Maria Hoffman, left, owner of Capisce in Lake Placid, and cafe manager Sarah Bailey pour drinks into cups stamped with Capisce’s hand logo. (News photo — Sydney Emerson)

LAKE PLACID — From business cards to signage to stickers and stamps, a logo is a business’s way of staking a claim both on products and in customers’ minds.

“With logo design and branding design and visual identity stuff, a lot of times you’re trying to connect the dots between who they are and who they want to be,” said Daniel Cash, a Lake Placid-based graphic designer with more than 15 years of design experience. Among other projects, he designed the logos for the villages of Saranac Lake and Tupper Lake.

“The logo is part of what we would call the ‘visual identity’ of a business,” he added. “Within that there’s a whole lot more than just the logo, and typically, when we work in the branding space, that goes beyond just the visual identity and more into the reputation and the way the business interacts with customers.”

Cash said that, on the designer’s end, much of the process is research — understanding the industry, location and context of the business. A visual identity should encapsulate not just where the business currently stands but also its goals for growth. When Cash takes on a new client, he identifies the business’s goals and problems before getting to work on the visual identity.

“A lot of the work of a graphic designer is problem solving,” he said. “Is it that (the client is) not getting noticed? Is it that people feel like, if it’s an existing business, do people feel like they’re stale and they want to shed the old and go into some new kind of thing?”

Kinnon Appleton, of Lake Placid, opened the popup Blue Line Bakery in 2023. (Provided photo)

A designer would then typically create a mood board, according to Cash. This involves assembling colors, styles and context for the client’s new visual identity. Next, in the design phase, he would create several logo options to present to the client, then work with the client to narrow down the options and revise them into a final logo. Even with extraordinary branding, though, Cash said that a business will not succeed unless it works hard to get its name out there.

“You can get a logo and you can have the best designer in the world do your logo, you can pay all sorts of money, but if you’re not going to put money behind executing the brand, then it doesn’t matter.”

Several small businesses in the Lake Placid area credit their logos with setting them apart from competitors.

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Capisce Coffee and Espresso Bar

Small Town Cultures products (Photo provided)

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For Maria T. Hoffman, owner of Capisce Coffee and Espresso Bar in Lake Placid, a strong visual identity was the first and most important step in opening her business. She said her logo, a hand raised in the quintessential Italian “capisce” gesture, was a chance to establish a unique personality while incorporating her Italian heritage.

Hoffman picked the hand because it reminded her of her late father and the Italian-American tradition of coming together over food.

“It brings a smile to our faces because when someone’s hand is up, there’s so much passion,” she said. “The hand, it seems universal. It seems most people can see that and they’re like, ‘Oh my gosh, my grandma used to do that,’ or ‘My great-aunt Marie did that.’ Everybody has a connection with it.”

It took over a year to finalize the logo, which was designed by Lake Placid native Georgie Knox. Hoffman wanted to ensure that she loved the logo before she invested in the shop’s sign, which cost several thousand dollars. Now, the logo has become so popular with customers that she’s looking into redoing the sign to make the hand bigger.

The typography in the shop’s logo is in Hoffman’s father’s handwriting, pulled directly from a letter he had written, which Knox digitized and incorporated into the hand logo.

“(In the letter) he was arguing about, someone had served food he didn’t like, so in it he wrote ‘capisce.’ I was like, there it is! He wrote it!” she said. “It’s pretty neat to see because he’d be really proud but also I’m never going to be like, ‘Oh I wish I wrote it differently.'”

The shop’s original logo design had the hand connected to the silhouette of the High Peaks, a kind of mountainous arm, but Hoffman decided that she wanted the shop to have a more timeless look. She and Knox simplified.

“It was really hard to not go the Adirondack way,” she said. “We see it, we breathe it, we’re Adirondackers, but how can we bring who we are to the Adirondack Park?”

Hoffman plans to have locally-sourced merchandise branded with the logo in stock by February, something that customers have been asking for since day one.

“Soon you’ll see the hand all over town,” she said.

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Blue Line Bakery

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Kinnon Appleton opened the Blue Line Bakery in September. A lean-to on wheels, the bake stand is open on weekends and roams around Lake Placid. Appleton posts the lean-to’s weekend location and menu on the bakery’s website and social media pages on Thursdays.

She said the bakery’s logo, which is on the sides of the lean-to, helps catch customers’ eyes.

“It’s easy to spot, with bright, bold, fun colors,” she said.

The logo takes the outline of the Adirondack Park — the eponymous Blue Line — and fills it with mountains, a river, trees and a gigantic pink cupcake.

“We wanted to make it really fun and bring in lots of elements from the Adirondacks,” Appleton said. “The cupcake, the top of it, we wanted to make it look like it was part of the mountain range.”

The logo was designed by Teddy Reiser, whom Appleton found through her husband’s podcast. Appleton had a few stipulations for the logo: She wanted the Blue Line incorporated and she wanted eye-catching, fun colors. From those guidelines, Reiser presented several different versions of the logo, and together, they tweaked it until they got to the final version.

Appleton said that the logo conveys the bake shop’s personality.

“I think when you look at it, you’re like, oh, this is cute,” she said.

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Small Town Cultures

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Cori Deans, founder and owner of North Country-based fermented foods company Small Town Cultures, is “very detail-oriented and visual” by her own description. She wanted her colorful products to do the heavy lifting in her brand’s visual identity.

“When I was first coming up with the concept for the business and the aesthetic, I looked at our competition and I decided to do the opposite,” she said. “There is a lot of farm branding, a lot of vegetables, a lot of squat jars with craft-looking labels, white labels. We went with a transparent label and a single-color logo to really make our products stand out and you could just see through the jar.”

The logo, which is a bowl with bubbles coming out of it, was inspired by the logos of Nike and Hill Farmstead Brewery — monochromatic, minimalist and sleek. Deans said that people occasionally mistake the logo for a whale, or else an abstract shape, but she doesn’t care as long as customers associate the symbol with the brand.

“You didn’t need to know what it was, but you knew it was us,” she said.

Deans went through about 20 rounds of edits with her designer, who she found on the freelance platform Fiverr. She said it took several months to come to a final decision, during which she consulted with family and friends to gather a variety of opinions.

The final version of her logo helped her to build a strong business identity, a business that has recently undergone further national expansion after several Small Town Cultures products were picked up by retail giant Walmart.

“I think our decision both with the logo and packaging has made us stand out from competition on the shelves,” Deans said. “It gives us a modern appeal, which fermented foods before were not branded in a modern way. … We want people to get hungry just by looking through the packaging at the product.”