The 7 Characteristics Of An Effective Logo

Logos are the first impression of a business for a customer. Subconsciously, we make judgements about a business’s abilities and purpose by the impression their logo gives. What does your logo say about you? For example, a bright, smooth cornered logo will denote fun and simplicity. Square corners and muted colours will suggest seriousness and professionalism.

A great logo will give an instant impression of the brand – the feel and culture of your organisation – and be memorable enough that a customer can refer to it when looking for a website or information about you. A bad logo will turn a customer away from doing business with you on the impression you are too traditional or not serious enough. It is vital that your logo appeals to your target audience.

Here are some tips to keep in mind when designing your next logo.

1. Create Balance

Balance is important because our minds naturally perceive a balanced design as being pleasing and appealing, just as a symmetrical face is considered beautiful. Keep your logo balanced by ensuring the weight of the graphics, the colours and the size of your images are equal on each side. This is why most logos are designed to fit within a specific shape; square, triangle or circle. Shapes naturally have good balance and are familiar to a consumer.

Check now: how balanced is your current logo?

2. Scalable

Logos must look good large as well as small. A part of this is the actual design itself. The other part of this is ensuring the file itself can scale up by using large size images and elements.

If you create an icon, ensure that it can scale to look good on a billboard and on a shirt. Check now: How does your logo look large and far away? Sometimes our eyes can play tricks on us with perception and depth. How does it look small and up close like on a baseball cap? Detailed logos can lose their effectiveness when made smaller.

3. Colour

Use colour to evoke emotions you are trying to raise. Humans associate certain colours with meanings. Do you want to generate excitement? Consider bold colours. Do you want to give the impression of stability? Go with muted colours. Colours are one of the most important decisions to be made in a logo. For Cadbury, the purple colour of it’s logo is so important, they spent 8 years and thousands of dollars on a court case trademarking it. Bright colours are hard to see. Fluoro colours and yellows are difficult to translate across a variety of mediums.

Consider, or ask your logo designer to show you, your logo in black & white, greyscale & two colours. You may think you won’t want these options right now but your logo will be used for many years across many different mediums and in many different environments. Experiment with individual colours and combinations. There are some rules for mixing colours, relating to whether they are warm or cool, opposing or complementary. Consult a colour specialist to ensure you get it right.

4. Appropriate Style

The design of your logo should be appropriate to your company and clients. What feel are you trying to convey? The use of imagery can be a very powerful indicator of meaning. For instance, the eagle with its wings spread represents strength and action. A torch represents leadership or competition. Badges suggest tradition and stability. What is a good representation of your values?

Do this: give a list of your company values to your logo designer. He will use them to design a logo closer to your requirements.

5. Typography

Font is very important and represents the bulk of the logo. In a logo you do not want to use common fonts, like Comic Sans, as it will look unprofessional. Also ensure you do not mix fonts except in exceptional circumstances. One font type keeps the logo simple and clean. The text of your logo is the most important part so don’t let it be crowded out by images or decorations.

6. Memorable

You want your logo to be memorable and recognizable by your audience. Be different and stand out. Even if they don’t love it, they will at least remember it. Being memorable is about using bold statements in your logo and not conforming to the traditional methods of designing logos.

7. Simple

Keep your logo simple and don’t make it too complicated. The best logos are simple because they are recognizable and easy to translate across various mediums. The Nike tick or the Coca-Cola swirl font are amongst the easiest to recognise symbols in the world and both companies have leveraged this across merchandise and advertising.

Get multiple opinions

When it comes to logo design, the numerous amounts of drafts required to get to a final product can make your brain and judgement numb to small details. It’s important that you give yourself breaks between looking at the logo before making a decision and show a variety of people for their opinion.

Do you need help with a new logo for your business, we are here to help. Complete Cloud has designed many effective logos for our clients.