Design « Merriam Associates, Inc. Brand Strategies

Merriam Associates specializes in branding that gets results. Everything we do systematically generates leads, closes sales, boosts profits, and builds a solid reputation for your company and your products or services. Our background combines the rigor of global Fortune 500 companies with the tenacity of successful entrepreneurs.

Boring Green Logo Redesigns Are a Color Cliche

Green–it’s the new blue. As an overused boring corporate color, blue is losing ground to green. Corporations everywhere have been jumping on the “green” bandwagon, whether they are hotels that wash towels less frequently, moving companies that reuse boxes, or retailers that recycle plastic bags. The green washing trend is even spreading corporate [...]

Renaming Proxios: CEO Talks About the Process

Fast growing, innovative companies can sometimes outgrow their brands.

“Our name became constraining,” said Frank Butler, CEO of Proxios, a fast-growing company using cloud computing technology to create affordable and reliable alternatives to traditional in-house information technology and phone systems. “Our old name Super-Server did not have broad appeal and it was dated.”

Merriam Associates gave this [...]

Rebranding Proxios

Outgrowing the Brand
Proxios had its beginnings as a small technology infrastructure outsourcing company called SuperServer. The company has grown beyond its Richmond, VA roots to have a national reach and had made significant investments in cutting-edge technology. They needed a brand that would convey the true stature of the company and give it a [...]

Logo Styles and Logo Types

After you have selected the name of your company, product or service, you will want to bring it to life with a visual representation–you need a logo!

You’ve got a number of approaches to choose from. Below are the four general logo styles in common use, along with their respective strengths and weaknesses.

Visual Systems Strengthen Brand and Cut Costs

Taking a systematic approach to your visuals, whether for your web site, brochures, business cards, even videos, will dramatically strengthen the power of your brand while cutting your production costs.

Beyond the Logo—Designing Brand Assets

Think beyond logo and think about how you can appeal to the five senses. What colors, shapes, symbols, textures, sounds, vocabulary, smells, flavors, and styles are associated with your brand?

Promote Uganda: Focusing The Brand Message

Focusing The Message of an NGO Brand
Promote Uganda is a non-governmental-organization (NGO) founded by successful ex-patriot Ugandans with the goal of improving the economic lot of people in Uganda. The organization is an ambitious one. We helped them organize and articulate their agenda around several key initiatives:

Providing tourists information about travel to Uganda
Helping researchers or [...]

Kirch: A Brand Story and a Catalog for Design Icon George Nelson

A Growing Company Looks to Branding
Kirch had grown from a small family venture into a multinational manufacturing and marketing powerhouse. The company had never really addressed its brand or history. In preparation for a new web site, they wanted to communicate to consumers in a new way. Kirch asked Merriam Associates to write the company [...]

Domino Sugar New Cannister Package Innovation

Sugar is sugar—until Domino’s introduced a new package consumers love so much they pay 12 to 46 cents more a pound. Great things come from innovative packaging.

HP’s Swosh-O-Matic Logo Service–-Bad Branding Made Easy

An effective logo must symbolize your reputation and your promise. It must mean something and communicate something. It must stand out. If your logo looks too much like others or is simply unmemorable, it fails as a symbol of your reputation. recisely because logos must be symbolic and distinctive, HP’s Logoworks is a bad idea. It’s quite possible that the HP service can provide mediocre to adequate design. What’s lacking is the in-depth strategic insight that must be intrinsic in every great symbol.