"Necessity is the mother of invention." - Learning Something New

Throughout my copywriting career, learning something new has always played a big part. It’s essential to get up to speed on a client’s business to deliver each message effectively, so I’ve done whatever research was necessary. Lately, though, I’ve chosen to limit my work to long-time clients whose businesses I know inside-out and upside-down. The upshot is that there hasn’t been much new stuff on my plate. Until now.

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“We need a logo for the Don’t Stop Now brand.”

I don’t know whether Jan said it or I did, because we were both so firmly committed to the importance of having a logo—for our website, Facebook page, and business cards—that we fell all over ourselves gushing about it.

Coming from an advertising background, I have several friends who are fabulous graphic designers, but there was the small problem of a budget. We have none. I decided to research get-a-logo-cheap websites in the hope of finding something that would meet our needs.

Suffice it to say that there are lots of such sites out there. I spent hours perusing one after another, and most of the samples I saw were—how can I put this delicately?—atrocious. The images were too busy or too goofy. The type was too big or too illegible. Three different fonts were incorporated into one design. The fear of white space was evident in the examples of business cards, because every corner was filled to capacity with “stuff.”

Learning Something New

It was clear that most of the work was done by design novices trying to break into the business. Since they were probably no more educated—or talented—in graphics than I, I decided to try to design a logo on my own.

Trust me when I say it wasn’t easy. It took the better part of a day on canva.com to create a logo and apply it to a two-sided business card, but I eventually succeeded. (The cross-hatching is a watermark, not part of the design.)

No, it’s not a great card. Yes, any of my designer friends could have done a far superior job. But I learned something new. And there’s an enormous amount of satisfaction in that.