Good Logo Design & Branding
Your logo design and branding should create something different and unique from anything else out there in the business world and therefore separate you from your competitors in a positive way. Remember, your logo is often your company’s first impression. Also, your logo design impacts your customer’s perception of your brand and overall attitude and purchasing decisions in regards to your product and services. So, it is important that your logo stand out from the rest.
Your logo must be original and correspond or correlate directly with your unique branding attributes. It should speak clearly about what you do and your brand.
“Since a logo is the brand’s visual keystone — the most concise expression of its personality — an honest approach to defining its DNA is imperative to a successful result.”
Deborah Harkins (creative director at crowdsourced design website 99designs)
The Basic Qualities of Good Logo Design
The best logos all have these qualities…
- Simplicity
Logos need to work in black and white as well as in color and they need to work in different sizes. For example, you may need to place a small logo on a baseball cap and use that same logo on the side of a bus. The logo might be required for use on a web site as well as a newspaper or on TV. To achieve all of this simplicity is required.
- Appeal
A logo can be a typographic treatment or a symbol (or both) but it needs to be eye catching and appealing to the viewer. The FedEx logo is a great example of this type of logo:
- Communicative
Companies use logos for brand recognition. Have you noticed how the arrow on the Amazon logo points from A to Z? Amazon does sell all kinds of books, don’t they?
The Importance of Color
Typography is the art and technique of arranging type to make written language legible, readable and appealing when displayed. The arrangement of type involves selecting typefaces, point size, line length, line-spacing (leading), letter-spacing (tracking), and adjusting the space within letters pairs (kerning).
- Red: energetic, sexy, bold
- Orange: creative, friendly, youthful
- Yellow: sunny, inventive, optimism
- Green: growth, organic, instructional
- Blue: professional, medical, tranquil, trustworthy
- Purple: spiritual, wise, evocative
- Black: credible and powerful
- White: simple, clean, pure
- Pink: fun and flirty
- Brown: rural, historical, steady
Infographic taken from the “The Psychology of Color in Logo Design“