What makes a good logo?

So, what aspects are needed to create an effective logo that will remain relevant for years to come?

A logo is central to the brand and identity of any business. It ties the company together visually and creates a level of recognition that the outside world need to connect to your business. It’s a customers first visual trigger to tell them that they are in the right place and is essential to nurture that connection. If a customer feels a certain level of connection to your business, it increases trust and makes them more open to using your services or buy your products. Logo design needs to be simple, versatile, relevant, memorable and distinct in order to be effective for any business or organisation.

Start with the right foundations

Every logo needs to work for the right audience, the right marketplace and be relevant to the product or service you are providing. Think about who or what the logo is for, what job do you want the logo to perform or what message do you want it to communicate, and how are you different to the competition. If your main selling point is that you offer value, and the customers you are hoping to attract are primarily looking for that, there’s no point in having a beautifully constructed, luxurious logo that looks great in gold foil. There’s nothing wrong with taking a different approach, that’s the job of a logo. It also needs to be legible. If customers struggle to read the company name, they’re never going to find you in the first place. Below is a fine example, looks pretty cool, but how is anybody going to know who you are or what you are called. (Apparently it’s Bloco)

Simplicity

Keeping it simple is not as easy as it sounds, but is vital to keep the logo versatile, memorable and timeless. It’s tempting to try and get everything you do into the logo, but this isn’t its real job. The logo is there to give people an immediate sense of your business or organisations personality and an essence of what your company is all about. The most effective logos of all time such as Nike or Apple, are incredibly simple without a trainer or computer in sight. They work because customers don’t study logos, they take a quick glance. Simplicity means that once seen, they are easy to recall, therefore making them memorable. A single focus is important to keep the message clear.

Versatility

A logo needs to be able to work at the size of a postage stamp and the size of a billboard. If it’s too complicated, the detail will be lost at a smaller scale. It also needs to work in one colour. There could be many reasons for this, your logo could appear in a black and white printed document for example. If the logo has a lot of detail, gradients and overlapping shapes, then it just won’t work. The way we ensure this is not a problem, is by designing logos in black to begin with and only move onto the colour palette once we’re satisfied with the form. Logos appear on a wide range of formats, from social media icons to the side of a lorry. All of these and more need to be considered at the design stage to avoid such issues.

Relevance

A logo needs to be relevant to the market and the target audience that it represents. When we talk about relevance, we don’t mean that a bakery must have a picture of bread, or an airport needs an aeroplane in the logo. Good logo design should appear relevant without stating the obvious. An important component of this are the colours you choose. A company organising children’s parties, won’t suit the same colour palette as an accountant for example. Fonts also add to the personality of a logo. Times New Roman would feel pretty boring for a soft play centre, and you probably wouldn’t use a law firm who’s logo was in comic sans. A logo rarely communicates what a company do at first glance and by itself, but it needs to feel relevant once the audience have made the link.

It needs to be memorable

A logo needs to stick in peoples minds and be easy to remember, this is where simplicity plays a key role. As we talked about earlier, a complicated, intricate logo is harder to remember when people tend to glance at, rather than study, a logo. A logo also needs to be distinct in order to stick in peoples minds. There is a balance to be had, keeping the logo relevant to the sector you belong to, while making it different enough to stand apart from your competitors. If you can make a logo clever, and work on more than one level, then the logo becomes even more memorable. For example, we designed a logo for a music festival in aid of celiac disease. This is a disease in which people can’t eat anything with gluten, which most commonly comes from wheat. We combined a musical note with a wheatsheaf in one simple mark. This gives the logo an element of surprise, and a subtle touch of humour.

It needs to work as part of a broader brand identity

A logo very rarely appears in isolation, so you need to consider the broader brand styling. If your logo has parts to it that can be manipulated, re-sized or taken apart to create brand elements then you can create relatable brand assets which can be used across marketing material to tie the brand together and be recognisable even when the full logo doesn’t appear.

Summary

Logo design is a creative business and one of the most satisfying when done well. These basic rules are not in place to stifle creativity, and if you are an experienced logo designer then you can really start to bend them. But they are really important to ensure your logo is effective and work for the long term and in any format or situation where your logo may appear. Following these rules will ensure you don’t have any headaches with your brand further along the road.