Logos are everywhere. For most of us, logos are an instant recognition of a company, it’s product or service offering. For companies, their logo is the cornerstone of their brand. And for those of us in the graphic design business, logos represent the most challenging of all design projects as we must create a single visual representation that appropriately reflects a client’s comprehensive vision of their businesses’ goals, expectations and aspirations. The trick comes in translation an entire ideology into a single picture that will be both uniquely original yet simple enough to trigger instant recall.
Here is a collection of our design team’s favorite do’s and don’t’s when it comes to logo design:
1. Do start with paper and pencil. Even though our designers have extensive training in graphic design using the best computer based tools such as Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop, our classically-trained illustrators go back to their roots of putting pen (or pencil) to paper. The benefit is two-fold: they can quickly create a wide variety of ideas on the fly, and at the same time it gets their creative juices going.
2. Do understand the client’s audience and brand appeal. This is especially important for the designer who may have never heard of, purchased or even seen the client’s product or service. Our designers spend a significant amount of time putting themselves in the shoes of the end-customer.
3. Don’t be led astray by the client. The client has hired us for our expertise and a big part of this is setting goals, managing expectations and in the end delivering a logo that will stand the test of time. When a client gives us vague feedback such as “it doesn’t speak to me” or “I’m not sure it will be memorable,” then it is our job to ask the right questions as well as share our knowledge of what works and what doesn’t. We’ve seen hundreds of great logos and equally bad ones, and our job is to steer our clients toward great ones.
4. Don’t be sucked in by the font-du-jour. Overly fancy, gimmicky or “creative” fonts are the equivalent of typographic bling. They will quickly become outdated, your messaging will likely get lost, and they are already way overdone by the time you’ve printed your first set of business cards. Whenever there are fonts in a log they should be simple and classic, and often sans-serif. There’s a reason helvetica is one of the most widely used fonts of all time, and even has it’s own documentary!
5. Do consider all usages of the logo before finalizing! Assume the logo will eventually be put on everything from business cards to billboards and everything in between. Can the design be easily produced in both vector and raster format? Different media such as web, 3-D signage, large format print production and embroidery will all require different formats of the same logo for production.
We often get asked, why does logo design cost so much, when I can get one for free on the web? Our answer to this, like most things in life, is that you get what you pay for.
