Designing a logo is a challenging task. Although a necessary step, it can be daunting to come up with logo options based on market research alone. Most likely you won’t stumble upon some creative magic through that process alone, and you will need to have a thorough exploration of the company background, values, client expectations and experiences. Ideally seeing your logo should evoke the emotion customers feel when using your product or service. Narrowing down your logo to a final design and then launching it to the world can be a very rewarding experience, but sometimes just a logo may not be enough. Large companies with multiple management and departments require a thorough ‘brand identity system’ that provides a unified vision which helps everyone in the company successfully build the company brand. To help you better understand the difference, let’s define a logo, an identity and a brand.
LOGO – is the central, visual, graphic element that helps customers discover, share, and remember your company’s brand. It is usually in the form of a unique iconic graphic, element, mark or symbol.
IDENTITY – is the visual devices used to represent your company. It is the various components that together, create a consistent visual image across a wide range of deliverables, including, stationery marketing collateral, packaging, signage, messaging, web, among others.
BRANDING – is the perceived image or subsequent ‘emotional response’ to a company, its products and its services. A brand is a set of expectations, memories, stories and relationships that collectively create a consumer’s decision to choose your product or service over your competitors.
Here is our 10 point LOGO CHECKLIST
This basic overview and checklist will help you to better understand the importance of good logo design, how it integrates into your brand and the various elements that must be considered when you’re ready to create your own unique look for your business.
- SIMPLE
Is your logo clean, simple to view and have high impact?
Sometimes a design that is too tricky, cute, or detailed for its use or application, can risk losing your audience before it even gets your message out.
- RECOGNIZABLE / MEMORABLE
Your logo should be easily recognizable and create a lasting impression.
Simple logos are often the easiest ones to identify, understand and remember. A refined and distilled logo should be able to catch the attention of a viewer zipping by a billboard at 70 miles per hour, or on packaging on a crowded store shelf, or any other form of marketing or promotional advertising. We all know how effective and quickly recognizable the “swoosh” is. You know, the one that an athletic shoe company uses. We don’t even have to mention the name, do we?
(Interesting fact: In ancient Greek mythology Nike is the winged goddess of victory – the swoosh symbolizes her flight take-off)
Logos that engage a viewer’s brain and make them think, can have a higher memorability factor. This can often be achieved by a combination of elements, such as, the graphic mark itself, uniqueness of the name, the typography used, and the colors.
- CUSTOMER FOCUS
Does your logo speak to your customer’s interests or needs?
The oldest logos, used in the first civilizations, were the seals that were made from clay, and evolved to wax. These identifying “symbols” were used mostly to authenticate legal documents, and were always symbolic of the owner – monarch, royal courts, monasteries, industry guilds. Today however, we want logos to represent not only our companies, but evoke a feeling among customers that it is “their brand”. The smaller the gap between the way you and your employees see your brand and the way it is perceived by customers means the better you have been at branding your organization. This should also be one of the considerations of your logo design. Are you going to see it in the same way that your ideal customer sees it? Will they look at your logo and identify themselves and their experiences with it?
- UNIQUE
Does your logo stand out from the competition and eliminate brand confusion?
Logos are about versatility in a cluttered marketplace, and being distinctive from your competitors. It’s difficult to be 100% totally original, but it’s important to be different and unique within your competitor’s industry, category, or geographic region, even more so than the brand universe at large.
- CREATIVE DESIGN
It is very important to identify any requirements and brand considerations that
impact the format, copy, and visual elements of your design, such as:
Format: Print, web, social media
- Layout: Considerations in accordance of your overall brand guidelines
- Visual: Colour palette, typography, graphic elements, photography, icons
- Localization: Language or regional considerations or requirements.
- TIMELESS
Will your logo stand the test of time?
Does your logo have a long shelf life and will it be around 10, 20, 30 years from now? Trends are great for the fashion industry, but a well-designed logo should have at least 10 years of staying power and can last decades longer. Consider Heinz, Levis and the oldest – Twining’s Tea of London, all brands identifiable by their logo, name and quality of their products. The point is to have your new logo last as long as possible to maximize your investment.
- APPROPRIATE
Is your logo relevant and credible to the audience?
How you “position” the logo should be appropriate for its intended audience. For example, a child-like font and color scheme would be appropriate for a logo for a children’s toy store, not so much for a law firm.
Some logos do a good job of alluding to the industry, or a problem the company solves. For example, many real estate companies have home or sale sign graphics in the logo. Some logos are very descriptive, similar to law and accounting firms that will have the names of partners in the logo ending in what they do – Smith, Franklin Law firm. However, a logo does not need to necessarily imply what a company does. Restaurant logos don’t need to show food; no automobile manufactures have cars in their logos. So just because it’s relevant, doesn’t mean it can’t have association. It is only by association with a product, a service, a business, or a corporation that a logo takes on any real meaning. It derives its meaning and usefulness from the quality of that which it symbolizes. If a company is second rate, the logo will eventually be perceived as second rate.
Product quality and company credibility are also important to consumers. If your logo can communicate your quality, expertise and trustworthiness, that is a considerable advantage. Consumers are impressionable and have expectations and assumptions of certain types of businesses. You need to project something that’s credible.
- ADAPTABLE
Your logo design needs to easily be applied across a wide range of media and applications.
For your logo to be adaptable your artwork should be created in a digital vector draw program, allowing it to be easily scaled proportionately, as well as to be saved in different digital formats for various applications. The most common of these programs, used by professional designers, is Adobe Illustrator.
Important considerations when designing an effective, versatile logo:
- Does it look just as good in black and white as it does in colour?
- Does it work well when reversed (white on black)?
- Will it work on different mediums like newsprint, vehicle wraps, labels, fabric?
- Will it work well with different applications like screen printing, embossing, or sand-blasting?
- Does it still work well when reduced to the size of a postage stamp?
- Does it look great even when it’s large scale, like the size of a billboard?
- Is there a horizontal version (for web banners), a stacked version (for signage), or can one optimized version truly accommodate both?
Designing a strong logo in black and white is always a great way to start. This way you’re more focused on form and function. Color can be applied at a later stage. Don’t forget that if you are on a tight budget, then keep the color theme to one or two strong colors, which can be very appealing visually, and less expensive to print.
- EXTENDABLE
How adaptable and scalable is your logo as you grow larger and into different markets?
Do you have a solo brand or is it part of a larger brand family; or is there a possibility of a sub-brand launching in the future? Apple designed the IPod, the IPhone, and the IPad, piggybacking the success of one product on the next by using their existing brand and extending it and the logo over a wide range of products and accessories. So consider whether your logo will ever need to morph and adapt to accommodate various divisions, regions or languages?
- CHARACTER
There is a saying, ”Anybody can love your looks, but it’s your heart and personality that makes someone stay with you.” Does your logo hint at the personality and depth of character behind your brand?
Have you ever looked across a room and thought “I want to know that person – they look interesting”? That is the same effect that you want a consumer to feel when they see your logo – that they want to get to know it / try it out.
Does your brand have a long history or interesting story that can be expanded on with a visual logo?
The ultimate goal is for a logo to have a common, clear, and unifying interpretation, but also have layers of meaning or symbolism that emerge over time as people experience the brand. Logos that create a sense of curiosity and incite you to explore deeper can engage a viewer’s brain, and even allow them to place themselves and their experiences into the scenario.
STILL CONTEMPLATING IF YOU SHOULD HIRE A SEASONED PROFESSIONAL DESIGNER TO DESIGN YOUR BRAND LOGO? Here is more reason why you should…
MITSloan Management Review have an article on “The Power of a Good Logo” in which recent research found that effective corporate logos can have a significant positive effect on customer commitment to a brand — and even on company performance.
http://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/the-power-of-a-good-logo