When you think about major brands like McDonald’s or Coca-Cola, what’s the first thing that crosses your mind? Is it a particular product? Perhaps a certain venue you’ve visited recently? While both of these answers might be correct, it is far more likely that an image of their logo pops up in your mind. For this reason, it is more than obvious just how vital a logo is for your company’s identity and branding. With this in mind, here are top four tips you should apply when coming up with your business logo for the first time.
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Show it to someone else
First of all, make sure that your logo doesn’t turn out to be inappropriate. In other words, what might seem completely simple to you, might have a bad connotation you’ve yet failed to grasp. Moreover, your judgment might be clouded by your expectations, seeing as how you start off already expecting to see what you’ve intended. The solution to this problem is quite simple – show your logo to a couple of people (even if they are complete laymen) and ask them what they see.
Think about the context
One of the most important things you need to keep in mind is the fact that your logo won’t ever appear on its own – so the background also plays a huge role. Therefore, it is important to envision your logo on a wall of your office, on the package of your product, on your website’s homepage and on your promotional products. This is a vital step in this creative process, yet a lot of designers simply seem to forget about it. Therefore, before you design logo, make sure to have all those marketing efforts like t-shirt printing and billboard advertising in mind.
Make it industry-appropriate
According to one survey, well over 90 percent of all the information a person receives comes from visual means. Therefore, if your logo is industry-appropriate, it will become your most important tool. For instance, if you were to see a logo with a cross, you would assume that it belongs to a clinic or a religious organization, whereas, if the logo was to contain a book as its centerpiece, you would assume that it stands for an educational organization or a library.
Keep it simple
Another important thing you need to keep in mind is the fact that a human mind subconsciously ignores shapes, signs and symbols it can’t understand. Of course, simple isn’t always better, but complicating your logo too much by having different shapes and sizes intertwine can confuse the observer. Needless to say, this is not something you want to have associated with your brand in any way. Furthermore, keeping things simple allows you to introduce some changes later on, when and if you estimate that your brand needs a bit of a face-lift.
Conclusion
You need to keep in mind that, while the abovementioned four tips are quite helpful, they’re merely pointers that are supposed to push you in the right direction. At the end of the day, you have the full creative freedom when it comes to your own brand and logo, which means that your decision carries the most weight. After all, making it in the business world is far from easy and not everyone’s made for success.
