Essential Logo Checklist: 6 Design Tips for a High-Quality Brand Logo

Your business logo is one of the most powerful symbols you’ll ever have for your business. It visually represents your brand and when people see your logo, they’ll already think of your brand’s name in their head. 

While many logos look like they are easy to create, it’s important to do the necessary research, brainstorm, and use the right tools to create one. 

The reason behind this is why you need a logo checklist, and in this article, we’ll give you some design tips you can use to make sure it’s nothing more than high-quality. 

What is a logo design checklist? 

A logo design checklist lists essential items and considerations that designers need to use to guide people through the design process. It serves as a tool that makes sure all necessary elements of a logo design are addressed, allowing designers to create successful and effective logos. 

When using a logo design checklist, you’ll find out that there are components, best practices, and considerations that you need to follow. The checklists help you find out if you have the key elements for a well-designed logo. 

The elements of a good logo 

If you want to know more about what makes a good logo, here are the main characteristics: 

1. Simple: A high-quality logo should be simple and easy to recognize. It has a simple design and can be easily understood at first look. It’s never a good idea to make your logo complex since it’ll be harder to scale it in different applications.
2. Easy to remember: Good logos leave a good first impression, and this helps customers remember it easier as it has visual elements that make it stand out from competitors and are easily recognizable. 
3. Relevant: They are relevant to the brand’s identity and values. Brand colors and design elements have to align with what the brand stands for. 
4. Unique: A good logo is unique and has distinguishing elements from competitors. Distinctive logos help brands stand out from competitors, especially in competitive markets. 
5. Timeless: It doesn’t have to rely on any design trends that can quickly become outdated. If you look at Coca-Cola, McDonalds, and other giants in the market, their logos never become outdated. 
6. Versatile: It is versatile and can be scaled across different mediums. They can be used in different platforms and merchandise. 
7. Scalable: Your logo should maintain its visual elements across different sizes.

Once you design your logo, you need to go through this checklist and if it has all of these, it means that you did a great job. However, keep in mind that with AI evolving now, AI logo generators ask you for important business information and how you want your logo to be. All the information you input will help the logo generator create a logo that has all of these elements. 

6 Tips to follow for designing a high-quality logo 

There are six important tips to follow if you want to complete your logo design checklist: 

1. Make it fit in with your brand’s identity 

Gaining a deeper understanding of your brand’s personality, mission, personality (values), and target audience. Let’s take a deeper look at how you can do so: 

1. Defining your brand personality (personality): Is your brand elegant, playful, bold, or something different? Your brand’s personality should be communicated through your logo design elements such as fonts, symbols, and colors. 
2. Clarifying your brand’s mission: What is your brand trying to achieve? This guides you to the overall style and tone of your logo, making sure it aligns with your brand’s mission. 
3. Understanding your target audience: Clarify your audience’s interests, preferences, and demographics. All brands have different age groups and this is something important to consider. 

A well-defined brand identity is important for creating a high-quality logo. Regardless if you create the tool on your own or use AI tools, you still need to clarify this information. 

2. Avoid using logos similar to competitors 

Your logo needs to be unique and there’s no way it can be if you allow it to look like competitors. While you may be wondering how you can distinguish your logo from competitors, here are some general rules to follow:  

1. Conduct a competitor analysis: Learn more about competitor's logos in your industry to identify their design elements such as color schemes, fonts, and symbols. 
2. Pay attention to your unique value proposition (UVP): Your logo needs to reflect what makes your brand unique. For example: McDonald’s has the unique M sign that you won’t find in any other logos. 
3. Make your colors and fonts unique: Choose a set of colors that aren’t popular with your competitors. 

By distinguishing your logo from competitors, it can establish a unique brand space that resonates with your target audience and will be unique for many years to come. 

3. Understand color psychology

Depending on which colors you choose, know that all colors evoke different emotions, but this will depend on what kind of brand style and tone you have. Understanding color psychology and theory is important if you want to keep users interested in your brand. 

While each color evokes different emotions, let’s take a closer look at what kind of industries and emotions popular colors invoke: 

1. Green: When customers see green, they most commonly think of eco-friendly brands and retail. Retail and e-commerce brands commonly use green. Good examples include Shopify. 
2. Black and white: Usually used for brands that promote luxury and high-end products. For example: Apple is one of them. 
3. Blue: Used by popular social media platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn, which promote a calm feeling and connectivity. 
4. Purple: Royalty is something that instantly comes to your mind when you use purple. It shows an elegant approach and is a great choice to use if you are selling luxury high-end products. 
5. Red: Used for expensive luxury ads and promotions. YouTube and Coca-Cola are popular brands that use red in their logo. 
6. Yellow and orange: Symbolize creativity and have a positive influence on how people perceive these colors. 

Each color represents a unique tone and what kind of emotions customers will feel when they see your brand logo. 

4. Choose a suitable font

Choosing the right font for your brand will strongly depend on what kind of personality it has and what its values are. The very first step to choosing the right font is to identify if you are an elegant, serious, bold, playful, or classic brand. 

Also, readability matters a lot. If your brand’s logo is changing through sizes, this isn’t good news. It needs to be scaled on billboards and make sure that it’s readable in large and small formats. 

Moreover, it’s important to learn more about the font types that exist: 

1. Serif fonts: Elegant and classic, the best choice for high-end brands. 
2. Sans-serif fonts: Clean and modern. Best choice for minimalistic brands. 
3. Display fonts: Decorative and unique. They are used for brands that want to stand out and maintain clarity. 
4. Script fonts: Artistic and flowing. Best choice for brands that are looking to add personal and creative vibes. 

Let’s not forget that fonts can be customized. Make adjustments by changing specific letters and making your logo stand out. 

5. Make sure your logo is scalable

It’s always important that the brand’s logo is scalable and maintains its high quality across different mediums regardless of size. The best way to make our logo scalable is by following some general rules that you need to apply at all times. 

Use vector formats when designing 

You can use vector formats like EPS and SVG. Vector images can maintain quality regardless of the medium size, but keep in mind that when using PNG and JPEG, they can lose quality when they become larger. 

Use clean shapes 

Simple shapes can maintain quality regardless of their size. Avoid using details that can easily be lost or blurred out when the logo is used in smaller mediums. This can make it look low-quality and make your brand logo look unprofessional. 

Avoid using too many effects and colors 

One of the biggest mistakes businesses make is trying to use too many colors and effects that can easily get blurred out when scaled at different sizes. Keep your color palette simple and limit effects. 

Create different logo variants and test them across different platforms 

This is to make sure your logo maintains its quality, you can check on this by creating three different logo variants: 

1. Black and white logos: Many logos might lose their quality when they are black and white, so it’s important to test this out. 
2. Primary logos: The full logo design is used for larger formats. 
3. Simplified icons: Smaller versions of your logo are created for smaller applications. 

After you conduct these tests, you’ll learn more about what works and what doesn’t. Don’t forget to conduct tests across different materials like your website, merchandise, and business cards. 

6. Gather feedback from customers 

Feedback is the key to a successful logo design and an important part of completing your logo checklist design. You can gather feedback in different ways from your customers: 

1. Define your feedback criteria: How do you want to gather feedback? Feedback metrics include colors, readability, emotional impact, impressions, and style. This encourages users to give you clear feedback so you have to choose how you want to gather feedback. 
2. Use polls and surveys: Creating surveys on Google Forms, SurveyMonkey, or any other tools can help you gather the necessary feedback on your brand's logo design elements. 
3. Conduct A/B testing: If you have to choose between different logo options, you can use A/B testing methods. You can conduct A/B testing via social media, emails, and web pop-ups, to see what works better for your audience. 
4. Collect direct feedback on social media: You can directly ask your audience for feedback on social media. Social media offers direct interactions, so this is an excellent way to gain a deeper understanding of what your audience thinks is best for you. 

Gathering customer feedback is important. 72% of customers will share a good experience with six or more people, so always take customer feedback seriously. 

You are one step away from designing a high-quality brand logo 

Now that you’ve learned lots of new information about designing a high-quality logo, it’s time to put all of these steps into practice. Logos are what make customers remember your brand’s name and what you stand for. 

Being like the rest is never an option, so it’s now time to go through your logo design checklist and create a logo that is memorable and aligns with your brand’s vision and goals.