A business logo is more than just a part of a brand. It is the public face of a company, and it’s how customers and potential customers identify your business.
Designing the perfect logo that complements and resonates with your brand’s ideology can be very intimidating. A great logo should be distinctive, memorable, approachable, simple, and practical in form. However, so much work goes into designing a logo, from conducting competitive research to choosing fonts, colors, and shapes.
The right logo design should convey the brand’s intended message without compromising the company. But what exactly makes a good logo great? This post provides a comprehensive overview of the top tips when choosing a company logo.
1. The One-Second Rule
Some of the biggest, well-known brands have the simplest yet recognizable and memorable logos. They didn’t need to be overdesigned to look great. Often, logos with simple ideas become more timeless and won’t look dated in two or more years.
Therefore, you want a logo that’s immediately identifiable and memorable in approximately one second. For instance, as complicated as the Coca-Cola logo may appear, the curves and swoops with the red and white colors immediately make it recognizable as Coke. The same is true for the Apple logo with the renowned bite from the side.
These simple yet quality logo designs make such brands immediately recognizable among target consumers and prospective clients. The idea is to make your brand’s logo as simple, recognizable, and memorable as possible.
2. Tell a Story
The best company logos tell a story and convey a feeling to the target audience. Whenever a company develops an identity, they start with brand positioning and deep discovery. This idea comes down to developing a logo with context in mind. You want a logo design where your brand message will live and resonate with your audience.
The logo must also respond to basic company needs, like recognizability and the simple idea attached to your product or venture. Consequently, the perfect brand logo should have visual poetry and look to start a conversation or story. This will mean the finished product or service is never a surprise to your client.
3. Reverberate the Nature of Your Business
Every sole element of a great brand keeps pace with the nature of the company’s message. From colors and imagery to fonts and border designs, every aspect of the logo must positively reverberate and connect to your products and services. It is vital to ensure your logo remains in line with your brand and conveys the right message to your clients.
Strong brand identity in any competitive market relies heavily on the brand’s logo design. It must conform to your business practices and reflect your brand’s core aspects by flawlessly exhibiting the company’s values and traits. Customers will also be more open to contacting you easily and more recurrently.
4. Stand Out with Color
Colors play a substantial role in augmenting your brand appeal and communicating your message perfectly to clients. For example, brands that use the color red portray a passionate, active, and aggressive message to their clients. Often, brands that use red in their logo target younger audiences.
Similarly, blue portrays a message of togetherness and intelligence to customers. This could be the reason social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter use this color in their logo designs.
Understanding each color’s meaning will help you utilize them more effectively and flawlessly in your business logo design. Different colors trigger different emotions. Therefore, ensure you use the right colors cleverly to send the right brand message.
5. What’s the Competition Doing
A lot of research, detail, and effort goes into logo design. And you’ll find almost all your competitors (at least the established brands) have already gone through this process. You can make better-informed design choices by analyzing and understanding the message behind the competition’s logo designs.
Are there any common colors or fonts? Are competitor logos giving off a similar impression? If so, what is it?
Companies pour thousands of dollars into their logo designs and can sometimes end up with logos that don’t represent them well in their industry or portray the right message. However, by analyzing your competition, you understand what logo designs, colors, and fonts work best in your industry. Use them as checks and balances to create your logo design.
6. Be Direct with Your Designer
This is perhaps the most important aspect of designing your brand logo. Finding the right logo designer is only the first step to designing your logo. Sending the wrong message to your designer could distort the whole idea behind your logo. Therefore, ensure you mention all the details you need for your logo design.
We also recommend staying open to more suggestions that can help make your designs even better. It’s natural to be skeptical about letting someone have any free reign when creating your logo. But even just a little bit of trust from your expert designer always helps.
Remember, the designer has probably created successful logos for other companies. So, they know this job better than you and will offer their recommendations to help your logo stand out more while portraying the right message.
7. Securing the Rights
Whenever someone else (a designer) creates a logo for your brand, it is important to purchase full copyrights to that image and make it yours. The logo will form an integral part of your company. You don’t want the creator coming back later to demand more money from you or demand your brand stop using it.
Designers create logos with the expectation of selling all rights to those logos. Therefore, ensure you file copyright and trademark to protect and make it your own. These important actions prevent other parties, even the logo designer, from stealing the logo.
Ready to Design Your Company Logo?
Designing the perfect brand logo is reliant on several factors, like the ones above. It should be unique, instantly recognizable, and communicate your brand’s message. A valuable logo will fit effortlessly into your brand’s identity and look professional and personal to the brand. Following the tips above will help you reach this professional level with your logo design.
Get in touch for more information on logo designs that convey your brand messaging effortlessly and tell clients more about your business.
