People tend to say a picture is worth a thousand words, but when it comes to your business a logo is worth an entire novel. It is far more than a cocktail of letters, colors, and shapes. It’s the symbol that conveys the personality of your brand, the values you stand for, and the goals of your business to your audience that helps you connect with the people you hope to call your customers. Creating a valuable and impressive logo can both be very fun and complicated, therefore we offer you here a ten crucial things you should focus on, to make it as easy as possible.
Know your target group
Your logo is most probably the first touchpoint that people will have with your brand. Therefore you will ll want to ensure that it resonates with the people of your interest. Since your logo is meant to make connections with your audience, you need to have some idea of what these people do and don’t like. For example, a person looking for a lawyer probably wouldn’t be attracted by the bright and funky logotype. Likewise, a kids-oriented brand will unlikely use a dark, minimalistic logo design So, before you begin the process of creating your logo, you should have a clear understanding of your target audience.
Reflect your business
Every logo tells a story of your business values and your brand. Good logos have to be able to reflect the nature of your business by conveying a story and eliciting an emotional response from their audience, whether it’s joyful or trusting and secure. To do so, every detail used in your logo (such as pictures, text content, font, etc) should align with the business you run and the products or services you deliver. Your logo design should make a lasting impression on of your services on the market and the customers
Stake out the competition
Your competitors and their creative ideas can be an inspirational gold mine. You are welcome to use it so that you can get a feel for the kinds of logos your audience gravitates to (and the kinds they will probably stay away from). On the other hand, while it’s ok to take some ideas it is not ok to copy them. Aside from not being ethically responsible, creating a logo that’s identical to your competitors will put your brand at a disadvantage. To create the right impression, you have to make sure that your logo is unique, which means that its design should be based on a new concept that stands out from the crowd and is better in design than your competitors.
Decide on the type of your logo
There are a lot of different logotypes that are arranged into three categories: image-based, letter-based, or combination marks. As the experienced designers from Red Kite Design explain, choosing the right category depends on a few important factors including your niche, business name, and design preferences. Image-based logos are mostly used if you want to be associated with a specific product you offer or the value you hold. However, it will take some time before people learn to connect your business name with your logo. The other option is to use your whole business name, or, if it’s too long, go with a monogram of one to three letters, which then falls into the text-based logo category. The third one is a compilation of these two.
Use colors in a smart way
It is an intriguing psychological game of how colors play a crucial role in determining a brand’s message. Colors have their personality and “emotional baggage,” which conveys different meanings and makes your audience feel something specific. As colors have certain connections to specific emotions they also tell about the personality and identity of your brand by invoking subconscious associations in people’s minds. They can even influence your audience to behave in a specific way as a result so it is essential to pay great attention to choosing the combination of colors that will represent your business.
Pick fonts carefully
Unless you choose an image-based logo only, fonts are the next important component of telling your story. Similar to the psychology of colors, every font has its own personality too, and they can be broken down into several categories. One of the most popular fonts among the logos are serifs, sans serifs, slab serifs, and scripts. It is even possible to have a custom font created especially for your logo as Coca-Cola did. Have in mind the importance of not having a mismatch between the typeface you chose and your brand personality. If the choice of typeface does not speak for your brand, it may send wrong signals via something as simple as your logo.
Keep it simple
The simplicity of a logo is the key to creating a brand identity. When speaking of a simple logo, it implies that there should be the use of only a few colors, fonts, and other elements. The viewers should get the message right away, at first glance of the logo. If there are too many confusing colors and fonts or a complex shape of the logo, the viewers might not be clear on what to expect. A simple logo is designed to easily become a part of the memory and the audience does not have to make efforts to understand the company and business behind the logo again.
Check it Across Platforms
A good thing to do once you are getting to the final stages of logo design is to try it out on multiple platforms. Why? Because different screen sizes might stretch it in ways you don’t like or small colour variants in screens can also make it look rather different. The mobile phone network ‘Orange’ had a terrible issue with this on early mobiles as their “orange” logo would often look red meaning they had to change it to make it less vibrant, but then on PC screens, it would look too faded. Luckily things are different now but this is still something worth checking.
Leave Plenty of Blank Space
Empty spaces at the edges of your logo not only make it look clean and easy to see, but it also counteracts social media sites edge cutting. This is especially true with Facebook as you only get a circle shapes profile picture on all pages, so make sure your design has room for things like that to crop the image, but still keep the logo intact.
Make it scalable and impressive in black and white
Your logo will hopefully feature a variety of advertisements, that’s why it is important to make it easily scalable. This means that when scaled up to larger proportions like those used on a billboard it still has to look impressive. The same goes for when printed on a smaller surface such as that of a promotional product like a pen, the logo details must still be clear and visible. Another effective tip to create a powerful logo design is to make sure that it is equally effective in colourless versions. There are many instances when a logo appears without colors such as documents, faxed documents, newspapers, so your logo should make a good lasting impression on viewers of these ads.
Keep in mind that your logo is more than just colors, fonts, and shapes. Your final design shouldn’t just look nice, it should also speak about the brand image you want to cultivate. Working with professionals and focusing on these few things, makes the entire process significantly easier.