03. Deciding on my corporate identity
It seems sensible to define your corporate identity, before you start marketing your business. I guess almost all interpreters and translators are faced with the same questions when deciding on their business name: Do I want to be out there as a single person? Do I want a neutral company name or even a name suggesting that there is a team behind the website? When deciding on a company name, either you are lucky and while struck by genius you come up with a solution you immediately like, or – like me – you mull over all potential company-name candidates again and again until you finally decide on the most acceptable one. If you don’t want to leave it there, talk to people – preferably business experts. Our family friend helped me transform my original suggestion into a much snappier one and it was fascinating to observe him. If I remember correctly, his reasoning was:
- Sinclair is a good name, keep Sinclair.
- Everybody knows “Lost in Translation”, then again you don’t want that.
- But something with translation.
- You want to offer a solution, say what you are doing.
- How about Sinclair translates?
He wanted to keep going, but I stopped him right there. I had my name!
Great, I had the company name, but what now? Creating a website or designing a logo? As logo is part of the company name, it seemed as the next logical steps. If you want to avoid high expenses and/or disappointment, look around, until you find a graphic designer, whose designs you really like. In my case the design was done by http://acuaro.cz. They promised two weeks, needed almost four, but delivered what I wanted. The assignment included the whole corporate identity: the new logo in different formats, business cards, an envelope, letterhead and a logo manual, a detailed description of how to create your logo and marketing products. Total costs – around 800 EURO. For reasoning behind the design see the photo and description below.
Explanation of the logo: The logo Sinclair TRANSLATES evokes the business field of interpreting and translating. While the speech bubble suggests communication, the different colour shades in the logo refer to a variety of languages.
If you have gone through a similar experience, please comment below, share your story so that other colleagues can benefit. Thanks.
If you have gone through a similar experience, please comment below, share your story so that other colleagues can benefit. Thanks.
Great post Katerina! I have been there too a couple of months ago when I decided to rebrand my business and start trading under a business name. I wanted at the same time my logo to be redesigned but this was a very hard task. I was working together with a website developer and a designer and we went through all possible options. I wanted something that could be easily linked to interpreting or to communication but I wanted at the same time to avoid the direct use of "interpreting" or "translation" as part of the business name as I might offer more services in the future than these two. I know, I am a difficult guy and I've been spending countless hours and days on this topic. At the end I came up with the idea of combining somehow my name with my company name, I think the designer wanted to kill me at this stage because this made it even a harder task lol.
AntwortenLöschenI finally suggested MDPwords, because MDP are the initial letters of my first name and surname and I had in mind a good tagline for this, I added then "words" because I basically work with words, both written and spoken ones.
I opted for the tagline Make Dialogue Possible, I wanted the tagline to briefly explain to potential customers what can I do for them and I could make dialogue possible between people speaking different languages. At this stage we started working on the logo, which is now basically a combo of speech bubbles forming also the letters M D P. Why the speech bubbles? Well, because in every language (I guess) the beginning of a dialogue is always marked by a speech bubble :)
All in all I can say it is a very crucial point in the life of every freelancer running a business, it's something that will be there with you for at least couple of years (or hopefully even more) so I would suggest everyone to carefully think about a good business name that could work and no to opt for the very first idea that comes to your mind. Write it down, make a list of names and possible combinations, ask friends and relatives what would come into their mind by listening to a brand named XYZ for the first time, pick something easy to remember and even better something easy to be understood. Last but not least: remember always to check if there is any other company around using that name, in your case I think you made the perfect choice by using your surname so people can directly identify you! Good job!
Hi Matteo,
AntwortenLöschenthank you very much for your interesting comment on how you decided on your company name and logo. For all the readers, who want to see the end result - check out Matteo's website: https://www.mdpwords.com/de/