In my last post, I wrote about what I would be blogging about. This post focuses on the logo and design of Enter Venture and how they are related.

I think there’s a waterfall effect when it comes to creating a new website. First, you have an idea for a website that’s going to change the world (or just make you a lot of money). Once you have an idea, you have to come up with a name. Once you have a name, you have to design your logo. Once you have a logo, you have to design your site.

Once you have users, you realize that the idea, name, logo, and site design all need to be fixed, but that’s another post altogether. (There are a lot more steps involved, but this is a post about the logo and design so just go with it).

For this post, I’ll take you through my waterfall.

The Name

Enter Venture. I like the way the two words rhyme. Bingo.

Honestly, deciding to choose the name Enter Venture was an easy, gut reaction; however, it took it took me 2 months working with 3 different people, countless checks on register.com, and plenty of time with thesaurus.com to come up with Enter Venture / enterventure.com.

There were a few exercises I went through to come up with Enter Venture. My favorite exercise is the stream of consciousness word dump onto a whiteboard. Next, I took a step back to think of synonyms for the words that best encapsulated my idea. Working with other people helped further diversify my options. Finally, I confined myself to certain guidelines: no three word names, must have a “.com” address, etc.

There are probably a million ways to come up with a website or company name, but I think the three guiding principles of 1) Brainstorm 2) Build Constraints and 3) Get Feedback, in whatever order, will give you your best chance for naming success.

The Logo

It took surprisingly little time to conceive the idea for the Enter Venture logo. I knew we wanted a something simple (a theme you’ll hear repeated on this blog). I would much rather start with something simple and build on it. Also, who needs a great logo? I’d much rather have a great product than an intricate logo. See Facebook, Digg, etc.

One simple look at the “Enter” key on my keyboard gave me the idea to separate the two words Enter and Venture by putting Enter in button. I was open to any button but thought something that evoked the idea of an “Enter” key would be clever.

With an affordable designer I was able to test out this one idea and three other design concepts. The button idea looked great and with a few tweaks to color and font, Enter Venture’s logo was complete.

The Design

Another thing that we communicated to our designer was that we would have a white background site. I love white background sites. I don’t see any other real option for text rich sites. White backgrounds have worked for text since the days of papyrus so it’ll be tough to convince me to do otherwise.

The design, like the logo, is minimalist. It’s so basic that I decided to immediately remove the Google Ads I originally placed in the sidebar. With a basic, but unique design I will be able to focus on creating content.

(One final note about the design: it’s not done. For all of you IE browser users out there, bear with me).

I’ve now nearly wrapped up the ‘why i’m here’ and ‘what i’m about’ pieces. Stay tuned next time for my Modus Operandi, part 1. We’re almost there.

Posted in How To, Marketing, Website Design