Your logo is a visual representation of everything your company
stands for. Think of McDonald's golden arches or the Nike swoosh-these
two impressive logos embody these companies well. But many companies
still skimp on developing this key identity piece.
Ideally, your company logo enhances potential customers and partners'
crucial first impression of your business. A good logo can build
loyalty between your business and your customers, establish a brand
identity, and provide the professional look of an established
enterprise.
Consider Allstate's "good hands" logo. It immediately
generates a warm feeling for the company, symbolizing care and trust.
With a little thought and creativity, your logo can quickly and
graphically express many positive attributes of your business, too.
There are basically three kinds of logos. Font-based logos consist
primarily of a type treatment. The logos of IBM, Microsoft and Sony, for
instance, use type treatments with a twist that makes them distinctive.
Then there are logos that literally illustrate what a company does,
such as when a house-painting company uses an illustration of a brush in
its logo. And finally, there are abstract graphic symbols-such as
Nike's swoosh-that become linked to a company's brand.
"Such a symbol is meaningless until your company can communicate to
consumers what its underlying associations are," says Americus Reed II, a
marketing professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School,
who's conducted research on the triggers that lead consumers to
identify with and become loyal to a brand. But building that mental
bridge takes time and money. The Nike swoosh has no inherent meaning
outside of what's been created over the years through savvy marketing
efforts that have transformed the logo into an "identity cue" for an
athletic lifestyle.
Growing businesses can rarely afford the millions of dollars and
years of effort required to create these associations, so a logo that
clearly illustrates what your company stands for or does may be a better
choice. Even a type treatment of your company's name may be too
generic, says Placitas, New Mexico, logo designer Gary Priester,
principal of gwpriester.com, the Web arm of design firm The Black Point
Group. Priester believes customers should be able to tell what you do
just by looking at your logo.
Before you begin sketching, first articulate the message you want
your logo to convey. Try writing a one-sentence image and mission
statement to help focus your efforts. Stay true to this statement while
creating your logo.
But that may not be enough to get you started. Here are some
additional tactics and considerations that will help you create an
appropriate company logo:
- Look at the logos of other businesses in your industry.
Do your competitors use solid, conservative images, or flashy graphics
and type? Think about how you want to differentiate your logo from those
of your competition.
- Focus on your message. Decide what you want to
communicate about your company. Does it have a distinct
personality-serious or lighthearted? What makes it unique in relation to
your competition? What's the nature of your current target audience?
These elements should play an important role in the overall design or
redesign.
- Make it clean and functional. Your logo should work as
well on a business card as on the side of a truck. A good logo should be
scalable, easy to reproduce, memorable and distinctive. Icons are
better than photographs, which may be indecipherable if enlarged or
reduced significantly. And be sure to create a logo that can be
reproduced in black and white so that it can be faxed, photocopied or
used in a black-and-white ad as effectively as in color.
- Your business name will affect your logo design. If your
business name is "D.C. Jewelers," you may wish to use a classy, serif
font to accent the letters (especially if your name features initials).
For a company called "Lightning Bolt Printing," the logo might feature
some creative implementation of-you guessed it-a lightning bolt.
- Use your logo to illustrate your business's key benefit.
The best logos make an immediate statement with a picture or
illustration, not words. The "Lightning Bolt Printing" logo, for
example, may need to convey the business benefit of "ultra-fast,
guaranteed printing services." The lightning bolt image could be
manipulated to suggest speed and assurance.
- Don't use clip art. However tempting it may be, clip art
can be copied too easily. Not only will original art make a more
impressive statement about your company, but it'll set your business
apart from others.
- Avoid trendy looks. If you're redesigning your old logo,
you run the risk of confusing customers-or worse, alienating them. One
option is to make gradual logo changes. According to Priester, Quaker
Oats modified the Quaker man on its package over a 10-year period to
avoid undermining customer confidence. But don't plan to make multiple
logo changes. Instead, choose a logo that will stay current for 10 to 20
years, perhaps longer. That's the mark of a good design. In fact, when
Priester designs a logo, he expects never to see that client again.
One thing you need to be careful of as you explore color options is
cost. Your five-color logo may be gorgeous, but once it comes time to
produce it on stationery, the price won't be so attractive. Nor will it
work in mediums that only allow one or two colors. Try not to exceed
three colors unless you decide it's absolutely necessary.
Your logo can appear on a variety of media: signage, advertising,
stationery, delivery vehicles and packaging, to name just a few.
Remember that some of those applications have production limitations.
Make sure you do a color study. Look at your logo in one-, two- and
three-color versions.
