Your logo is the visual summary of your brand; a symbol of the trust and loyalty that your customers feel for your brand. Wherever your logo appears, your customers can rest assured that they are enjoying the level of quality they can expect from your brand. But how does your logo get to that point?
Although every logo is a unique representation of a company or brand and no two logos should be alike, there are several basic principles that should apply to every logo design to ensure its success as an iconic reminder of your company’s values and positioning. These are the aspects of logo design that a design agency like Koncept considers when seeking to differentiate you from your competitors and establish you as a leader of your industry while creating your unique logo identity.
A well designed logo should be:
Scalable
In order to maintain consistency, a logo should always appear the same in every medium that it is seen. This means that the logo should be recognizable when viewed at any size, whether printed on a small business card or plastered across a massive billboard, or viewed on-screen on your website. A logo that doesn’t work well at variable sizes is quite simply not a good logo.
Versatile
Sometimes its necessary to have variations of a logo that can be used in different situations – for example a stacked (tall) logo or a horizontal (wide) logo. In these cases, the two variations should have enough similarities (for example, the type treatment, logomarks, colors, etc) that they are unmistakably a part of the same brand.
In some situations, a logo may be needed in black and white, or a single color. A logo design should always take this into account.
Recognizable and Memorable
Some of the most recognizable and memorable logos are ones that can be identified at a glimpse. We all know and recognize the Nike swoosh or the McDonald’s golden arches or the Coca-Cola Spencerian script. These iconic brands didn’t get to that point overnight – they stood by their logos for years, and allowed their logos over time to become associated with the level of quality their brands delivered.
Appropriate
There is a fine balance between making a logo stand out in its industry and making a logo inappropriate for its industry. Although a logo should aim to be unique and recognizable, it should do so within the boundaries of what the brand’s customer base expects to see. If your product or service is considered elegant or classy, an eclectic, whimsical looking logo would be inappropriate. For a company that targets a younger, hipper crowd, an old fashioned logo would be inappropriate.
Other considerations:
Remember that a logo, although the primary visual representative, is only one part of a fully developed brand. It should always mesh well with other aspects of the brand’s visual identity – websites, business cards, printed collateral, etc.