This is my old logo, which I made myself.

I worked with Jason Polkovitz from Tiny Little Mind on my logo design. I selected him because his designs are simple and clean. Jason was patient and easy to work with. We went through a large number of iterations of logo designs. In fact, Jason wrote a blog post about it. As we went through the process, I realized that there are 3 important ingredients for a good online logo design:

In addition to a traditional logo, I needed a relatively simple square image that can be used on Twitter, Facebook, G+, LinkedIn and as a favicon on a browser tab. If you're like me and online presence is important for you, remember the simple square image that will end up serving as your brand mark. For my logo, it's a little marquis diamond that is between strategy and marketing.
The logo needs to be clear enough to still look legible, when shrunk for a web site. We tried fancy fonts for the words strategy and marketing. But this would not work as a web site image. So, back to the basics.
I wanted a logo that I loved and that my clients liked. So, I got feedback from as many different people as possible, not just clients. In fact, I posted logo candidates on Facebook a couple of times and emailed it to a bunch of people whose opinions I respect. My initial brand mark was a compass, and people liked it. But there were a number of things about it that were bothering me, like the resemblance to the cross hair of a shooting target, complexity of the image that made it difficult to make a favicon out of it, lack of relationship to Brillianta, my company name... Then my 11-year-old son pointed out that the compass looked like a male symbol - a circle with the arrow outside of it. This had not occurred to me. I was too close to it, to see the forest for the trees. I just didn't see it, until my son had pointed it out. You can see the logo candidates in my prior post called "How good is your eye for design?" if you're curious what it looked like .... So, I nixed the whole compass concept. That was a hard thing to do. Both I and the designer were invested in the compass. I liked the symbolism of navigation for research and strategy, which is what I do. But it just didn't work both conceptually - lack of congruence between the name Brillianta and the navigational symbol and visually - too complex and not compact enough to work as a favicon. And Jason, the designer, came through. He made me a diamond that I love.

Now, I am happy with the final product. The new logo is clear, simple, and compact, which are all characteristics of my value-added for my clients. So, there you have it. Three key ingredients of online logo design are:

Simple square image that ties into the logo that can be used on social media sites and as a favicon
Easy-to-read font that works, when shrunk for the web site
Get lots of feedback and trust your gut - don't settle for something you don't love. And if all else fails, throw away what you have and start over.

What do you think of my new logo? What are your lessons-learned in logo design?