A logo should distinguish a company, offering it a visual identity.
A logo is an essential aspect of business marketing; it acts as the ‘face’ of your brand and is used as a way of referring to your company in marketing and advertising materials. A successful logo will be memorable and help consumers to quickly and easily recognise your company.
Here are a few things that you should consider when designing a logo:
Simplicity
Simplicity is a key factor to creating a logo that leaves a lasting impact on consumers. By making a logo simple, it will also help your logo to become more memorable and versatile. In contrast to this, a complicated logo could fail to engage an audience, whilst also being difficult to identify.
FedEx Logo. Between the ‘E’ and ‘X’ you can see that negative space is used to create the shape of an arrow.
Within the idea of simplicity, it is important to make use of negative space. One of the most popular examples of this is the hidden arrow in the FedEx logo, which is done so subtly that most people don’t notice it as first glance. This arrow is in the negative space between the ‘E’ and ‘X’.
Versatility
Your logo will serve a variety of different purposes and it is important that your logo is versatile. Your logo should be able to adapt to look and work effectively across a large variety of different media and applications. It should be designed in a vector format so that it can be scaled to any size. Also when designing it you should consider how the logo would look either printed in one colour, printed in black and white and printed in reverse.
Netflix Logo. The image above shows the usual Netflix logo alongside the Netflix logo that is used for all social media icons.
With corporate presence on social media becoming increasingly important, it is essential that your logo works effectively as a social media icon. This could mean that you will require a much more simplified version of your logo. One example of this is Netflix, which dropped the full title ‘Netflix’ in favour of a simple, red ‘N’ against a black background for all social media icons.
Recognisability
Nike Logo. Consumers would easily recognise the above image as the Nike logo despite it not being accompanied by a caption or title.
The simplicity of your logo will help determine how recognisable your logo is. The purpose of a logo is to give your company a brand identity , allowing customers to easily distinguish you from other companies. Therefore, if your logo isn’t recognisable, it isn’t successfully fulfilling its purpose. For example, the famous Nike tick often doesn’t need to be accompanied by a caption or the brand name for consumers to know what it is. This shows a strong brand identity.
Apple Logo. It is the iconic missing bite out of the apple that gives it deeper meaning.
As well as this, creating a logo that is completely unique will also help increase its recognisability. Uniqueness can be achieved by thinking outside-of-the-box and transforming everyday mundane objects into something distinct and recognisable through giving them character. For example, it is the missing bite in the apple logo that makes it iconic and unique, giving it a much deeper meaning.
Appropriateness
It is important that a logo is appropriate for its purpose. You should take your target audience into consideration, looking at their age, gender, culture etc. and use that to influence your choice of colour and font etc. For example, a child-like font and colour scheme would be appropriate for a children’s toy store, but not for a Law Firm.
Toys R Us Logo. The combination of the use of bright colours and a child-like font shows us their the target market is children.
Colour plays an important role in the designing of your logo as it carries lots of different meaning and can communicate various ideas around your brand identity. It is important that the colour(s) that you choose to use in your logo send out the right message about your company.
Timeless
Coca Cola Logo. This is the perfect example of a timeless logo as it has not changed in it’s history of over 100 years.
However, it is important to acknowledge that sometimes it is more important that a logo is timeless. For example, one of the most universally recognised logos is the Coca cola logo, which is neither simple nor versatile. This logo has hardly changed at all in it’s history of over 100 years.
Why you need a brand guideline
In order to maintain a strong brand identity, it is important to create a brand guideline that outlines a comprehensive collection of the dos and don’ts, colour guidelines for reproduction in all print mediums, digital media and web.
A brand guideline sets standards and rules that will ensure the correct usage by everyone handling brand communication and helps maintain a clear, consistent message and voice. It will provide variations to the logo to ensure that it is versatile, whilst still remaining in line with the specifications of the brand.
With a brand guideline, you will be able to keep the brand consistent, recognisable and ensure that all elements are used correctly and effectively. This will help your company look professional and help maintain a strong and powerful brand identity.
