Does Your Product Logo Actually Matter? | Hacker News Reader

Does Your Product Logo Actually Matter?

kalzumeus.com

73 pointsduck51 comments

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.

I love Teach for America.

Done; you'll get your notification letter as soon as I figure out how to mail things to Japan.

I'll get you next time, Patrick McKenzie. Next time!

I think you're underestimating the value of authenticity, especially within the right demographic.

Bingo Card Creator (correct me if I'm wrong) is primarily targeted at a demographic that is friendly to small business. An attempt in this market to appear like big-faceless-megacorp will, as this study proved, hamper your results.

The old logo may not look terribly good, but what it says to me is: authentic small business run by some dude who sure appreciates my business.

It always surprises me how many small companies try so hard to appear big, when in fact there's so much value in projecting that of the underdog.

    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.

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.

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.

How is it hyperbolic? Your definition of a "professionally-designed" logo excludes the normal professional process for identity design. Then you conclude that engineering always beats aesthetics.

"I can easily make a case that it is more professional than his current logo"

Please do. It's not obvious to me.

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.

So in retrospect I agree with all of this.

I think Patrick's current logo is pretty ugly. I think the 99designs logo is bland and cliched, but I don't think it's ugly. I thought that would count for something. It doesn't.

Lesson learned: a logo that speaks to your audience can succeed even if it's ugly.

Thomas, were you intentionally choosing a bland/generic logo in an effort to prove your point? Just from glancing at the 99 Designs logo store, here's a few logos that, while still generic (in the sense that they have nothing to do with bingo) seem to have a little more personality:

* http://99designs.com/logo-design/store/12556 * http://99designs.com/logo-design/store/12531 * http://99designs.com/logo-design/store/3090 * http://99designs.com/logo-design/store/1116 * http://99designs.com/logo-design/store/602 * http://99designs.com/logo-design/store/12572

It seems pretty obvious to me that many logos would perform better than the one you selected (a dangerous assumption, perhaps), although I wouldn't be surprise if Patrick's current logo out performs them all. I actually think his current logo is pretty good.

Yep; I gave him 5 options (and invited him to pick anything else) but said up front that I'd bet that any uh more "recent" looking logo would outperform his current one (and that's what I was wrong about).

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.

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.

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.

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?

Not just you. But I'm not a teacher looking to make bingo cards, so my opinion might not count for much.

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.

Unless you are running a site that has to convey a strong sense of exclusiveness or security you can usually get away with a logo that is considered ugly by many.

Same applies to page layouts as long as the value for the user is there.

> on the old one the text looks squashed

If you're just looking the screenshot in the blog (as opposed to clicking thru to a larger view), I think it really is squashed. Try going straight to http://images1.bingocardcreator.com/blog-images/logo-wager/o..., it looks a bit better.

I'm also not a teacher looking to buy bingo cards, but the new logo is just terrible. Is that really the best you could find on 99 Designs? (99D is down right now, but I was going to see if I could fetch a better one quickly.) I'm not at all surprised it performs worse that the current one. I'll bet it performs worse that just the text "Bingo Card Creator" displayed in basic font with sufficient contrast to the background.

While I can imagine the old logo being better executed, just as an anecdotal impression, the concept behind the old logo seems pretty much spot on to me.

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).

> 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.

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.

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?

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.)

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.

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.

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.

It would be harder than you think. Patrick is patio11 on HN (http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=patio11). He's smarter than the average bear.

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.

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.)

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. ;)

do it.

bcc was one of the steps on the way to me realizing that building the site is almost none of the business.

as a friendly and encouraging wager, i submit that you can't or won't get a bcc clone business with >$500 revenues/mo.

If you can do a better job in three days than he has over the entire history of his business, then you definitely should.

Go for it then. Patrick is making about $4,000 per month. If you think you can do better in 3 days then, you stand to make a fortune. So why haven't you done it?

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?

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

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.

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.

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?

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

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?

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 ;)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

Good to Bad - Pepsi: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/e/e9/Pepsi_logo_200...

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?")

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