This post is part one of two that covers the importance of your logo and brand identity for your business.
What’s in a logo? A logo is an abbreviated mark that defines your business in its totality – the mission, what you do, and how you conduct your business. It is often the first impression people get and needs to be unique enough to be recognizable. Your logo and how you’ll carry that through the rest of your brand identity should be one of the biggest things that you put a lot of thought and care into. Brand identity is all of the components of your branding (logo, tone, tagline, design elements, type used, etc) working together to portray the overall image of your business.
The styling of your logo also speaks a lot to the type of business you are. The two most common types of logos are an icon image with the name of your business, or just a text-based logo. A simple typeface (aka font family) change throughout your branding can change the personality of your business from a fun, casual business to a stiff, professional business that cares about rigid rules and regulations you comply with.
You need a logo, but how do you get started?
When you’re starting a business, costs can be tight and it might be tempting to go to one of those online services that you pay a really low amount of money and it generates options to choose from. These are often trendy, decent looking logos – but you’re missing the most important part…YOU. These are auto-generated symbols and typefaces that they have made in their repository and it compiles logo layouts based on your name. There are a few other problems with this: 1) Even though you can use the logo all you like, you can’t trademark your logo when you grow. So to gain legal protection over your brand, you’ll need to redo the logo process anyways and this can create confusion with your customers as you are building brand recognition. 2) There will be other businesses with the same logo icon out there and this can create confusion as well. Just don’t do it! This is an important investment.
Find a Designer
Find a handful of designers or creative agencies that have a lot of flexibility in their style and ask them for quotes. A range of styles is important because this means that you’ll be more likely to get something that is appropriate for you, and not just a signature style. If their signature style suits you, then that is okay too. Pricing varies for logo design from a few hundred dollars to thousands of dollars, so find something that fits into your budget. Understand that this is the visual cornerstone of your business you’ll be investing in for at least the next 5-10 years. Sometimes quality does come at a price.
Define Your Principles and Mission
How do you approach the designers with exactly what you want? One exercise that I like to do with businesses is to have them list what their core business and mission in 5 descriptive words. This makes you pair down what is important and gives you almost a checklist to refer to, making sure you are sticking to your principles.
Do Your Research
Research competitors and other businesses that have similar core principals to see how they handle translating these things through their branding. It’s okay to draw inspiration from other logos that you like, but define exactly what you like about certain elements. It’s important to keep in mind that successful logos speak to that particular business, and some of those elements may not speak to yours.
Keep an Open Mind
Enjoy the collaboration process with your design professional. They may come up with some solutions that never crossed your mind. Come to the table with some clear goals and ideas, but leave room for those ideas to evolve into something you love. A few guidelines to keep in mind with a strong logo, is:
- Keep it simple. A logo should be able to be read in just a few seconds. If you can’t tell what exactly the symbol or text is or you have to analyze it for a bit, you need to simplify it. Work on the lines of it to make it more recognizable or adjust the type for readability.
- A logo’s strength shouldn’t be dependent on its colors. It should be strong in just black before adding the colors of your brand in.
- Limit colors. Don’t get too crazy with the amount of colors you choose to include. The norm is 1-2 colors. Same goes for the amount of typefaces you choose.
- Think about scale. Your logo should be readable (both graphically and textually) at a smaller scale.
- Think about how to reverse the logo for dark backgrounds as well.
- Think long term. You don’t want to keep changing your logo. Pick something that is more on the timeless side than fits into a fad. When you see companies rebrand their look, they do so with smaller adjustments or modernizing their logo after several (5-10) years. Your business needs to build up recognition, and your customers can’t recognize you if you keep changing your branding.
The Process
After the initial discussion about what exactly you’re looking to accomplish and brain storming ideas, the design process usually delivers a handful of initial concepts as a starting point. Once you choose the concept that represents the business well, build on it. It’s normal to go back and forth 2-3 times after you choose a direction to fine tune the logo to the finished result. After you have a logo you love, make sure to get a vector format. This type of logo won’t pixelate when you make it larger, and you’ll give designers and vendors this logo for things when they’re making them. The last thing you want is your logo to look low quality.
You have a logo. Now what?
Now is the time to develop the rest of your brand image. What does that mean? It means to develop the overall image of all of your correspondence and how you’ll carry your logo and branding through it all. Go back to those 5 descriptive mission words and build. Choose the typefaces you’ll use throughout your designs, a general color palette, style of graphics and images, layout styles, tagline, tone of messaging, interior spaces with signage, the type of creative collateral you want and how they’ll fit in. These should all be communicating the same core theme and be true to your brand. Carry it all the way through and stay consistent.
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