A logo is a symbol or emblem used by commercial enterprises, institutions, and organizations to promote public recognition. In simpler terms, a logo can be defined as the face or brand of a business. Because a logo carries so much significance, the task of designing one becomes that much more important.

Logo designing, therefore, is a major step that a business owner might undertake. Be it a commercial business or an E-commerce business, logo designing is an extremely important task for all. Logo design is not just confined to businesses; it includes schools social organizations, and even individuals.

The fact is that every enterprise that wants to build a brand and leave a mark on public consciousness designs a logo. While schools and institutions might not put a huge effort into designing their logo, business owners who are competing in a fast-growing market spend a lot of money and time in designing their logos. The reason behind this is to attract enough consumer attention toward the design and direct traffic toward their business. Designing a logo, however, is not that simple. One needs to understand various factors and consider many things in the process of designing a logo. This article will discuss ten of the most important things one needs to consider when designing a logo. Before going into those ten magical logo design tips, however, let’s understand a few other things about logo design.

We will start with the benefits of logo design or managing a logo for a website, business, or organization. This section is especially for those who still have second thoughts about designing a logo or are unaware of the benefits of a logo for their business or organization.

Benefits of Logo Design

• Builds corporate identity:

  To keep it simple, let’s ask this question. How often do you remember a company’s full name and its business description while browsing the Internet or reading a newspaper? I’d guess not that often. In that case, you must realize that your audience will experience the same when it comes to your business. To avoid this issue, you need to build a logo that defines your business and gives it a recognizable image. A logo affects a user much more than content alone and it is more easily remembered. In short, a combination of name and logo better identifies you.

• Enhances branding:

  Every business dreams about making it big, and a very important factor is having a recognizable logo. . How do you identify a branded t-shirt? The answer is its logo. Nike or Levi’s is not the same until the product has its logo imprinted. Similarly, McDonald’s and KFC burgers are brands, and the logo says it all. In the process of building a business, it is important to build a brand, and this becomes easier with a logo. A logo boosts the brand it represents and, therefore, even television channels put much thought into making the most minute changes to their logo. The fact is that logos really do matter.

  

• Makes an advertising plan easier:

  A logo plays an important role in the task of advertisement. Imagine the gateway of a corporate mall or a company’s investor or partner page; the first thing that catches your eye is the logo. You cannot expect your users to read through the entire billboard while crossing the road, nor can you expect them to read a complete description of your business on someone else’s site. In these cases your logo says it all. In many cases, you cannot put up a long description for various practical reasons. Thus, a logo makes your advertising plan easier and yet impressive.

There are additional benefits to creating a logo, the above being the major ones. Now, after understanding the importance of having a logo design, the next major factor is how to create a logo design. If you are a professional designer yourself, by following certain logo design tips you can create your own design. If not, you can hire someone to design your logo. In both cases, there are important factors that you need to consider. Let’s talk about this briefly before outlining the 10 important points in designing a logo.

You design a logo:

When you design your own logo, you must first understand and implement certain requirements, while making sure that the logo conforms to other general considerations. The general considerations of logo design are the factors that you need to consider whether you are a buyer of a logo design or design it yourself. Make sure that you have used the name somewhere in the logo. When names are too long, designers tend to use initials. if you are designing a logo for your website, keep it in Jpeg format and a small size, so that the logo doesn’t increase your web site’s loading time. Make sure that the typography and color combinations work well before confirming your logo. These are some of the important factors one needs to consider when designing a logo. A few other considerations, some being major ones, are discussed in a later section.

You ask another to design a logo:

Now, when you are asking someone else to design a logo, there can be two cases: either you are hiring a designer to do so or going to a logo designing company. In both cases, you need to research and submit your exact requirements. Always look at past logo designs that the company or designer has done. Consider their views, as they are experienced and make your points as well, since the logo design is for your business. Address the issues of typography and color, review samples critically before finalizing, and make sure that the logo represents your business and has the capability to build a brand. When all these things are in place, you are ready to go. But first, there are other important things that you need to consider while designing a logo, and a list of the ten most important factors follows.

Ten Most Important Factors to Consider While Designing a Logo

1. Relevance of design with the business:

Just because you love the color yellow, you cannot simply build a logo in different shades of yellow. The background color, the symbols, in short the total effect, should be in sync with your business. For example, if your business is about cooking, your logo should talk about cooking and not about dresses, shoes or bags. Your logo is the emblem that the public will recognize. One of the main reasons behind your creating a logo for your business is building a relationship with customers and gain their attention. And this benefit is available only when you design a logo with more than 70% relevancy so that people identify your logo along with your business. This also helps building a brand for your business. As users tend to remember images and symbols more so than content, a logo serves to reach out more to customers. The logo should resemble your products in order to increase business. Moreover, the logo color should sync well with the website, so that the resemblance of both can also build traction.. Thus, the better the designs work together, the greater the value of the logo.

2. Future vision of business:

Everyone wants to be successful, and since designing a logo is such an important task for your business, you need to consider this throughout your design work. When you are designing a logo, you can design it for today and perhaps decide to change it tomorrow. Once you create a logo, however, it should be forever. Even though some companies may change a logo, they do it generally to offer a new look often when they are redesigning their site. This includes a huge risk, because your existing customers might not like the new face of your business. It is always beneficial, when designing a logo, therefore, to keep in mind your future vision. Suppose your business offers baby care products. This doesn’t mean that you should necessarily create a logo with a baby in it. You might like to expand your business to kids’ products and maybe young men and women products as well. In that case your baby logo will be irrelevant. You should, therefore, always consider your future vision for your business while designing your logo. Similarly, a company offering k12 education should not specifically create a logo with a k12 imprinted on it when the owner has plans to enlarge it beyond k12. Future outlook and a vision of growth for your business should be considered while you are designing a logo.

3. See through your users’ eyes:

Users of your products are always the priority concern for your business. You are building a business to gain traffic and earn revenue and both come about via your targeted audience. Since your business logo will be the face of your business, when designing a logo you need to consider your audience’s perspective along with your taste. If you are designing a kids’ site, make sure your logo is targeted for kids, and design something that attracts kids to your business. Similarly, if you are creating a design for professionals, you cannot get too funky while designing your logo. Below, examples provide some light regarding this. Though some professionals might be fun-loving and playful at heart in personal life, when you are serving professionals give them only what they expect. For example, even though you love extravagant colors, landing in an educational website with those colors may cause you to wonder whether the site will provide something of value. In that respect, always design your logo in sync with an audience’s thought. The best way to know this is to get reviews from a few people who can be your targeted audience before giving the final green light to your design.

4. Look at competitors’ sites:

Yes, you are hearing it right. You need to do research on your competitors and how they have used their logo. This, however, doesn’t signify that you need to create a replica of it; if you do so, there are many drawbacks. But what you need to do with this research is to think through the process of your business field. You will come across various business products, and one example could be fairness cream. There you might see that fairness cream for ladies should have baby pink and white in it, and when you browse across hundreds of fairness products, you observe only these two colors. The reason is not that one is copying the other, but rather that people relate fairness with white and baby pink, something that is soft and light. You cannot sell a black color fairness cream to a woman; she might love wearing a black gown to a party, but convincing her that a black logo fairness cream will make her fairer is something near to impossible. Another example can be most of the PMP certification related sites that have blue color as most prominent. The reason behind this is PMI, the institute that offers PMP credentials. Similarly, while looking at logos when you do research on competitors’ sites, you need to understand people’s ideas toward the product, and you need to create your logo considering this idea. While you might think that doing research on a competitor’s site for a logo design might not give you significant benefits, ignoring the same will be a mistake. Consider this an important point.

5. Create an immediate impact:

We are all aware of the importance of first impressions. Since we’ve established that your logo is the face of your business, it needs to be creative and attractive to pull customers in. You cannot offer a dull and boring logo and expect crowds to come to your business. Note that “dull and boring” here doesn’t refer to colors. The fact is, you need to be creative and use your imagination when designing your logo, while at the same time staying within the limitations given. For example, the Puma brand has a leaping lion in its logo. A Puma is a feline that resembles a lion. It identifies with personal power. Thus, when the company was considering this logo, they kept in mind all of these factors: the meaning, the symbolic representation, and the resemblance to their product. They have created their products ranging from shoes to bags and dresses with a selling point of power. This creates an immediate impact on users, and they instantly identify the Puma brand with a lion in its logo. Thus, you need to make certain that your logo is striking and impressive when designing your logo.

6. Keep it simple:

Someone once said “simple is beautiful,” and you need to keep this in mind while designing a logo. In order to fulfill the previous priority factor, you should not end up building a complex and difficult logo design. Logos should make users remember them, and in the process of making it impressive, if you make it too complex, it would be more difficult for your user to remember it. You need, therefore, to use a simple approach while designing a logo. You should not experiment with a host of different ideas in the same logo, as that might end up causing confusion. Try, therefore, to keep it simple and subtle. Your preference should be to make your logo easy to remember, and this is possible when you keep your design simple, which would include typefaces, color mixtures, and icons.

Below are the final and most important list of important factors while designing a logo.

7. Size is important:

Just because the logo serves as the face of your business, you cannot create a large icon displaying your business appropriately. Absolutely not. You need to focus on the size of your logo. You logo should not be very large because this might adversely affect your future promotional campaigns. Your logo should be of such size, shape and form that even if you resize it, it does not lose its impact. Besides, when you rescale a larger logo to a smaller size, the letters and the pixels will not be as clear and impressive as it actually is. Keep your logo small and clean and yet attractive. Also when you are using a logo for a website, you need to make sure that the logo is a smaller size so that it does not affect the loading time of your site. Thus, size plays an important role in logos and, therefore, you need to consider size as a priority while designing a logo.

8. Color combinations can be tricky:

While designing your logo, an important thing that you need to consider is color. Color mixtures, however, can be tricky. You need to be an expert or at least need to have knowledge of colors in order to use it for designing. Color combination can either enhance the look of your logo or completely destroy it. Be very careful, therefore, while choosing your colors. An ideal choice would be to go with subtle colors that are not too harsh on one’s eyes. Also, do not go for too many color combinations; select colors that harmonize with your design and complement the site’s theme colors.

9. Using clip art may not be a great idea:

Although incorporating clip art would be an easy idea, you should not generally choose that unless you have sufficient reason to do so. When you use clip art on your design, one of the major disadvantages is that it might look like a duplicate of a previous design created with similar clip art. This will compromise authenticity. Your logo needs to be unique and exceptional, targeted only for your business, and, therefore, using clip art might not be a great idea in this case. Your approach is to create an identity of your business and anything that resembles someone else’s will be a detriment for you. Make sure, therefore, that you stay creative and unique while designing a logo.

10. Logo should be long-lasting:

This subhead is not to confuse you but to tell you that logos are ideally created once for a company. Be sure, therefore, when making your choice in selecting the typefaces, the colors, the shapes, sizes or icons. Anything that is in vogue can be an obvious choice, but think about tomorrow. The same in-vogue choice might not be adored by people at a later time, and in fact considered old and not authentic. Consider, therefore, the longevity of your logo while designing it.

These are the major factors that you need to consider while designing a logo. After designing your logo, always make sure that you have it scrutinized carefully. Reviewers can include your clients, targeted audiences, and experts. All of these people will help to catch the follies of your logo design that you might have missed. With completion of a review session and perhaps some rework, your logo should be ready to get launched as the face of your business.