7 Things To Keep in Mind While Designing The Perfect Logo

Copied

Table of Contents

“What is a good design?” This question can possibly get you a variety of answers because it is subjective. What looks top-notch for you might not even move another. Personal taste is something inevitable in this conversation, which makes its seem like an unsolvable riddle. But this is really not so true. To understand what makes a good logo design, you need to find a way to think about it objectively––which means without any personal feelings, opinions, or preferences influencing the outcome. You have to ask yourself, what does the logo communicate about the brand? How does it stand in the test of time? Will people remember it after a glance?

This blog will answer these questions and gives you a quick overview of the basic qualities and functionalities of a great logo. This way, you will ace the right way to design the logo that can lead you to success.

The functionalities of a good logo

In order to design a great logo, let’s first talk about what a logo is supposed to do. Logo design begins with an effective strategy. A good logo should deliver that strategy. A good logo is the perfect tool for attracting an audience to brands and creating the best memorable impressions. They use design to differentiate the products and services from their competitors and also communicate ownership of a brand’s stake in the market.

Though it’s common to feel overwhelmed by the subjective nature of visual aesthetics of logo design, consider some factors you can test while evaluating a logo––that’s how well it is serving its function. At the end of the day, a good logo should look good, but most importantly, it should also achieve its brand goals and appeal to its target audience.

The 7 characteristics of a great logo

The Right Shape

Graphic design is all about visual communication. The art of designing a logo entails both knowing what you want to say through it and which visuals can say that. Certain emotions and feelings are expressed through certain images and even the logo’s shape. Glossing over the scientific background behind graphic design, all you need to know is what characteristic each shape represents. Match your logo’s shape to the characteristics you want your brand to convey.

Circle and ovals denote friendly, casual, and inviting.
Curvy lines denote playful, relaxing, and intriguing.
Triangles denote authority, leadership, and dominance.
Sharp angles and spikes denote aggression, gritty, edgy, and offbeat.
Horizontal lines denote stability, reliability, and calmness.
Vertical lines denote prosperity, command, and success.

Ofcourse, you definitely can create your own original abstract shapes to convey something very interesting. You are even free to mix and match shapes to personalize them. For example, a square with rounded corners still conveys security, but it is friendlier than a square with pointed corners. Remember the apple logo?! Technically it is an abstract shape that has round edges and curves, which gives it attributes like warmth and casualness.

The Right Business Cues

Logos communicate need-to-know information about your brand. In a second, they accomplish what press releases, product descriptions, and about pages do through paragraphs.

Design cues that relate to your business will help convey information quickly, and they can range from easy to miss subtly to smack on the head bluntness. Looking at the more nuanced side, you can add “dog whistle” cues that only your target audience understands. For example, look at this Rhythville logo that uses a familiar font that most musicians will recognize, even if they are too far to read the “Music company” part.

Similarly, you can tell Dr. Trusty is a dentist even though it’s not blatantly mentioned in the logo. The tooth imagery is what makes it clear what kind of doctor they are.

If you prefer to have a bit more abstract imagery with the type of logo, you can even add a clear tagline to symbolize what you do. In logo design, that’s a perfectly acceptable way to have your cake and have it too.

The Right Colors

Just like shapes, each color has its own emotional meanings. These meanings are often fairly universal because they are based on the things that we see in real life. Red is the color of blood; it invokes feelings of urgency and alertness. Brown is the color of tree and wood; it denotes nature and land. And it’s a pretty safe bet for people all over the world to associate yellow with the warmth of sunshine. Colors also contain certain cultural associations. For example, in the US, green means money, and in Japan, Purple resembles evil.

Because of the primal reaction, color is one of the most valuable characteristics of a logo. Color alone can say how your brand comes across, even in direct contrast to other traits like typography or shape. Great branding also requires a consistent color scheme, so your logo should have the same colors as your website, in-store decor, your employee uniforms, and much more.

The Right Tone

There is a reason for cereals to use mascots, and law firms won’t. A promotion from a cartoon tiger doesn’t go so far with alleged felons. For an effective optimization of your logo, you need to outline your solid brand strategy and identify who your target audience are? Who are you trying to appeal to? What sort of brands do they identify with? The answers to these questions will help you easily choose the perfect logo characteristics.

Take a look at the logo of Flying colors, a paragliding company. Due to the nature of their industry, it targets mostly adventure seekers and extreme athletes, groups that tend to appreciate great landscapes like the background of the logo.

Or, if you want to take a humorous approach, use a logo that doubles-down on a joke. The company Lawncierge, whose company name is wordplay, matches the sense of humor with a unique and funny butler mascot.

The Right Typography

All the visuals can influence the vibe and mood of your logo. While that’s obvious for images in a logo, the same applies to the typography–– How the text looks will affect people’s perception of your brand as much as what it says.

Typography comprises all visual choices in text: name your font and text size, but also other details like serifs, boldness, first, weight, texture, and how you extend the L’s bottom and use it underline the rest of the text.

Fonts are not as clear as colors or shapes, although they do follow many guidelines. For example, sharp angles (like the M in metallica’s logo) still connote edginess and aggression. It’s best to trust your own gut reactions while choosing fonts, but here are some general basics to get you started:

Serifs are best for more professional or formal brands, while sans serifs suits for casual and carefree occasions.
Flaunting all the curves––script fonts are the go-to style for both fancy and fanciful brands alike.
Adds more significance to your texts by making them bigger than the others. You can use this to stress certain aspects of your company or even accept puns.
Use different varieties of fonts to separate types of text: a flashy, decorative one for your name and the one with utmost clarity, legibility for secondary text like slogans.
Handwritten fonts make you seem friendlier but not professional. While you choose typography, remember not to put your cart right in the front of the horse.

First and foremost, keep in mind that typography is all about readability and legibility. No matter how great your font is, if your people can’t read them, its absolutely not worth it.

The Right Trends

You should also bring the latest logo trends into your design to communicate that your brand is contemporary and relevant. Trends solely rely on repeated usage and popularity to be effective, and they keep changing every year. So, smart designers stay on top of what’s hot and what’s not.

For example, geometric logos follow a trend that combines warm colors and friendlier, shape-based compositions to create a design that is both modern and personal.

Look at this logo from the house of Gumdrops, a greeting card company that uses a trend of intentional, literal colors to bring a lively rainbow palette of gumdrops and appeal to a mostly feminine demographic

These logos also elevate the dominant trend of minimalism by stripping down even more with abstract shapes. This shift to abstract concepts can enhance the effect of minimalist logo designs and make them more and more appealing.

The Right Size

In recent years, many advertisers and marketers are coming around to the idea that having multiple versions of your logo is the best way to keep proceeding, known as responsive logos. That way, you can adjust your logo’s size wherever it appears, whether a tiny in-app banner or a massive highway billboard.

That doesn’t mean you should have different logos, but different sized versions of the same logo. Start with a small logo that is more recognizable with its utmost bare minimum elements. Then scale up every subsequent iteration. Make things bigger; add more elements or texts that use more intricate details.

We would recommend creating four different sizes, but make sure the style is perfectly consistent. We can’t stress that enough, though. All versions of your logo should be recognizable. Otherwise, you are undermining one of the greatest benefits your logo brings to your business.

All Time Design Graphics unlimited design subscription plans allow you to experiment with no pressure or constraints.