When you first start your business you often don't have much money to spend on a professional designer, so you bootstrap it.  You have a friend or friend of a friend do it, or you go with a basic text logo or clip art.  It get's you started and is "good enough".

As your business grows you get to a point in time where your logo may not represent who you are or it might look dated (I hear that 80's look is coming back).  What do you do now?  You still don't have a ton of money and you have even less time to work through some huge creative process.

John Hardesty, a good friend of mine, CEO of Tricycle Consulting and a really good designer to top it off, recently wrote a post on how to identify if your logo is in need of a makeover. Does Your Logo Match? 

If you determine that you qualify for a new look he has seven questions that can save you a lot of headache, time and money if you can answer these *before* you begin your design process.

1. What makes you different?

2. Who is your audience?

3. What emotions do they experience thru your service?

4. What brands do they associate with other than yours?

5. What are the first three words that come into your mind when you think about your business?

6. How about the first three words from your customers?

7. What are the standards in your industry that people recognize quickly?

Every good designer will walk you through some sort of process like this but it's a good idea to know the answers before picking a designer.

HP has been sponsoring a new section of Small Business Trends and as part of that sponsorship Anita Campbell has been going through the design process with Logoworks for one of her smaller sites - Help my logo is so 1999. She makes some interesting points about the old design of her site:

The logo — in fact that whole site – looks “hobbyish.”  So it has colored my perception of how I treat the site. It’s always the lowest priority. 

She then goes on to walk her readers through the design process.  If you'd like you can even check out the initial designs she got back and vote on which ones you like best.