5 Basic Rules Of a Great Logo Design

Your logo design is a key foundation for business success.

Your logo appears on your business cards, letterhead, website, apparel, envelopes and flyers.

These materials are designed to reach customers, prospects, suppliers, industry associates or even the press. It is important to remember that your logo is often the first interaction potential customers have with your business. Your logo simply must provide a favorable impression or you risk losing the sale.

Here are the 5 Basic Rules Of a Great Logo Design:

1. Your logo should reflect your company in a unique and honest way.

Think of your logo as the suit you’ll be wearing to a cocktail party of investors. That suit better be pressed and polished, but it also needs to appeal to the people at the party if you want to make a good first impression. You wouldn’t wear a tux to a pool party, just as you wouldn’t wear swim trunks to a wedding.

Your logo is one of the first touchpoints that people will have with your brand, you’ll want to ensure that it resonates with the right people. Your logo is meant to forge connections with your audience, but to do that, you need to have some idea of what your audience does and doesn’t like. So, before you start making your logo, you should have a clear understanding of your target audience.

For example, someone looking for a lawyer probably wouldn’t go to a firm that uses lots of bright colors and funky fonts.  Likewise, a logo for a kids-oriented brand likely would fall flat with a dark, minimalistic logo design. In this vein, consider who your business is meant to help before you move on to the next step.

2. Avoid too much detail.

While you might be tempted to throw as much as you can into your logo, don’t go overboard with the design.

When printed in small sizes, a complex design will lose detail and in some cases will look like a smudge or, worse, a mistake. The more detail a logo has, the more information the viewer has to process. A logo should be memorable, and one of the best ways to make it memorable is to keep things simple. Look at the corporate identities of Nike, McDonald’s and Apple. Each company has a very simple icon that can easily be reproduced at any size.

Simplicity is key for your logo design.

3. Your logo should work well in black and white (one-color printing).

Remember that you will be advertising your business in newspapers, magazines, leaflets, etc ads. On such ads, usually, the publishers go for colorless printing of advertisements. In that case, your logo design must hold its impact on the viewers. Your logo appears impressive in colors. But if on newspaper ads, if it is less impressive, you should redesign the logo.

4. Make sure your logo’s scalable.

Your logo should be able to adapt to any size. Can it go on a giant billboard and a tiny pen?

A scalable logo needs to make sense, look good and remain legible at any size—whether it is printed on a tiny business card or on a huge poster. If you include too much detail in your logo it will make it harder to scale down to a small size.

To achieve scalability in your logo, you need to create your logo in vector format. Vector files are created with rescaling in mind, so your logo looks just as sharp when it’s blown up to a large size.

5. Your logo should be artistically balanced.

Logos are important business symbols. People first see a logo on a product or service before buying it. It can assure a buyer about the authenticity and genuineness of a product. It fills buyers with confidence. But that is just a primary purpose of a logo.

In the modern competitive world of business, logos have many other roles to play. These symbols engage potential customers. They convey a certain business message to target customers and help build a brand identity of a company.

However, to create a perfectly designed logo, one of the key things to ensure is the balance. We all love to lead a balanced life, which covers all aspects of living a life happily. Similarly, all the design elements must present themselves in a balanced way. Only such designs will appeal our senses.