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What you should know about your logo

A good logo is an essential part of advertising your business. It's that single graphical element that gives your company or organization's name a uniqueness.

Yet, so many logo designs are also a constant headache or drastically miss to perform their intended function. The first thing we need to understand, is that a logo is a symbolic representation of your business. It is an element that should be easily recognized and therefore something that the viewer remembers and associates with your business. Just as you would want your sales representatives to look their best, so should your logo.

A good logo design contains a visual symbol and a company name. Often, the two are combined as a single unit. For example, the Coca-Cola logo is one that has the visual elements combined with the company name. Pepsi on the other hand, uses an icon and a name separately. Some logos have been around for so many years that the company no longer needs their name displayed. I'm sure you could easily associate a company name with icons for Mercedes, Nike, Shell, Chevy and others.

What all of these successful logos have in common is their clean lines and simple graphics. Yet, while their simplicity is obvious, there is much more to them than meets the eye. The simplicity is not only for easy recognition, it avoids many headaches when it comes to reproduction. If your logo would only be printed on a business card, then let your imagination go wild. However, a logo gets reproduced in a wide variety of places such as newspapers, magazines, vehicles, illuminated signs, billboards, hats, t-shirts, pens, mugs and more. Each one of these places has their own limitations and rules for reproduction.

While printing onto paper has the capability of reproducing fine lines and details, plastic, cloth and ceramic surfaces do not. On top of that, if your logo depends on color for indentity, places such as newspapers mostly print in black and white. Even when color is printed in newspapers, the reproduction methods often have a hard time with registering the colors accurately or have severe limitations in matching your corporate color. It is therefore essential that when a logo is designed, it needs the flexibility to keeps its identity even when reproduced in single color such as black. If your logo contains a lot of detail, chances are the image will suffer severely when it needs to be reproduced in small sizes such as pens or on surfaces such as cloth.

When choosing colors for your logo, you also need to be aware that different reproduction methods have severe limitations for matching color. Special colors such as those chosen from in ink selectors (ex. Pantone®) are often difficult and sometimes impossible to reproduce with process inks such as those used for printing magazines. When special colors are used and you want your logo color matched, be prepared to pay more (sometimes a lot more). If you're thinking of getting some baseball caps embroidered with your logo, get ready to face challenges and disappointments if the rules of good logo design were not followed.

When the logo is being designed, pay attention to the shape. That is, draw a box around your logo that contains it. Is it square, vertical or horizontal? Now think of an ad space that it needs to be placed in. Will if fit properly or does it need to be reduced severly in order to fit? If it fits properly, change the shape of the ad space and try again. Chances are that you will run into areas that just won't let you get the logo into place without modifying it one way or another. That's where flexibility comes in. Through the many years I've been designing logos, I try my best to first use an icon combined with a company name that allows their positions (read shape) to be changed without losing the identity of the design.

One more thing. When you hire someone to design your logo, be sure you get all the artwork you'll need for reproduction. Artwork for logos should be supplied in a vector format which can be enlarged or reduced to any size without losing detail or distortion. You will also need bitmap versions for use in-house and on the web. Also, along with your artwork, the designer should provide you with a complete set of reproduction guidelines to avoid any confusion no matter where your logo is to be used.

While there are other elements to consider in logo design, I won't go any further as this article could go on for several pages. Suffice it to say we've covered some of the major elements that go into good logo design. One thing to remember though, once you decide on a logo, be sure it is exactly what you want. If you end up changing your logo afterwards because you don't like the design or it is give you trouble during reproduction, it can end up costing you a lot of money and you've also lost the familiarity of the initial image.

For now, have a good look at your logo and see if it adheres to some of the points we've described above. If it is a solid logo, then congratulations, it passed the grade. If you find some issues with it, feel free to contact us and get our opinion.

 

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