Logo Design: Search Engine Workshops

Search Engine Workshops opened its doors in 2002. Their product is live workshops where they teach students about search engine optimization. Before doing so, they turned to us for a website and logo. The logo only needed to be used on its website and, perhaps, print material.

We contemplated several designs before settling on this one. Since search engine optimization is all about targeting customers in the search engines through various on- and off-website techniques, we decided that a target would be appropriate. However, a normal dartboard or archery target has been used quite effectively by the Target chain of stores as well as other companies. Even though the color scheme would likely be different, we didn’t want to 1) incur potential trademark infringement issues, and 2) create consumer confusion with a similar logo. So, we settled on the crosshairs. Crosshairs help shooters, whether through a scope on a rifle or a fighter pilot looking at a heads up display, focus and aim on their target. This gave us the basic circular shape as well as divided the circle into four quadrants.

We knew that our the owners of Search Engine Workshops were partial to using photos of people. They knew that website visitors respond to photos of people. They had taken photos at their workshops, which they gladly let us use for the logo. We chose four photos to place inside the quadrants created by our crosshairs.

Next up was selecting a typeface. We tried several typefaces. We didn’t want the photos obscured too much, so we selected an open typeface that allows the photos to show through the text. Our client also wanted the logo to articulate the services they provide. So we continued the circular theme of the crosshairs and placed short headlines that accurately describe the services offered around the circle that makes up our crosshairs.

Our client was quite pleased with the result. Search Engine workshops has gone on to be a leader in live search engine optimization training.