Yahoo! weren't the only company to create a new logo last week. So did thousands of businesses. So did I.

I sympathise with everyone who has had the task of coming up with a unique combination of letters and colours that are expected to sum up the whole of a business. Logos are not my area of expertise, I’m afraid. Fortunately, when I was working with my designer on the logo for my new online shop, anniversaryandcelebration.co.uk, I found there is considerable guidance in the form of research and surveys on the do’s and don’ts.

Only the most international and well known of businesses can be recognised by a symbol like the Mercedes star, the Nike flash or the Apple apple, so the first question was the choice of font or typeface. Research said that serif fonts, the ones where the letters have accents on the ends, are associated in people’s minds with trustworthiness and tradition. Good for a bank you might think and, yes, Lloyds, HSBC, Santander and Barclays all use serif fonts. Maybe the government wouldn’t have trusted RBS so much if they’d taken more note of the lack of twiddly bits on their logo.

The non serif fonts are seen as contemporary and stable. Script fonts that look like handwriting are feminine and friendly. ‘Modern’ fonts, which are round and geometric, are considered chic and intelligent. So, for a site that offers gifts to celebrate silver, ruby and even golden anniversaries, I chose the reliable, traditional serif font.

Not that I could stop there. With thousands of businesses making use of every font, you have to do something to stand out. You're onto a winner if you can customise your font so that the mere shape of the letters is instantly recognisable, like Kelloggs or Coca Cola. You could write any word in their font and people would still associate it with that particular product.

Yahoo! chose to up the size of the final O and to scoop a bit out of the top of each letter (a bit so small as to be almost subliminal). I made the word Celebration italic. Not so inventive as Kelloggs or Yahoo! but, hey, I’m on a limited budget.

One thing companies usually have to consider is that this exciting new logo has to work across a number of media. It may be used on something as big as the side of a building, as odd as a tin can, as unreliable as newsprint, and as small as a smartphone. Because of the rise of the web, virtually all today’s top logos use crisp separate letters to avoid them coagulating into a blob when reduced in size. Not surprisingly, Google and Amazon show the way on this.

The problem I found with the Your Life Your Style logo, which was originally designed for a shop front and spread out the letters in a single line, was that it turned out to be too small when reduced to fit on a poster, let alone a smartphone screen. In the end, I had to have it redesigned to fit into a square shape

I’m fortunate that my new business will operate exclusively in digital media so my only consideration was making sure it would work when small. However, the name is way too long. I don’t know what I was thinking, when I came up with it! Well, I do, I was thinking of search engines looking for an anniversary and celebration website, but it didn’t help when it came to a digitally friendly logo. So I put it on two lines which I think works, just.

Then there’s colour. If fonts are all similar, you can make your logo more memorable by associating it with one or two particular colours. In fact, research shows that our subconscious judgement of a logo is based more on colour than font. It doesn’t have to be an unusual colour. The most popular colours among the top brands are blue, red and black/grey.

Red says action and energy while blue suggests dependability and strength in people’s minds. Black is considered neutral and serious. One thing is for sure, once you’ve chosen a colour you should stick to it if you want people to instantly pick you out. Kelloggs and Coke both use red, as do 29% of all top companies, but you would take a lot longer to notice them on the shelves if their logos were sometimes green, sometimes yellow and sometimes rainbow coloured.

I chose- actually, my wife chose- purple and pink, the colours of romance and femininity.

And there you have it. Will our logo convey the brand image we need for anniversaryandcelebration.co.uk? Will it work on a practical level? I dare say I could have done better if I’d had a £10,000 budget but, in business as in life, there always comes that moment when you know it’s not perfect but you have to let it go. A bit like this blog.