Scatty.com

Think about the iconic corporate logos that stand out as memorable, familiar and enduring. Whether it’s the McDonald’s arched M, the Nike swoosh or the Apple … apple, there are certain icons that have worked on multiple levels.

The art and science of corporate logo design incorporates multiple elements. Best-practice design techniques, color science and testing all factor in to the development of a strong and effective corporate logo.

These decisions are critically important. A study of corporate logo design published in Harvard Business Review showed that logo choices – descriptive or nondescriptive, simple or complex, symmetrical or asymmetrical – can greatly influence consumer behavior, funding decisions and brand performance and equity.

How do corporations develop their logos? Here’s a look at the steps that result in excellent, powerful and resonant corporate logos.

Conceptualization

The first step is to iterate what the desired outcome is for logo design. How will the logo be used? What will the logo say about your brand.

You want a logo that communicates what your brand is all about. The logo is a critical element of your broader brand strategy.

Research

Logo design is about far more than finding a cool graphic and adding some text. It also needs to be relevant to and representative of your brand. The team working on your logo should conduct research into the following:

• Competition. This work will assess what competitors have for logos and are there common themes and approaches within your industry
• Versatility. Logos need to work in multiple formats and channels. You want a logo that will work on your website, social media, signage, letterhead and business cards and advertising
• History. Is there a historical significance to your company, location or name? If so, incorporating that heritage into a logo is an ideal opportunity
• Resonance. The logo can look fantastic on your website, but does it resonate with your target audience? A good logo will form a connection with customers

Brainstorming and Designing

Logo design is a process that will have multiple waves of presentation, discussion and refinement.

Brainstorming meetings that allow designers and executives to share ideas, concepts and approaches can elicit powerful ideas that lead to great logos. This creative process may involve initial rounds with larger groups before shifting to a smaller group of decision-makers who evaluate different rounds of options.

Some designers choose to present initial concepts in black and white, leaving the decisions on color to later in the process. A minimal approach to colors is usually the right approach, choosing hues that may already be incorporated into your brand.

Other considerations in this phase will include:

• Typography. What fonts and faces will be included, if any, in your logo
• Longevity. Will the logo endure and not become dated
• Shapes. The shapes you choose say a lot about the brand. Circular shapes are perceived as softer, friendlier and caring. Angular shapes evoke a more formal and firm position
• Icons. Whether derived from your logo or paired with them, the icons you may choose to use as part of your brand need to be aligned with the logo

Finalization and Presentation

When the logos have been finalized, they will likely go through multiple layers of approval. Marketing teams, C-suite leaders and even boards may want to share their feedback on the logo. That’s why presentation is so critical. In this phase, designers will provide examples of how the logo will look on your web page, on social channels and in company marketing materials. These presentations will be accompanied by narratives about the process, the purpose of the logo and what it is intended to evoke in customers and other stakeholders.

Logos are an important part of a brand. Using a careful process can result in an end result that’s appealing, compelling and effective.

Broadly defined literary devices are tools that writers use to express or evoke larger themes and guiding ideas in any work of fiction. They are often used as “shorthand” to make connections that might be painfully tedious or less powerful if they were fully spelled out in concrete language.

Although literary devices have been common throughout the ages in all forms of writing, their succinct and implied nature make them particularly useful in the composition of short stories and other creative works that have lower overall word counts.

With this in mind, read on to learn about five literary devices that can dramatically improve your short stories.

1. Metaphor

Metaphor occurs when to unlike things are presented as similar or the same. Although it abounds in all forms of literature, few people make proper, extensive use of metaphor in their writing. While it is relatively common for a writer to work a simple simile (such as Robert Burns’ “my Love is like a red, red, rose) into their work, an extended analogy (such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s wallpaper) is far less common. In her short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper” serves as an analogy for the oppressive social norms of the patriarchy. Although she never explicitly identifies it as such, Gilman’s descriptions of an imaginary women trapped beneath the yellow wallpaper communicates volumes about female repression in the short story.

2. Symbolism

Far wider in use and more culturally universal than a mere metaphor, a symbol is an object, image, or word that isn’t necessarily limited to a single implied meaning. A terrific example of symbolism in a short story can be found in the “Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allan Poe. After killing unnamed old man and hiding his body under the floorboards of the house that they shared, the protagonist and narrator of this short story is driven insane by a distinct thumping sound in the house that they both had shared. In light of the complex associations that humankind has long drawn between the heart and notions of love, togetherness, and morality, this supposed heartbeat infuses this rather brief tale with an outsized amount of extremely poignant symbolism.

3. Foreshadowing

Foreshadowing (previewing or hinting at key literary themes or narrative plot points relatively early in a work of fiction) may take a long time to pay off in a longer creative form like a novel. However, this payoff can be just as satisfying within the relatively compressed duration of a short story. Because it has precious little time to place a firm grip on a reader’s attention, a short story can foreshadow a future event within the first few paragraphs to create a compelling hook for the narrative and build suspense throughout.

4. Irony

The ample use of narrative twists in short story writing, makes them fertile ground for the use of irony. In particular, short stories often contain situational irony, which subverts expected outcomes for maximum reader impact and enhanced contextual meaning. Take O. Henry’s “The Gift of the Magi” for example. This widely read short story depicts a wife who cuts off her long hair and sells it to purchase a chain for her husband’s cherished watch. At the same time, her husband sells this watch to buy his wife a comb for her long hair.

5. Satire

Works of satire use humor or wit to ridicule influential and/or authoritative figures, institutions, and cultural ideas. Writers can use it to make powerful statements of inference that often stretch far beyond the limited lines of text in a short story. One of the most famous instances of satire in a short story is the central character of Mathilde in Guy de Maupassant’s “The Necklace.” Maupassant uses satire to point out the extremely destructive vanity of his protagonist as well as other members of the petty bourgeoisie.