Logos are undeniably important to brand-building. Your company’s logo is the identifying mark by which consumers will recognize your business. A good logo can help your brand to excel, whereas a poorly designed logo can actually hinder business. Good logo design, however, is not as easy as some might think.
Before even beginning the logo design process, you must first establish your brand’s personality. What type of business are you? What feelings to you want to evoke from consumers? The ideology of your company plays an incredibly important role in building your brand. Clarity is a key component for success. Your brand’s personality is an aspect of the overall identity that you are creating, and if you are not clear about that personality, then it will be difficult for your brand to maintain consistency. Consistency throughout your marketing is critical to successful brand-building. No one likes to be confused. A clear identity helps to define your brand, makes it memorable for your associates and consumers, and can help foster customer loyalty.
Once you have decided the appropriate personality for your brand, you are more prepared to create a spectacular logo. Generally, there are five basic principles for creating a really great logo.
1. Keep It Simple
Your logo should be quickly and easily recognizable. You want people to see your logo and immediately associate it with your brand. Too many colors or a complicated design is often distracting, and it can keep people from really connecting your logo to your brand in an instant. If people are required to think too long about your logo design, then it may prevent them from associating the design that you have created with your brand.
2. Make It Distinctive
Having a simple logo does not mean that your logo should be boring. You want to have a really cool logo. In fact, you want your logo to be better than cool; you want it to scream the uniqueness that is your brand! You need to have a logo design that catches the eye and holds the attention long enough to leave a positive impression on the memory. If no one can remember who you are, then your logo is not helping your business.
Color can be a very important factor for creating a distinctive logo. Different colors have different emotional associations, so you want to be careful to choose colors that are consistent with your brand’s personality. People are more likely to follow their initial emotional reactions to your logo. You need to be mindful of eliciting the intended reactions.
3. Keep It Focused
Creativity is awesome; however, you still want your logo to be appropriate to your brand. If your company sells cat food, then having a picture of a pair of shoes as your business logo really does not make a lot of sense even if that pair of shoes is the most incredible illustration anyone has ever seen. No one is likely to associate that awesome logo of the shoes with cat food, so everyone will be saying to each other, “Hey, don’t you just love that awesome logo with the shoes?! What’s it for again? This makes a rather ineffective sales strategy. Again, consistency is a vital component of good marketing and brand-building. Consider how your logo design represents your brand’s ideology during the design process, and you are much more likely to create a logo that is appropriate and representative of your brand.
4. Make It Versatile
One of the most stupendous things about logos is that you can put them pretty much anywhere, on pretty much anything. Thus, your logo needs to be designed so that it can be used in multiple mediums. Will it look just as glorious embroidered on the small pocket of collared shirt as it will plastered across a billboard? Printing in color may be prevalent, but what if your logo needs to be printed in black and white for something? Would it still look just as amazing, and still be just as recognizable, as it is in color? Keeping your creative design simple is definitely a major component of its ultimate versatility because your design must be easy for you to reproduce. From simple flyers and elegant business cards to t-shirts and coffee mugs, your logo is meant to be seen as many places as possible, so when you are designing logo, you should consider the plethora of places that you will want it to be able to go.
5. Make It Timeless
People and businesses alike enjoy being trendy, being on top of whatever is the hot new thing in pop-culture at the moment. However, the issue with trends is that they are really of the moment, and a moment later pop-culture has moved on to the next hot new trend, which can easily cause your formerly trendy logo to be instantly outdated. Do you want your brand to strike like a hot match and then burn out just as fast, just like some one hit wonder of a song that you heard on the radio last year (who sang that again)? Probably not. You more likely want your brand to be remembered for a very long time to come, and if you want your brand to endure, then your logo needs to have a sense of timelessness about it. This does not mean that you need to create some boring, antiquated design. You simply need to create a design that will transcend the trends, that will still be relevant no matter what the hot new thing is.
With these five basic principles to guide you, you can create a truly stellar logo that effectively represents your brand. This logo will help you to create your overall brand identity that you will utilize throughout your marketing strategies.
