At the heart of your company’s branding is your logo. It appears on everything from your website to company letterheads, merchandise to email signatures.
Your logo is literally everywhere, so you need to make sure it’s communicating the right messages about your business. Does it reflect who you are, and is it memorable enough to help you stand out? Let’s take a look at what makes a powerful, dynamic brand logo.
Expert tips for effective logo design
Designing a great logo is trickier than you think. In fact, it’s actually much easier to create a terrible one by accident. You’ll discover this when designing one from scratch, or trying to an update an old logo that now makes you cringe.
Here are some tips that should kickstart the creative process, and to start talking to your branding design team about:
- Know your brand identity. Before you do anything, you need to get down on paper some essentials about your brand’s personality, voice and ethos. Keep it to just a few words (i.e. fun/authoritative/soft/family-friendly/innovative). You should also know your target customer, as this ‘persona’ is who your branding will need to appeal to. Doing this essential groundwork will help you to understand what it is your logo needs to communicate.
- Be unique. If you can put a twist on a concept, be clever, funny or bold – you have a good chance of standing out from your competitors. Get it right and your logo will be memorable and instantly recognisable.
- Use a professional designer. Unless you work with an expert, an idea that works in your head could come out looking amateurish and even a little silly. Designers understand all about proportion, colour and symmetry, which balances the design and makes it look professional.
- Choose colours carefully. Colour communicates ideas and meanings, so it isn’t a superficial consideration. It really can make or break a design. This is another area which really does require the insight of a trained designer. You need colours that work well together and reflect your brand identity, as well as being visually arresting. And don’t forget about the power of white or negative space – not every part of the logo has to be ‘coloured in’ Remember that your brand will be tied to this colour palette, so choose carefully.
- Avoid the clichés. Just because you’re a plumbing firm, it really doesn’t mean that your logo should include a spanner somewhere. Similarly, just because a design trend is popular at the moment, it doesn’t mean you have to use it. You’re much better off creating something unique and timeless.
- Keep it simple. Your logo is a multi-tasker, needing to say and convey lots of different things at once. It’s easy to throw the kitchen sink at it, ending up with a cluttered mess of a design that ends up communicating nothing. Remember that a simple logo can be hugely powerful, so make use of your branding team to help you strip the design back to the core concept.
Need an expert eye on your ideas for a new logo? Get in touch with the branding and design team here at Ambos Digital.
