Why we've changed our product icons
Published on 17 Jun 2020 by Emma Eynon
At Fantom Factory, we have a vision for Fantom software and eLearning training. We are a small team, and we love what we do - surely this is enough to create a small, effective business?
We face many hidden challenges alongside thousands of other start up companies that aren't obvious when you are starting out! You may think a large part of the struggle is when you create the company, domain name, and business plan. But there is a huge mountain to climb that no one really likes to talk about - branding and design!
Sure, there are the fun parts - make a logo, choose some branding colours and fonts, and maybe even have some nice pictures designed. That's great for those companies who perhaps only need a couple of website pages and a nice printed invoice design. But what happens when your entire business is based online - like ours?
Now your business marketing is almost totally dependent on finding a great graphic designer. A designer who has technical web knowledge, and experience in branding and communications. They need to understand mail server requirements for anything that will be connected to email. Oh, and they need to really understand your business and your aims!
These superhuman designers are few and far between, so if you find a good one - don't lose them by being cheap! How you communicate to your clients is one of the most important things you can do - which for a web business really comes down to presentation. It's not a final journey either, with the evolution of ideas and elements, your styles and images may need to change. Take Fantom Factory for example, our website has been through a number of redesigns until we were finally happy!
Our eLearning courses need to have their own branding too. We had some detailed, technical images made to depict SkySpark Analyst and Axon Core.
Nice huh? "So what's the problem?" - you may ask!
While these look very polished and detailed, do you instantly recognise our courses from them? Printed smaller in literature documents, say as part of PDFs, they are hard to make out. As we look to planning our next programming course build, we considered how that "brand" may look in the same theme. We realised we wanted bolder, simpler images that really try to convey the identity of their respective product / course.
As a result, we asked our own superhuman designer to come up with something to fit the bill - and we now have these:
We think these really do the job - clear, recognisable and still part of the Fantom Factory branding theme (which is basically purple!). These are now live on the site, and we have placed them into our PDFs and marketing literature. This makes our job a lot easier with upcoming courses too!