Today there are various online logo makers, but these tools can be helpful only if you know how to approach them, which requires a deep understanding of what makes a logo design effective. To understand the principles of an effective design, you must first understand what is the main purpose of a logo. And that is sending the right message to the right audience, converting them to loyal customers.
To achieve this, the aim of your design process must be to create a logo that’s easily recognizable and able to inspire loyalty, trust, and admiration. On top of that, all its elements need to be strikingly different from other logos in the same niche - it needs to identify your business. So let’s take a look at the principles that will ensure your design will meet these criteria.
Catching The Eye With Simplicity
If you want to make your logo easily recognizable and imprint it in the memory of your customers, simplicity is the key. Many inexperienced designers fall into a trap of overdrawing, losing that unique and unexpected element in the process. Your target audience needs to be able to understand your design at first sight, even on the packaging on the crowded shelf, or when racing past the signage at 70 miles per hour. A riot of lines, colors, or fonts will make your logo too complex and therefore ambiguous, and we’ve already said the message it conveys should be loud and clear. It’s useless to waste a great amount of time creating a custom font that would be too extravagant to read when there are so many simple yet eye-catching fonts already available. Effectiveness lies in the modest number of elements, chosen with care.Standing The Test of Time by Avoiding Trends
If you haven’t created a logo that will still be effective after 10, 20, or 50 years, you’ve just wasted your efforts. This usually happens due to the fact we’ve become slaves to trends, whose only true place is in the fashion industry. Even there they come and go, but that’s not such a big deal as it is when your brand identity lies on the line. The fact that you’ll stand out at the moment means nothing if there’s no longevity in your design. Decide that you’re not going anywhere and stop following the pack.
Effective in Any Color or Size
Your logo won’t be effective if it doesn’t work equally across a variety of applications and media. That’s why you need to design it in vector format, ensuring it scalable to any size. It needs to remain effective if printed on a billboard, postage stamp, in one color, or even in reverse color. Color psychology can be very useful in logo design, but colors also have one weak point - they can be very subjective. You should start your design in black and white, giving advantage to shape and concept. You’ll easily find the right colors later, just keep in mind the printing cost - more colors mean more expenses in the long term. And if it doesn’t work in black and white, it won’t work even with all the colors of the rainbow. Appropriate Instead of Self-explanatory
Many designers make the mistake of trying to make a logo self-explanatory: they try to show teeth in case of dentists, food in case of restaurants, furniture in case of furniture stores, etc. But the Mercedes logo isn’t a car, is it? The effectiveness of a logo doesn’t lie in saying what your company does - it lies in the design that’s appropriate for the audience it aims at. Various colors and child-like font are appropriate for a toy store, but not at all for a law firm. By making your design appropriate, you’re building a strong association with a certain business, and that’s what enables the logo to take on any real meaning.As you can see, simplicity will make a logo recognizable and memorable, staying away from trends will make it immortal, sketching and conceptualizing phase will make it scalable and not dependent solely on color, while the design that’s appropriate will represent your business without the need for any explanations. This is what makes it effective. Clear insight into your brand and thorough research of industry and competitors are actually much more important than extravagant shapes, colors, or fonts.
0 Comments