At the intersection of award winning graphic design and award winning chocolate (already this is the best sentence I’ve ever written) lies Candinas; a HOW magazine Perfect 10 award winner of unique design and one of Consumer Reports’ top picks for chocolate. Does good design really make for better tasting chocolate? Find out for yourself — enter this month’s contest by leaving a comment below. I’m giving away a 25 piece box to the lucky winner. Mention a food packaging design that you really like and I’ll enter you twice.

The contest ends at 5pm EST Wednesday, February 20th. Good luck!

“Build it and they will come.” Cast your mind back to 1989, to the days when Kevin Costner was a stone hottie, and the whispered mantra of Field of Dreams comes drifting back. “Build it and they will come.” True for a fictional baseball diamond, soon to be populated by a ghost team, not so true for your brand new or newly redesigned web site.

So how do you get people to visit your site? And what do you need to do to start ranking in Google? Here are a few tips:

Add new relevant content as often as possible. A blog is a great way to accomplish this. And Google loves blogs, though only if they’re updated fairly regularly. Don’t think you can launch your blog, write three or four posts, and sit back and let it pull in the traffic. It can be a lot of work to keep up on your blog posting, but if you’re looking for web traffic and better Goggle rankings, there are few better ways to get it.

If you’ve added a blog, claim your blog on Technorati. It’s free. Also check out the article “20 Essential Blog Directories to Submit Your Blog To”.

Increase your exposure by commenting on other people’s blogs. Do a Google search or visit technorati.com to find relevant blogs. The more traffic the blog gets, the better.

Submit your site to free directories. Do a Google search for “free directory submission”. Also search for free directories in your profession. A word of caution: Google will penalize you for linking to sites that use shady techniques, like link farms, or (most times) sites that sell links. Reciprocal linking (where you link to someone in return for their link to you) is also depreciated in Google and not worth your time. Install the free Google Toolbar and take notice of Google’s assigned Page Rank for the directory sites you visit. Submit your link to sites with a good page rank (3 or higher, or if your site is already established, higher than the rank your site currently has).

Search for competitors sites. Find out who is linking to them (search in Google for link:www.yourcompetitorsitename.com). Try to get links there yourself.

Create profiles for yourself on other sites and link to your web site. Linked In is great for this, just be sure your profile is public. Many people also swear by YouTube (if you have relevant video to post), Facebook and MySpace.

Find out a little bit about search engine optimization. It’s worth your time. The best site I’ve seen for this is The 15 minute SEO list. It’s clear, easy to understand, and incredibly helpful.

Have faith — if you work at it, people will come to your new site. It takes time and effort on your part, but site traffic begets traffic, and your efforts will pay off.

I’ve been thinking about logos lately, inspired in part by David Airey’s excellent new blog Logo Design Love. I am often asked to design a logo for a new business or organization, but sometimes I’m asked to do a logo redesign. There are many reasons why a company or organization might want to redesign their logo including:

• The existing logo feels old or out of date
• The logo they have was done on the fly by someone with little or no experience (a surprising number of times an ambitious intern with a copy of Corel Draw. Ack!) and they’d like something more polished and professional
• The scope or mission of the company has changed
• The company has come under new ownership
• The company has a name change

A logo redesign can be great, but here are a couple of things to consider:

It can be costly. After the expense of the logo redesign itself, expect to reprint everything with your company ID on it, including signs, letterhead, envelopes and business cards, brochures, folders, marketing materials, and more. If you have a web site, you’ll have to update your site, and depending on the design, maybe even redesign it. You can phase the new logo in gradually, but I don’t recommend it. It can take a very long time to use up your old materials, and in the meantime your brand spanking new identity is losing the impact it would have with a big rollout.

It can be confusing to your customers. A couple of years ago a real estate agency in my town did a complete logo redesign, with somewhat disastrous effects. The old logo and identity weren’t very aesthetically pleasing but the bright (bright) yellow signs and script logo font were immediately recognizable. When the agency rebranded themselves under a new name they also launched a whole new identity — white signs, modern looking artwork of a row of houses, and a sans-serif typeface — no more script. The new logo definitely looked better than their old one, but no one recognized the new company. For a small local real estate agency with a long standing good reputation, that was very unfortunate. They should have continued at least one of the aspects of their former, well known, logo and ID — color, script…something. The company sold out to Century 21 shortly thereafter. I don’t know if the logo redesign and the buyout were connected, but changing the company logo so drastically left many of their longtime customers wondering what happened.

For some examples of redesigns, both good and bad, visit Brand New. One of my favorites is Lifesavers redesign, above, but if you want to know what makes a logo redesign work (or not work), Brand New is your site.

Are you considering redesigning your company or organization logo? Have you seen a redesign that worked really well? Have you seen one that should have been left alone?