Logo Design Advice

Here are some tips to help you during the logo design process.

I would never advise designing your own logo unless you are a qualified and experienced graphic designer, but here are some tips to give you a better understanding of what makes a great logo, or a poor one.

First of all, and you’ve heard it all before – less is more. Let’s examine a few of the world’s most successful brands.

All three of the logos above are as simple as it gets. If you didn’t already know what the company did, you probably wouldn’t be able to work it out just from looking at the logo. There is nothing wrong with that. A very common mistake when designing a logo is trying to explain the entire company with one graphic. Rather than telling the whole story with a logo, it should be used in conjunction with headlines, photographs, graphical treatments and copy. A logo is a stamp. A badge. A seal (no, not the animal). Whacking on website addresses, phone numbers or even the company address will greatly take away from the impact of the logo – and it looks very, very unprofessional. There is a reason why none of the top 100 companies on the planet have their web address in their logo. Google don’t even do that, so why would you?

Try not to overdo it with the special effects. Too many special effects in the logo shows that the logo has no strength on its own. It should work just as well as a flat logo – as the logos above do. There is nothing wrong with having a “3D” version of your logo, for web use or as an email signature – but it should never be the main version of your logo. Adding shadows, embossing, reflections and lighting effects these days will also make your logo look very outdated. Web 2.0 is over. It’s dead. You need to move on. Even Apple (logo above) has started reverting back to a flat logo recently – and they were one of the first large companies to adopt the Web 2.0 style.

Be careful of that “corporate” look that people always refer to. Basically they mean a sans-serif typeface, no spacing between the words, words separated by different colours, and some kind of “arrow” or “swoosh” tacked on for no apparent reason. There is absolutely nothing wrong with being original. Having a typeface that suits your industry is far more important than giving it a corporate look. I am very pleased that serif typefaces seem to be making a comeback. I used to suggest them all the time and the standard response I would get is “please change it to font like arial and then we are good to go”.  I am unsure why nobody wants to stand out from the crowd these days. It’s like they are content trying to fit in with another successful company’s corporate identity. You need your own identity!

That’s all for now – I will expand on these tips later on. If you have any questions about logo design, corporate identity or anything else design related, please contact me and I will be glad to put in my 2 cents worth.