Why you need a logo and what to consider when designing one.
הפריטים הדרושים
When establishing a business or organization, it’s important to have a visual identity. One of the pillars of any visual identity is a logo, which will ostensibly act as “the face” of an organization. In this guide, we will explore the logo as an extension of a brand and the visual elements that comprise them. Once finished, you’ll have the knowledge to move forward and design your very own.
Why do you need a logo? Why does it need to be good, specific, etc.?
Let’s start with the basics. A logo is often the initial contact and one of the most recurring messages your business or organization will put forth, so it carries a lot of weight in terms of visually communicating with your audience. This communication is immediate, and is processed largely on a subconscious level, underscoring the importance of developing an effective design. A logo identifies your products or services as specifically yours, giving you the opportunity to link with people through recognition. Recognizing a logo does not require traditional literacy, extending its reach to young children and others, providing for a wider web of influence. This guide will walk you through the process of creating a logo from an initial concept to choosing and considering the design of your elements.
What makes a successful logo?
A successful logo:
- stands apart, is distinctive and unique.
- is memorable. It will be recognized by consumers and have staying power in their memory.
- is versatile, working at any size, layout, and placement.
- reflects your brand identity.
- is timeless.
But how to make a good logo?
Here are some general questions to ask yourself when evaluating your logo options:
- Immediacy: Can it be read and understood in seconds? Is it clear what your business does?
- Is it memorable? Will your customers be able to remember it?
- Is it simple? Is it visually striking without clutter and messiness?
- Is it versatile? Can it be applied to all your brand’s needs?
- Is it timeless or trendy? Will you have to redesign it in a couple of years?
- Is it unique? Does it set you apart from your competitors?
- Does it appeal to your target audience?
- Is it legible? Can it be read easily?
These questions will be helpful as you design and incorporate multiple elements. As you continue to build upon your logo’s complexity, returning to such questions will be helpful throughout your process, especially with further reflection.
Know yourself: establishing your brand
Before jumping into the process of designing your logo, you first need to have an established sense of your own brand identity and your target market or audience.
Brand Identity
Brand identity is essentially a brand’s personality, its values, and how it represents itself. Brand identity helps customers identify your brand, distinguish your products and services from competitors, and is vital to building brand recognition.
Target market
Who are you trying to reach with your marketing? Having some degree of specificity and focus with regard to your audience allows you to communicate more directly and efficiently. Demographic information like age, gender, education, location, and socioeconomic status are all potential considerations, among others. Having an audience in mind allows you to make messaging more personal, but be wary of setting your sights too narrowly and excluding people who might be interested in your business. On the other hand, don’t cast your net too wide or you might come off as generic. Make sure to align your logo and its message with your audience’s needs.
Seek Inspiration
- Brainstorm: get all your ideas out without initial editing.
- Consider your audience and put yourself in their shoes.
- Tap others: bounce ideas off colleagues and friends. This will sharpen your sense of your audience.
- Mood board: create a visual language for the kind of branding you want to put out.
- Consider the pros: what are successful, established brands in your field using for logos?
Consider competition
- What are brands in the same field using for logos?
- How are they engaging your target audience? What makes you/How can you be different or stand apart?
What’s your style?
What design aesthetic fits your brand? Does it make sense to adopt a traditional or modern visual sensibility? Should it be ethereal, eccentric, lighthearted, or stoic? What kind of visuals will suit your product and your brand identity?
Types of logos
There are a number of basic forms a logo can take that variously incorporate images and/or typography. You may find it helpful to first decide what kind of format you’re interested in using for your logo. It may also be the case that your process considers the design elements first before putting them into a set format. Experiment with these possibilities. Here we will explore some types of logos so you can better understand your options. You may find that you have use for each type of logo and these variations can be a part of a greater familial system of logos for your brand.
Wordmark (aka Logotyopes)
A wordmark is exclusively typography-based. This leads to an often minimal logo design. Many successful brands use this type of logo. With wordmarks, lettermarks, and letterforms, the emphasis on typography requires the design be that much more intentional, as there are no other elements to support their efficacy. Your words (and how they look) matter here. A tagline may be worth considering to provide more context. When multiple design elements are placed together in a set form, it’s called a “lockup.”
Lettermarks (a.k.a. Monogram Logos)
Similar to a wordmark, this kind of logo uses a company’s initials. Television channels often rely on acronyms that stand in for the full name and adopt a monogram per popular usage. As is, lettermarks may not communicate all there is to know about your business (may not be the most informative). You may consider a tagline or use a monogram as a variation of the original wordmark in placements that don’t require as much context.
Letterforms
Letterforms, like their siblings wordmarks and lettermarks, are typography-based, but only utilize the first letter of the company’s name. These are ideal when the company is known or to use as a variation for their ease of scalability. Baseball teams often use letterforms on their hats as a part of a system of logos.
Pictorial marks (logo symbols)
This type of logo relies solely on images or symbols to communicate with the public and are only truly effective once brands reach a certain level of ubiquity. Even then, successful brands will often include text elements in advertising to underscore their identity. This can also be a variation on your logo where typography is not deemed necessary. Think about where you may see logos with no typographical elements and if they ever exclusively appear as such. Clothing can be a place this type of logo is used with greater frequency, as is tech hardware (think Apple computers).
Combination mark
This type of logo merges images and typography. The design can be simple or complex. For this style of logo, it is essential to find a font that feels on-brand and identify an icon or image that speaks to your business. Think about the visual weight of the icon you select and how it balances with your text. Does one overwhelm the other? Balancing different elements and their weights can be challenging. Your icon and font should be cohesive, sharing a similar or complementary style. Refer to the basic principles of design when putting it all together.
Typography
Assuming typography will be a part of your logo, font is a key selection in the design process. Logos that are image-based only really work once brands have reached a certain level of ubiquity or fame, and even then successful brands will often include text elements in advertising to underscore their identity and use pictorial variations in specific contexts.
Choosing the correct font or fonts for your logo is an often overlooked yet critical step to successful logo design. Like shape and color, different typographies convey specific feelings and moods. This selection can completely alter the message your brand is attempting to communicate. Before wading through the endless available typefaces you could use, it is vital to first understand the four main types of logo font styles and how to choose your own.
Serif logo fonts
Serif fonts are typefaces that have small lines or pen strokes stemming from the letters. These decorative lines improve legibility and give the letters more character, often exuding a sophisticated and subtle feel. Serif fonts suggest a more historical experience, evoking feelings of institutional repute. Serif typefaces are best used as business logo fonts if your brand is attempting to convey elegance and tradition.
Sans serif logo fonts
Sans serif fonts are those without serifs. These fonts tend to come across as a bit crisper and cleaner, and their simplicity makes them easier to pair with other, more eye-catching fonts. Sans serif typefaces are often considered more modern fonts and are often used to represent cutting-edge design and futuristic innovation.
Script logo fonts
Script fonts are typefaces that are designed to replicate the artistic flourishes of hand lettering and calligraphy. They may be associated with tradition and can have a handmade or decorative quality. These should be used very intentionally, especially if cursive, as these fonts can challenge a logo’s legibility and therefore decrease the logo’s accessibility.
Display logo fonts
Decorative and standout fonts are a great way to grab attention and solidify an image of your brand in your audience’s consciousness. Funky, futuristic, retro, or geometrically diverse logo fonts are a great marketing tactic — think stencils, glyphs, and other visually unique letterforms. Still, they should only be used as the primary component of a simple logo design — mixing display fonts with other typefaces is difficult and has the potential to create a messy and confusing logo for your brand. Display fonts are best used minimally when creating truly memorable logos.
Shape and form
Next, we’ll move to the logo’s form or shape. A successful logo design uses the psychology of shapes — or how specific shapes subliminally influence the human mind — to underscore brand identity in a powerful, compelling way. Some shapes inherently carry symbolism with them, such as hearts or stars. While choosing a shape for your logo, consider your brand identity and the way the visual structure of shape can support it. As you think about your own logo design, consider the following shapes and what kinds of characteristics they are associated with. Basic shapes, like squares, circles, and triangles, have an impact in their simplicity.
Squares are:
- Predictable
- Sturdy
- Reliable
- Balanced
Rectangles carry many of the same associations but are:
- Expansive
- Broad or tall
Round or circular forms are:
- Soft
- Continuous
- Humane
- Representative of eternity and unity
Triangles can represent:
- Direction
- Motion
- Stability
- Warning
Spirals are:
- Natural
- Spiritual
- Dynamic
Abstract shapes are:
- Often minimal
- Artistic
- Intellectual
You might also consider organic shapes, which often carry specific references to existing forms in nature that have clear associations.
Color
Color is a powerful tool of attraction and communicates to us as viewers in a deeply influential way. The color spectrum carries with it a range of emotional invocations that affect us, regardless of if we are aware of them or not. Whether you start at the beginning in warm or hot colors or shift toward the latter area of the spectrum where tones are cooler, they all carry the power to affect human behavior. This concept is called color psychology.
How can logo colors affect your business?
In marketing, colors can be used to motivate or inspire, thus impacting a consumer’s impression of a brand and whether they can be persuaded to consider that brand for future purchases. Research shows that this area of design in particular is profoundly influential. Some research even suggests that between 62-90% of consumer decisions are based on color. Keep in mind that the colors you choose for your logo might factor into other aspects of your brand’s visual identity and thus will appear in other parts of your brand presence.
As such, choosing the right color for your brand is a crucial point in leveraging your logo design toward your desired ends. Should you choose to use more than one color, pairing colors along the color wheel is its own process. You might consider using complementary colors, which are at opposite sides of the color wheel, or analogous hues, which are next to each other. Other considerations like contrast are crucial to legibility and will impact how your logo is read and received.
Colors carry associations and meanings that can be wide-ranging. There are common color associations that may resonate in a broader way, though the effects can vary across experiences and cultures. Individual associations will surely play a factor in how your color choices operate within a person’s psychology, but returning to your target market as a general focus will aid you in making effective choices. We’ve outlined some common associations with basic colors here:
Red
- Love
- Passion
- Danger
Orange
- Energy
- Warmth
- Autumn
Yellow
- Sunshine
- Youth
- Optimism
Green
- Nature
- Wellbeing
- Success
Blue
- Serenity
- Security
- Cold/coolness
- Water
Purple
- Royalty
- Nostalgia
- Luxury
- Ceremony
Black
- Sophistication
- Graphics
- Drama
- Darkness
White
- Modernity
- Cleanliness
- Minimalism
Composition
Whether you have designed your logo by choosing individual elements and combining them or adopting them cumulatively, the composition or layout of these will play an important role. Consult the basic design principles and how they interact when bringing it all together.
These are:
- Emphasis: Does one or more element need to be more pronounced?
- Hierarchy: What is the most important thing for someone to see? And what is the order in which someone sees each element?
- Balance and alignment: Do the weight of the elements make sense in creating a cohesive whole? Which orientation (top to bottom, left to right) makes the most visual or practical sense?
- Contrast: Does the logo melt together? How does the difference between elements allow them to stand out and be read most easily?
- Repetition: Can using multiples of an element or effect strengthen your intent?
- Proportion: What role does size play in your design? Do the relative sizes of elements make sense?
- Movement: Is the design dynamic? Does it carry the eye?
- White space: Can your design benefit from space between elements? How can you design empty space to keep it light and legible?
- Unity: Does the design come together as a cohesive whole?
You may end up designing variations on your logo for various usages and placements. The orientation and presence of your elements may not be the same in every instance. Experiment with variety. This may be a creative exercise that reveals something you had not previously considered.
So, there you have it — the ultimate guide to logos. Designing a logo for your business is simple and accessible with Adobe Express. Have fun designing!
