Reflective of Hile’s diverse client base, the new companies and organizations range in size, industry and marketing needs. Alpha Remodeling has been serving the Ann Arbor area since 1989. The company specializes in additions and interior and exterior remodeling projects. CareBridge is a non-profit company incorporated to support the MiPCT (Michigan Primary Care Transformation) demonstration of a more integrated, affordable and effective system of providing health care. Ergopoint provides online self-assessment for businesses concerning their staff’s ergonomic work environments and provides education and recommendations for healthier alternatives. Go Docs Go is a health care provider committed to bringing doctors and medical professionals directly to a patient’s front door. Internet2 is an Ann Arbor-based consortium led by the U.S. research and education community dedicated to researching and sharing a revolutionary-class IP and optical network. Pall Life Sciences is a world leader in providing filtration, separation and purification solutions for use across the broad spectrum of life sciences. Power Panel, a Toronto, Canada based company, has a manufacturing facility in Detroit where the next generation of solar panels are being produced. REthink Real Estate CRM offers a cloud-based real estate CRM that revolutionizes the way brokers and agents buy, sell, lease, and manage properties. Qualigence provides in-depth recruiting research and strategies for businesses, including recruiter education and an annual recruitment conference. And Scio Township is home to more than 900 diverse businesses representing some of the area’s largest firms to mid-sized and small boutique companies covering a broad range of industries.

So why do discerning companies pay substantial amounts of green to hire a firm to custom design their logos? Perhaps the answer is that to really capture the essence of a brand, it takes a lot of thought, creativity, experience and trial and error. Ask any designer and they’ll tell you that designing a logo can be one of the most challenging projects they’ll tackle, because a successful logo says so much with so little. And regarding the cost? Well, a logo, like a company’s website is one of it’s most important brand assets. So the question really is, what’s the value of a corporate brand?

At Hile, we tell our clients that their logo is the clothes their company wears in public – a visual synonym for their business, and much more than a pretty graphic/type design – their logo should reflect the core of who they are.

We recently developed a brand identity for Go Docs Go, a medical start-up providing home medical care (read house calls) for homebound and geriatric patients. After going through the logo design process with our client, we thought we would provide a picture into how we do it.

Our first step was sitting down and talking with our client to discover who they were as a business, and how they could differentiate themselves from other competing firms. We needed to understand their core purpose, their customer promises and how they planned to prove those promises. We needed this information in order for the logo to have “authenticity.” While their competitors had typical corporate medical logos, Go Docs Go expressed a desire to have a friendly, contemporary logo that presented a sense of accessibility to their patients and their families, while still representing a professional organization that participating health care providers could align themselves with. These attributes were right on the mark with the way we experienced our client.

Next, we pass the torch to our designers and they develop an assortment of logo concepts. Then, internally we select the designs (sometimes as many as twenty) down to a few options to show our client. For Go Docs Go we also developed a tag line to communicate the company’s purpose: “Go Docs Go – The Doctor’s Office at your Door.”

Below are the designs we presented along with the reasoning behind each option. Our designer, Charlie Szczygiel, provides our narrative:

“The main thing we needed to communicate was ‘doctors (and other health care providers) coming to your home’ and we wanted to be clear about that message, so it shouldn’t be too abstract. There were some common medical images such as a stethoscope that we needed to avoid since our client’s competitors were already using them. Despite the ‘speedy’ reference in the Go Docs Go name, we realized early on that we should avoid visual references like the image below, as it might communicate speed at the expense of thorough patient care.”

The logos below are those we presented to our client. See if you can guess which one was selected, and click on the link at the bottom of this post to see if your selection matched the client’s final pick!

“This one was a softer option, but we still needed it to stand out. We wanted to try blue in order to give the logo more of a soothing feeling than the more typical medical red. This was a design where the messaging was incorporated in the typography.”

“This idea was the same concept as our first design, only in icon form. Initially, I was just playing with the icons and needed a way to contain them, so I ended up trying a pill image since that is a simple, medically recognizable shape. Then, we decided that if we put a slant instead of a straight line in the middle of the pill, it would communicate the travel aspect. The logo is saying three things (literally representing the tag line), but it is contained in a way that all the messaging works within a single icon.”

“This design communicates “medical” and “homes” in the simplest icon I could think of – the medical cross. The neighborhood graphic makes it a friendlier logo. The only downside of this might be that some people wouldn’t see a red cross right away, but it still works aesthetically and conceptually so I didn’t see a problem with the design.”

“This was a little abstract. ‘A little too feminine’ according to Dave (Hile). He felt this might be more applicable for, say, hospice care. But several designers argued it should be included and Dave gave in.”

“This one is pretty self explanatory. We wanted to present an option without a medical cross. The heart rate monitor delineates the shape of a house.”

“This design highlights a doctor or healthcare provider (developed from universal walking man) entering a home. It’s a literal and straightforward treatment. But that was okay since it was our goal to provide the client with a range of options.”

Click the link to find out which logo was chosen: The Winning Go Docs Go Logo.

How did you do? Leave a comment!

Founded in 2004, The McCreadie Group serves some of the nation’s top research universities and hospitals by providing software development, support and sales for pharmaceutical applications and products. The McCreadie Group is a leading provider of Investigational Drug Services software through the Web-based Vestigo™. The company also focuses on the education of future pharmacists through the PharmAcademic™ program.

Prior to developing the company’s corporate website, Hile developed the name and designed the logo of Vestigo™ as well as the software’s User Interface design.

XG Sciences has its headquarters in Lansing, Michigan but serves clients around the globe, providing a new class of carbon nanoparticles in the form of the multifunctional graphene nanoplatelets. Their brand of xGnP ^® grapehen nanoplatelets, and other versatile materials, serves clients ranging from universities and research groups to compounders and end-users.

GPS is one of the nation’s leading implementers of Six Sigma and Operational Excellence®, which is their trademark approach to serving businesses through assessment, training, project execution and implementation. GPS serves some of the top Fortune 100 companies on a global scale and employs over 100 highly experienced consultants.

While most people at Hile Design were just starting to fulfill New Year’s resolutions and sincerely regretting that extra slice of pie over Christmas, I was boarding a plane, on my way to a land of Bollywood, chicken masala and blue skinned gods. As part of a Spring Arbor University requirement, I needed to spend a month in another country in order to graduate. So, I chose India.

I spent three weeks bouncing from city to city, tasting food far too spicy for my American tongue and keeping a look out for elephants (alas, I saw none). Starting in Mumbai, my group traveled to Hyderabad, Calcutta and ended our stay in Delhi.

We were required to keep a journal to record our experience, and in the first page, I described India in one word: Thick.  India is thick with people, thick with smells and noise and pollution, thick with poverty and thick with luxury, thick with tradition and color and religious deities; India is thick with markets and vendors and food and traffic and non-profits trying to make a dent in the thickness, but, most of all, India is thick with media and advertising.

The minute I stepped out of the airport into the humid Mumbai streets, I was struck by how much print advertising dominated the aesthetic culture. If there was wall space, whether domestic residencies, retail stores, corporate offices or broken down structures (of which there was a lot), there was a poster or banner advertising some brand of food or technology. Typically in America, a sign advertising something like Coca-Cola on a building is usually a signifier that whatever business occupies the space probably sells the product. But, in India that wasn’t the case. It seemed that as long as the public could see the building, it was free for the advertising taking.

Amid all the mangoes, saris and bangles, I expected to see a reflection of the society I was in when I looked at the posters and billboards. Unfortunately, just about every ad I saw had a very pale looking model dressed in western clothes and selling either a western product or its Indian equivalent. Nowhere in the television commercials did I see a dark-skinned woman in her sari holding up a packet of curry spices to the tune of a Bollywood song. Nowhere in the print promotions did I see a man in his kurta sitting down for a meal in his brightly colored apartment and eat with his hands and some chapatti bread. As far as marketing goes, India may be stationed in the East but certainly has its eyes to the West.

This Eastern idolization of the West isn’t anything new; skin lightening and eyelid lifting has been a trend in Asia for some time. However, I find it fascinating that it has gone beyond personal appearance to entire cultures embodying this movement to become “more American” through its media and advertising. That raises the question of the power of marketing and if it really is the global identifier for a society. I wonder how many cultures outside of the US associate Americans with the golden arches of McDonalds or the seductive women of Victoria’s Secret.  I also wonder how many Americans look at the ads and have the same feeling I got in India, where what they see around them and what they see on the billboards don’t match up.

So, as I sit at my desk in my kurta and crave a mango lassi, I’ll leave you all with the question that has been on my mind of late: is media and advertising a reflection of the culture, maybe the best parts of the culture, or is it creating some sort of ideal that the culture is trying to achieve? Does it matter?

What is true is that we’ve just been selected to create an identity and establish a Web presence for Ann Arbor / Ypsilanti-born biotech startup, DeNovo Sciences. (Now that’s our skill set.)

DeNovo Sciences has been getting a lot of attention recently because they’re on the path towards being able to detect and capture cancer cells in the bloodstream before they find a landing site in the body and metastasize. As they say it:

We hope that this would one day lead to the holy grail of detecting cancer even before the discovery of  primary tumors.

Pretty cool, huh?

So is the fact that this local startup company is hiring a local company (us) to develop their brand with funding provided through Ann Arbor SPARK.

And this isn’t an isolated incident. It’s part of a movement.

There’s a whole lot of high tech entrepreneurship going on with support places like SPARK, Tech Transfer, and in labs, basements and small businesses around town. We think a flood of good news for the region is about to break.

And, even though Hile Design will never be the source of a life-changing medical or technological breakthrough, we think it’s pretty cool that we get to shine a spotlight on the folks that do.

In Don’t Make Me Think, Steve Krug gives a spot-on guide to website usability— all that stuff that helps visitors to your site find what they’re looking for. What Krug’s book doesn’t touch on is the relationship between usability and search engine optimization (SEO) —how visitors actually find your site in the first place.

I really don’t fault Krug for this (too much) since it’s not his area of primary expertise, and there’s plenty written elsewhere on SEO. Still, a nod to SEO might have been nice since some principles of usability that Krug advocates can appear to be in conflict with best practices in SEO.

If you’ve read Krug’s book along with a few guides to SEO, you probably know what I mean.

The current maxim for SEO is “content is king” with textual content sitting high atop the searchability throne. If you want search engines to find your site, you need good copy. A picture may say a thousand words to most of us, but to bat-blind Web crawlers, a picture only whispers whatever you can squeeze into its alt tag.

In contrast, to make sites more user-friendly, Krug suggests you “Get rid of half the words on each page, then get rid of half of what’s left.” (Cue hearty shouts of approval from graphic designers everywhere.)

When less is more and when less is just less

In my first fresh-out-of-a-college writing job, I was confronted with a harsh reality: the 12 pages of brilliant verbosity in my college essays as an English major was not necessarily going to be rewarded in the business world. I’d just written my first article for the agency magazine, and I proudly passed it on to the graphic designer. It was promptly returned with “You need to cut at least 500 words to fit the page” written on top. How could I cut 500 words from perfection? And for what? “White space”?

Left with no alternative, I began the painful task of cutting my precious copy. I cut and reworded and cut and rephrased. When I was done, something miraculous happened: the fluorescent light above my cube glowed a little brighter as I realized my article was actually better, not worse. I hadn’t amputated any limbs — I’d performed lyposcution and lost the excess fat.

I think what Krug is advocating for is simply good writing. Unfortunately, the Web isn’t always the place to find this. With the lack of physical limitations like paper size, and the speed with which content is generated, the time and motivation to write tight-skinned copy is in short supply. Couple this with a sloppy understanding of SEO and “more” can feel like value added when, in fact, more is mess.

What’s a writer to do? Know thy audience(s)!

Fortunately, most of the principles of writing well apply to both SEO and usability. The key is to remember who you’re writing to. Every good writer knows that “identifying the audience” is step one. For writing on the Web, you have two audiences: the visitors who will use your site and the search engines who will drive them there. Do your due diligence on both. By researching what terms people actually use to find your products/services, you can make educated decisions about what terms are key (avoiding less is less) and what are superfluous (avoiding more is mess).

Consider the following examples of copy for RickySticky Widgets, a small company that helps users improve the performance of their Quicky Stickets:

Example 1:

In order to improve and enhance the quality of the performance, efficiency and speed of your Quicky Stickets, try our newly redesigned and highly innovative RickySticky Widgets which are the trusted and proven source to provide the perfect cutting-edge solution to resolve your Quicky Stickets’ performance issues. Buy your RickySticky Wickets Today!

Problem: the writer is making SEO the enemy of usability by cramming in every searchable keyword he can think of including many that are likely low-value. He loses clarity, and readers, in the process.

Example 2:

Buy our new RickySticky Widgets.

Problem: This is quite usable for a visitor who knows exactly what they’re looking for (and many will), but, with the important search term “Quicky Stickets” omitted, how many visitors searching for “Quicky Stickets” will never reach the page?

Example 3:

Newly redesigned for 5x greater efficiency, our second generation RickySticky Widgets are guaranteed to optimize Quicky Widget performance.  Shop online

Much better: This includes a few high-quality search terms but doesn’t overwhelm hurried shoppers with so much text that it obscures the action (i.e., “shop online”).

The good news is nearly all principles used to optimize a Web site for usability (alt tags, titles, clear navigation, etc.) are also things search engines reward. Which audience your site copy is most heavily weighted for (visitors or search engines) will depend on how well established your site and brand already is. And, if you want to have a bit more freedom in how much you write and a place to be a little freer with keywords, start a blog like this one. If I’d written the above advice on a page of the Hile Design site, it’d probably of kept it to 50 words or less. (Hint: notice how many keywords related to good Web design are included in this post.)

Poetry and fiction may be more personal works, thus requiring seclusion from the distraction of others. But agency copywriting is a different ball game altogether.

Marketing writing is a form of communication that is constantly evolving, and to be successful copywriters need to be actively involved with others. I have learned a few things from my experience in writing copy for Hile:

1. Swallow your pride. As a young writer in the advertising world I had to learn very quickly that not everything my creative little fingers typed out was gold. Writing copy for a website or a script for a video is not your personal memoir, so take a dose of humility and make adjustments, edits, and rewrites where the client wants them.
2. Respect the input of others. An advertising agency is a diverse community; there are designers, programmers, project managers, copywriters, etc. When your writing is under review (and it will be) don’t discount the critique of the web programmer just because he took fewer English courses than you in college.
3. The more perspectives the better. Think of the workplace as a microcosm for the larger, diverse communities of people that will eventually read your writing. So, send your copy to more than just your boss for review. This doesn’t mean you need to adhere to every single suggestion that you get back, but it will give you a better idea of how your work will be read by the public and the client.
4. Designers are your friends. Marketing materials are composed of both images and words, and the best kind happen when words and images are married to form a happy union that we dub “advertising.” As the writer, it is crucial that you work with the designer rather than simply expect him or her to create images that conform to your writing.
5. Don’t always expect a high-five. Writing is a personal endeavor because it is a form of intimate creation. It is also a measuring stick of your intelligence and creativity. But, just because the copy you wrote for that coffee company brochure is riddled with metaphor and alliteration, don’t always anticipate getting a pat on the back. Writing for the media is a job, and while it’s nice for good work to be recognized, don’t take every project as a personal appraisal of your worth as a writer.

In the words of the poet Richard Tillinghast, “humility is naturally rare, particularly among young writers, for whom the value of doing something remarkable is vastly increased when they can say it only took them fifteen minutes.”

Writing for the media is not about sitting down at your computer and producing a masterpiece of copy in “fifteen minutes.” In fact, no type of writing should be about quick and easy creation. Working in an advertising agency is a good way to learn that the best copywriting comes from collaborating with the people around you, whether through requesting editing and revision, a wider range of perspectives, or a simple dose of inspiration.

Maggie Tibus is the Copywriting Intern at Hile Design.

Imagine you’re a client eagerly about to review Hile’s proposed design for a new website. You click on the link we’ve given you and there on your screen you see a mocked-up web page featuring clean, stylish design, a just-right photo for your banner image and … wait a minute. What the heck? In place of where the copy should go you see this:

Where you thought you’d see words somehow related to your company’s industry or purpose, there in its place is what appears to be a long, lost Romance language. You rack your brain trying to decipher what is now taking the place of the expected text. Of course, the words (if you can call them that) are there to show you how the page will look with copy and, unfortunately, hold as much meaning as a baby’s babble.

What Lorem Ipsum basically comes down to is designing and organizing a website, brochure, etc. that visually looks like the finished product. It doesn’t distract the viewer with actual copy, and the letters are spaced out well enough so that it appears on the page just as intelligible English would. 

If Lorem Ipsum is simply a way to take up space, why not use something less cryptic? Wouldn’t a series of “blah blah blahs” do the same job? Not really. And let’s face it, seeing “content here, content here” all over a design comp (short for “composite,” advertising jargon for a preview or mock-up) can be about as boring as the drone of a person who gets up to the microphone and repeats ”check 1, 2, 3.”

Besides, why alter a dummy text that has survived for over five centuries and made the jump from standard printing to electronic typesetting*? Let’s show Lorem Ipsum a little respect here.

Way More Than a Placeholder

While Lorem Ipsum is not a language itself, most clients are not far off in assuming that it is. While it would be fun to say that we just bang on the keyboard and call it Lorem Ipsum, the placeholder text actually comes from The Extremes of Good and Evil, a book written in Latin by Cicero in 45 BC*. So the next time you’re on a website that sells toilet seat covers or the like, remember that Lorem Ipsum, that shout-out to one of the greatest Roman philosophers, held the place where the description of the latest cartoon soft seat now sits.

Lorem Ipsum has come a long way since the pages of Cicero, though. Today it is even built into most publishing software and can be found online through numerous text generators. If people are going to use dummy text they want the good stuff.

For those familiar with Lorem Ipsum, it has become a sort of inside joke, spawning numerous text generators that morph Lorem Ipsum into humorous, thematic dummy texts. These include Gangsta Ipsum, Pseudo German Ipsum, Marketing Ipsum, plenty of food-oriented placeholder texts, and, our favorite, Hipster Ipsum, Who wouldn’t want a dummy text that uses words like “sustainable,” “cardigan,” and “banksy?”

Lorem Ipsum Generator Sites to Tickle Your Fancy

• hipsteripsum.me
• tlipsum.appspot.com (Yorkshire Ipsum)
• www.lorizzle.nl/ (Lorizzle my dizzle fo shizzle)
• www.duckisland.com/GreekMachine.asp (We like the “Psuedo-German” and “Marketing”)

Apparently food Ipsums are popular:

• baconipsum.com
• tunaipsum.com
• veggieipsum.com
• beeripsum.com

Alternative to latin-ish Ipsums:

• www.cameroncreative.com/filler-text.html (Check out the “Terms & Conditions”)
• chrisvalleskey.com/fillerama (Monty Python filler? Yes please.)
• www.fillerati.com
• slipsum.com/lite.html

With that, I will leave you with these kind words: Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Cras imperdiet. (Let’s pretend that means “So long, have a good day. Thanks for reading.”)

* Fact and figures according to www.lipsum.com