Starting up new businesses is no easy feat. Around the world, companies are building up and attempting to put their foot in through the door in order to generate revenue and become household names. Becoming a strong business requires having a strong logo and in this article we discuss Ensuring Your Logo Encompasses Your Brand.
The logo design process isn’t as simple as picking a font and bright colors. Brands need to make sure that their identity is clearly portrayed in their logo in order to be memorable to viewers and easily identified.
Your brand identity consists of elements that should be unique to your business. This consists of your logo and logo variations, brand colors, fonts, style guides, as well as your identity on social media.
Your logo represents who you are. It’s how you want your customers and followers to perceive your brand, as well as the services and products you provide. It makes you unique and different from your competitors.
No matter the size of your company, a strong brand identity is crucial. Larger companies such as Google, Coca-Cola and Apple have strong, memorable identities, and can be used as inspiration when you’re getting your business going.
But how do you create this strong identity? How do you make sure that your logo encompasses who you truly are as a business?
Table of Contents
Start At The Beginning
The logo does not equal the brand. Start at the very beginning and figure out:
- Who you are?
- Why you do what you do?
- Why should people care?
- What does your business stand for?
- What does your business want to change in the industry?
To create your identity, logo and overall branding, you need to have a clear vision on what your company stands for. Once you figure out who you are and why, you can dive into creating the visual aspect of your company.
Tell a Story
With everything in Marketing, you have to be able to tell a story in order to capture people’s attention.
Create a story for your brand and as a result, the rest will fall perfectly into place.
This is especially helpful if you’re struggling to create visuals for your branding or logos.
Simple is Best
Many of the larger companies in the world have simple logos. They make use of a minimum number of colors and because of their reputation in their respective industries, people are able to identify them just by their logos.
The best branding is known to be timeless. Once you’ve picked the best name possible for your brand, create a logo that is simple but stands out.
Use eye-catching colors (but colors that are relevant to you) and start the process.
Evoke Emotions
What do you want people to feel when they see your logo? If you’re in the food and beverage industry, you most likely want people to feel a sense of hunger.
Colors such as yellow and red are known to evoke hunger – that’s why many fast-food chains make use of this combination.
By using your name and typography, you can also try to evoke the emotion you’re looking for.
Using playful fonts will portray your business in a light-hearted manner; using straight, formal fonts will show you as direct and all about business.
Keep It Minimal
Brand names and logos need to be simple and recognizable. Create your name first – keep it minimal and easy to remember.
Make sure that it’s something that is easy to pronounce as well!
Make it Personal
When creating your name and logo, you want to make sure that it’s personal and unique to you.
The best company names across the world will speak to what the organization does using just a few words that’s easy to understand and remember.
A good tip is to use an everyday concept rather than using a combination of words.
Focus On Your Target Audience
Create an identity that appeals directly to your target audience. Fast-food chains make use of colors and visuals that they know will stand out to their potential customers.
Your brand identity and logo need to reflect what you will be providing to your audience and why they would want to do business with you.
Don’t Overlook SEO
Consider Search Engine Optimization when choosing your name and logo. Is the chosen name something that’s already a common phrase?
Is the name used by your competitors for their products or services? You need to create an original name so that you can easily rank on search algorithms.
An excellent company name and logo will help you stand above your competition.
Keep Your Name Broad
Essentially, it’s vital that your brand is future-proofed. If you start to sell other products along the road, and this overshadows what your company was originally about, it may cause some confusion, and you would have to think about rebranding.
Create a name and logo that’s broad enough to prevent this from happening.
We can’t imagine anything worse than creating a name for yourself and then having to change it with the logo 5 years later, when you’ve already made an impression on customers!
Ask Your Employees
There’s nothing wrong with asking for help from those you work with! Brainstorm with your colleagues about words, designs and colors.
Spark a creative conversation with them and get as many ideas as possible. If you want your logo to encapsulate your company as a whole, what better way to do so than to have the whole team work together?
Tests in Various Sizes
Memorable logos are versatile. They look good when scaled down, they look good when scaled up. This is an important factor to take into consideration when creating your logo.
The quality of the visuals needs to be high-quality as you will be placing your logo in a number of places – marketing materials, print ads, billboards, social media ads and banners and so much more.
Pay attention to your font as this will surely be affected the most when resizing. When you scale down on your logo and the font is illegible, you’re heading in the wrong direction and it’s time to rethink the strategy.
Originality is Key
It’s easy to just pick a logo you’ve seen before and create something based on that, but in most cases, the two logos will end up looking very similar.
You have to draw the line between taking inspiration and flatly copying the design elements of the logo you are using as inspiration.
Your logo needs to be based on your own creative ideas.
While creating a logo isn’t the easiest task in the world, it also doesn’t have to be impossible to get done.
If you put in the work and do your research, you’ll save time and effort and will be able to create a logo that perfectly encompasses your brand.
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Author Bio
Fazreen Razeekis from web design agency Grafdom. Passionate about education technology, writing for various publications. A graduate from Edith Cowan University, Perth, Australia, he holds a Bachelor’s Degree with a double major in Marketing & Management.