A Day in Paradise

I posted this article on hedge fund logos on my hedge fund website blog. I thought I’d cross post here.

As anyone who works in the design industry knows, is that not all  logos are created equal & not all logo design companies create the same types of design. Our team at HedgeCo Websites has specialized in creating web designs and logos for hedge funds for the last 5 years. In that time period we’ve worked with hundreds of hedge fund managers to create logos and web site designs for their various funds.

One of the things that is often overlooked is that the choice of the design firm is almost more important than the design itself. Science has proven that if someone throws enough logos at you, you (eventually) will find one that you like. Even though you may find a logo that you like, the fact is that it will not portray your company the same way a logo designed by industry professionals will.

We are very proud of our work and, obviously, hope that you select the HedgeCo Websites team to help you with creating your hedge fund logo as well as your website and general branding efforts. Having said that, we have put together a few tips that will help you when choosing the designer to create your hedge fund logo.

Does your Logo designer understand your core audience?
Your logo and branding efforts identify you and your hedge fund to your investors. You need to work with a designer who understands what investors associate with, and what imagery/designs/typography they will respond positively to.

Our team has seen cases where a hedge fund manager works with a designer who is not familiar with the hedge fund industry to create a logo which may have been liked and approved by the hedge fund manager, but contained imagery or symbolisms which portrayed a negative image with perspective clients. Once a hedge fund has committed to a logo, it’s expensive and difficult to re-brand themselves.

Does your logo designer understand your strategy & hedge fund goals?
To understand the specific needs of a hedge fund logo and branding, the designer must understand the strategy that the hedge fund employs. A logo for a forex hedge fund will use different typography/imagery than a logo for a natural resources fund. The designer’s color palette will change from the Grays and Blues of wall street’s funds, to the greens and blues & yellows of natural energy, and the maroons and browns of Natural Resources Funds, and obviously in between.

Your Logo must be part of a larger branding effort.
Does your logo designer understand the bigger picture and branding needs of your hedge fund? Are they looking ahead and creating a logo that will work well in a 2-color business card, or integrate with a website?

One of our clients requested that his logo be formatted so that it not only looked good on his letterhead, business cards and website, but also on the sail of his yacht. Thankfully due to the flexibility of our designs, we were able to work with the fund to create a branding effort to work well with all their advertising efforts.

The colors that are chosen by your designer are critical to the success in branding your fund. Are the colors they are choosing meant to reflect well on the entire branding effort of you firm, or are they just throwing a design in front of you which will make you happy enough to approve the design and get them some quick cash, leaving you with a quick design that you will not be happy with in the long term.

In Conclusion
At the core of the issue is finding a designer who communicates with you through every phase of the project, then based on his understanding of the industry creating a logo that portrays your company’s goals and strategy.

I wonder how this works

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Tags: testingflock web2.0

Yesterday I read the an article on Network Neutrality on CNN.com. The article was written by Craig Newmark of Craigslist and was VERY wrong.

Here’s part of what bothered me:

Here’s a real world example that shows how this would work. Let’s say you call Joe’s Pizza and the first thing you hear is a message saying you’ll be connected in a minute or two, but if you want, you can be connected to Pizza Hut right away. That’s not fair, right? You called Joe’s and want some Joe’s pizza. Well, that’s how some telecommunications executives want the Internet to operate, with some Web sites easier to access than others. For them, this would be a money-making regime.

That is a VERY misleading analogy on many levels. Here is my counter-analogy.

Steve runs a Pizza delivery service. When his service started he used to charge per-pizza he delivered. The prices weren’t that high, and since I’m too lazy to go out and get my own pizzas I appreciated the service. I didn’t eat as much pizza as I would like to, because Steve’s surcharge was always in the back of my mind.

Once Steve got enough clients, he expanded his business and realized that he could offer a better service by charging a flat-fee. Using this new business model everyone paid a flat monthly fee, and the cost of people who ate a pizza every night (like me) were subsidized by the people who only ate 1 pizza a month.

Everyone had hot pizzas, everyone was happy.

A couple months ago Gpizza opened, they offer all the regular pizzas, but also offer the GSuper 4-course MegaPizza. This pizza comes in 4 parts which are served by midgets waiters. The midgets waiters need to be transported with the pizzas and then brought back to the Gpizza store.

For the first couple months Steve is happy to provide his loyal clients with Gpizzas, even though it did require substantially more resources for Steve to transport the Gpizzas and midgets. As Gpizzas become more and more famous, people start to complain that their Gpizzas are arriving cold, the midgets were tired from the slow ride and weren’t as enthusiastic with their serving the pizzas.

Ypizza, which has been using Steve for 10 years, sees how much money Gpizza is making and decides to make the Ysuper 4-course MegaPizza and one-ups Gpizza by providing a dancing leprechaun along side the 3 midget servers.

Steve sees that he will not be able to provide any service if more Pizza places start offering MegaPizzas. He has two options:

1.Revert to a Per-pizza business model and charge his clients for the delivery of MegaPizzas
2.Charge pizza places for the delivery of MegaPizzas

Gpizza catches wind of this and prepares the “Pizza Delivery Guy Neutrality” bill which mandates that Pizza delivery guys are unable to charge pizza shops extra for delivering MegaPizzas.

Now with silly analogies out of the way, a bit of mythbusting:

The Network is NOT Neutral
Craig says “So let’s keep the Net as it is now: Neutral, fair and free.” The network is currently NOT neutral, it’s free for ISPs to do what they want. Network Neutrality regulation will not free anything, but will restrict the ISPs in the service they can provide.

Bandwidth / Latency costs Money!
High Bandwidth/Latency applications cost money to transfer. The money has to come from somewhere. Creating laws that stop ISPs from charging the Googles, YouTubes and Skypes of the world mean that YOU and I will be paying for it instead.

YouTube/Google/Skype and Craigslist are making money
They can allocate a bit of money to provide good pipes.

When Google rules most of the Cable in the US
How neutral do you think that will be?

Reuters writes story about guy who films himself skiing down an escalator and then posts it on Youtube.

At T-4 you would think I would have better things to do… well, I pulled an all nighter last night and am about to take apart my desk.

Today is moving out day…

Funny Stuff. Funny youtube Mac vs. PC video included.

I too am highly disturbed by this video…

thanks ub

The best car show ever… bbc put some of them up on youtube… This series they try to destroy a toyota pickup truck. Includes parking it on top of a 25 story building and then demolishing the building underneath it. Good watch

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hzRLG8dA-E
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4IzCg-HGgiw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwYbLThZbrw

I recently tried to find any Top Gear DVDs in region 1 but couldn’t find anything. I just wish that BBC would create a channel just for top gear so that we can subscribe just to that. Kudos anyway!

Gearing up for the Amazon.com release of the Ancestor Novel, Scott has convinced Jian and Rhumkorrf to start blogging!

This is a part of a larger guerrilla marketing campaign which focuses on making Ancestor an Amazon.com best seller on April 1st. So if you have a minute, throw a couple links on your blog, and make sure you’re in the virtual line to grab Ancestor as soon as it hits the virtual shelves!

Woohoo, new Rambo!

John Rambo has been living a secluded lifestyle in Bangkok and salvaging old boats and tanks for scrap for twelve years. But when a group of volunteer aid workers bringing supplies into Burma disappear, a relative of one of the missing missionaries begs Rambo to find them. He heads off with a small team of aspiring heroes to locate and rescue them.

tip from doug

Hiro Nakamura from heroes is actually a code warrior in real life. His profile can be found at this great wired article.

“I’ve been programming computers since elementary school, where they taught us, and I stuck with computer science through high school and college,” said Oka. “ILM offered me an entry-level position at its Marin, California, headquarters, but they refused to fly me out for the job interview. Fortunately, Microsoft also was interested in hiring me and they flew me out to Seattle, then down to San Francisco and back to Providence.”

Oka ended up taking the job with ILM and remains with the company to this day, despite his hectic TV production schedule. He said ILM was a great place to start in the industry because he learned a lot about the pipeline and how the company worked.

If you haven’t watched Heroes get started now, we’re only half way into the first season. Hiro Nakamura and his very broken engrish is definitely the hero!

A lot of the software Oka wrote became applicable to other shows. For example, the computational fluid dynamics he worked on in Terminator 3, which allowed liquid metal to take shape, handled the drool in Dreamcatcher. His surface-cracking technology from Star Wars: Episode II worked well for Pirates of the Caribbean.

In other geek news the IT Crowd is coming back on Jan 5th. The DVD is also out (with L33T subtitles), just incase you’re wondering what to buy me for Christmas. If you’re wondering what the php connection is… IT Crowd consultant Yoz frequents #phpc and is rockstar programmer at ning PHP coders are also geeks and enjoy geeky shows like Heroes and IT Crowd.

Happy Holidays!

I wasn’t very impressed with this song in the tomb raider music video (what was with the flying elephants), but this version totally rocks!

Don’t know how long they are going to last… but you can view them all online here and here. Also got Family Guy, South Park and American Dad.

Just got back from watching Crank. What can you say? It’s craaaazzzzy! A couple quick comments.

• The first time I’ve seen google product placement. Between the scenes there were shots from google maps where it panned across the city and then zoomed in on a street/car/house. In the corner was a “Maps provided by google” logo
• Nokia, having phones ring with the “nokia sound” is just as annoying as hearing the windows sound when laptops boot up.
• You really should watch this with proper surround sound set to the appropriate volume
• We have been desensitized to violence
• We have not been desensitized to Sex and Drugs

Now I want to rant about violence in movies. This movie has a lot of Sex, Drugs and Violence. The “funny” thing about it, is that I was really only “shocked” by the Sex and Drugs. This sort of goes along with the rant about how cartoons are being edited to remove scenes where cartoon characters are chugging on a cigar. This is a cartoon where the characters repeatedly blow each other up with various forms of dynamite/fireworks but we’re offended when someone smokes on a childrens show.

So apart from the crazy ride this movie was, I think that this movie has was some form of social commentary. Why is it “alright” to create action and laugh about people blowing each other up, when it’s not “alright” to laugh at people shooting themselves up with huge drug cocktails and the running around town with a huge erection? Obviously when I say “alright” I mean socially acceptable.

Of course combine them all and you have some great scenes, like where he is involved in a car chace / shootout while getting a blowjob. Gives a whole new meaning to shouting “Keep your head down!”

Another highlight was when he needed the poor indian guy’s taxi so he threw him out of the taxi and yelled “Al Quida”, and have the crowd jump on the poor guy and beat the crap out of him. I know, I shouldn’t have laughed… but again, I think this was yet another peice of social commentary by the director.

Stella’s words when I showed her Apple’s new ipod nano line up.

As everyone has already heard Steve announced a nice new line-up of products, and for the first time in a while I’m pretty happy with what they are offering.

The conversation went something like this:

“The pink one is 4 gigs, for another $50 you can get double the space with the new 8gig nano. Then again, pay another $100 on top of that and you can get 10 times the space with 80gig ipod.”
“Cool, can I get that one in pink?”

I’m not sure if the engraving is new, but apple gives some ideas of what you can do here. There is a very cool ajaxy system that you use to create your engraving, you type your message in and the image is updated in real time. A bit resource intensive, I would have opted for a flash applet to do the rendering to save that trip to the server.

Just to prove that you can bump into anything on the internet, here’s a nice tutorial on How to grow Marijuana. Pretty interesting production system this guy has.

Thankfully, the fact that I can’t even grow a radish probably keeps me out of trouble.

Now that I’m on the topic, everyone has got to see Saving Grace. It has one of the best tag lines in movie history “Grace’s doctor is worried about the state of her joints.”

That’s all for this weeks TGIF blog post… now back to work.