What makes a Great Logo
The best logo designs share many of the same characteristics, even though they are all unique and different in their own way. To make certain that you
get a great logo, there are some common guidelines that you should follow. And always remember the following tips when creating the perfect logo for your business:
- Can your customers relate to it ?
- Does it tell a story to your customers ?
- Does your logo explain what you do ?
- Does it reproduce easily ?
- Does it catch your attention and match well with packaging or website design ?
1.) Can your customers relate to it ?
Make your logo for your customers. It sounds simple and very easy thing to do but it is a commonly overlooked pitfall of many organizations.
Understand what a great logo is for your organization
The first thing to understand is that your idea of a great logo, may not fit for your industry. If your industry is conservative like banking, finance, or conulting you will probably want to have a conservative logo that fits the industry. On the other hand restaurant, auto, and construction logos often include digital art or illustrations.
Know how you plan to use your logo
In some cases you will want to know how you plan to reproduce your logo. This will help you to define possilbe color restrictions or additional costs for reproduction. It is common for certain logos with intricate colors or designs to have significantly higher printing costs.
The best logos avoid common mistakes and pitfalls
Some of the best photos and award winning logos are simple, 1 color, text based illustrations. Some great logos, are intricate multicolored pieces of digital art. While other logos
are more simple and created with just 1 color or 2 colors.
Some of the most recognizable logos look like they only took a few minutes to create. One great example of this is the Microsoft logo, that is most often displayed as a text based logo in 1 color. The Microsoft logo may be one of the most
recognized logos in the world.
Know how you want to use your organization name within a logo. It is not always necessary to include the full name of your company in the logo. To use our Microsoft example again, you can see that Microsoft does not include the "Inc.", which would represent the full name of the company. You don't need to always include the corporate identifier that
is associated to your official company name.
Define your business in 10 words or less
Having a clear understanding of your business message is critical to help a designer convey that message artistically. A designer will use adjectives, or short phases that you provide to paint a picture or portray a message to your prospective customers. The message should be clear, and understood prior to building your logo. If your small business offers fresh homemade food and not organic frozen ice-cream, it's important for the designer to know.
Even multi national companies should have a very clear and consise business plan. This will help management to focus on to core strength of the business.
The color green is often used to represent "fresh" produce type of logos, which the color white is often used to depict cold items, or frozen objects.
Do your research, and know what you want
While it isn't the job of a CEO to know how to build a logo, the CEO should provide a clear direction and business message for the company. Put together a brief message for your organization, complete with some adjectives that help to identify your message. Our service offering is great because we give you many designer perspectives to help you get the best logo design you can possibly get.
