips.

I think the bigger problem here is that the rest of his site looks straight
out of 1998. The half-decent logo may be the only thing lending it any
credibility. :P

~~~
tptacek
If you too would like a reason to donate some money to Teach For America, you
could suggest a series of design changes and bet that they'd A/B test
significantly better with his audience than his current design. I'm guessing
that Patrick wins either way on bets like this, and so do we (since the
writeups are great). So... what's the next thing you'd change?

~~~
roam
Several people have mentioned that the new logo didn't fit in with the rest of
the site and I have to agree. The site as it stands now just works. It's
consistent. Patrick uses flashy colors to attract your attention to the
important bits.

As someone mentioned before, he'd be better off tweaking bits and pieces and
iterating. Making the oval in the logo a bit smaller and making the size of
the bingo card the same as the text next to it.

But what I'm really wondering (and it's far less work): would changing the
favicon to a bingo card or perhaps a green or blue square with a white B on it
make a difference? Don't laugh, I'm willing to put some money on it ;)

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watmough
The old logo may be cheesy looking, but _in this situation_ , it's a hundred
times better than the crappy generic one, and it is strong enough to balance
the awful text set to its right.

With the generic logo, the ugly text dominates.

If the text was fixed up, perhaps the generic logo might stand a chance, but
with the shown pages, it's way too weak.

When I did my app site at femcalapp.com, I cribbed the basic design from
something else, but I've worked steadily to refine it, albeit without any
metrics, just my own metric of does it look better or not.

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arnorhs
I would love to know the A/B difference between having the ugliest logo man
can make (or simply _no_ logo) and your currently best one (your original
logo).

That could give you a scale of how much a logo can possibly affect your
conversion rates. Maybe the difference can be as much as 20-30% with a bad
logo, but you wouldn't know by A/B testing two random designs.

Regarding the logos' aesthetics, a lot of people want to chime in and they
probably have something to their point, however since they are not designers
they do not have the experience of knowing what people in general find
aesthetically pleasing. Because when you design things for people you learn
that you can't find anything that everybody likes, you can only find something
that a greater percentage of people will find more beautiful than the next
thing. You almost learn that designing based on your own opinion will always
yield poor results, so you design based on what you've learned that the
biggest percentage of people will like.

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mattwdelong
As someone who recently entered the advertising and design industry with my
company, I would like to chime in with my thoughts.

I think a logo should be well thought out design, it doesn't have to tell a
huge story but when someone looks at it they have to be able to say "Hey,
thats the bingo card creator logo" or "that's verizon wireless". These cookie
cutter design sites don't really produce results other than generic trendy
designs built with skills obtained through generic tutorial sites - but props
to them for earning some extra cash with those skills.

Secondly, I think it`s the all encompassing strategy that really represents
the brand. Put simple: The brand is MUCH more than just a logo. It`s how you
interact with your customers, it`s how you handle bad publicity and it`s how
you advertise to your customers.

Patrick, keep the old logo. It`s not phenomenal, but it`s you.

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ErrantX
The new logo was at a distinct disadvantage - the words "bingo card creator"
are a lot less obvious and the washed out colours push it into the background
(and even clash with the banner).

I reckon a pro-looking logo with the same bold colours as the original may
fair better.

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ced
Patrick, it sounds like you're performing "orthodox" statistics. That's likely
to be good enough for this problem, but have you considered Bayesian
statistics at all? Your conclusions could be very different.

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prs
Logos evolve over time - If it is not right the very first time, it can be
improved gradually. Unfortunately, it works the other way round as well.

Bad to Good - Apple:
[http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fa/Apple_fir...](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fa/Apple_first_logo.png)

Good to Bad - Pepsi:
[http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/e/e9/Pepsi_logo_200...](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/e/e9/Pepsi_logo_2008.svg)

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gojomo
What if some of the visitors had visited before -- or seen the prior logo
before, on Patrick's blog or another story -- but from another browser or
where the cookies had expired/cleared? Then, seeing the second logo on a
followup visit would have a 'slightly off' look that could deter signup. ("Is
this a knockoff site?")

