6 Essential Logo Design Do's and Don't: Expert Tips for a Strong Brand Identity
13 Nov 2024dispaceadmin
Logo design is much more important than it looks. It’s one of the most important parts of your brand’s identity and represents its values and informs customers what your business is all about.
Besides knowing what is good for your logo design and what isn’t, you have to know the do’s and don’ts before creating one. While many only focus on the positives, knowing what to avoid is always a must.
In this article, we’ll dive deeper into learning more about what you need and don’t need to do when designing your logo in order to create a strong brand identity.
6 Do’s for creating a logo that builds a strong brand identity
75% of customers will recognize a brand by its logo. Therefore, if you are doing something wrong, it’s your time to stop and follow these six tips.
1. Define your target audience
The very first step in creating an ideal logo design is to know who your target audience is, and this requires careful and thoughtful research. The main goal of a logo is to attract customers and make your brand relevant to them. Therefore, before you create your logos, you need to know what kind of theory and fonts to follow to grab the viewer's attention.
A great way to learn more about your audience is to initially analyze your competitors. This involves knowing what kind of fonts, colors, and shapes they are using. After, use this information to create a better logo design that engages with your clients.
2. Make your logo memorable
Viewers will only look at your logo for a few seconds and if they don’t remember it the next time they see it, this means that you failed to make a good first impression. Therefore, to avoid this from happening, you need to make it easy for your audience to remember your logo. How do you do that?
You need to make sure your logo is simple, and this can be achieved by not adding too many effects, or details, and keeping everything simple. When you over-detail your logo, it’ll also be worse in smaller mediums, which means it might get blurred out; not something you want to happen.
3. Your logo needs to be scalable
Just like we said to avoid over-detailing, this matters a lot when you are about to scale your logo and use it for different purposes such as websites, social media, print landscapes, and different mediums.
You’ll know if your logo is scalable when you create more logo variations and use them on different mediums. Less detailed logos are always a better fit in smaller spaces. General rules to follow when creating a scalable logo involve:
- Using vector graphics
- Simplifying details
- Choosing a scalable font
- Balancing the aspect ratio
- Limiting color gradients
- Testing and exporting in higher resolutions.
Also, our best advice is to make sure you use PNG and SVG formats instead of JPG since it can lose its quality when scaled.
4. Understand color psychology
Colors are a powerful tool for designers and a key principle that can create different levels of emotions for people. That’s why it’s important to learn more about color psychology and what kind of impact they have on people’s emotions.
Color psychology is best understood when you use the color wheel which uses the following color groups:
- Primary colors
- Secondary colors
- Tertiary colors
These three color groups combine to form new colors and are separated into two color temperatures:
- Warm colors
- Cool colors
Depending on what kind of brand personality you have, you need to convey it with the colors you want to use on your logo design.
5. Choose the proper fonts
Font trends come and go, and while they always change, your logo’s font is supposed to remain the same until your business exists. It represents uniqueness and it’s always important to choose a timeless font.
Some general rules to follow when choosing your font include:
- Prioritizing readability
- Understanding your brand’s personality
- Choose between serif, sans-serif, and script fonts
- Use display fonts
Many fonts have timeless designs to them, so it’s important to always pay attention to this part.
6. Ask for feedback from professionals and your viewers
Logo design is not an easy task, and asking for help is never the wrong thing to do. Professional designers can create logos that help fit with the target audience’s style and brand’s values. While they have experience creating logos, they can help you identify if you are on the right track or not.
The same story goes for your audience. Put out a logo and ask them for feedback. While they might not be professionals, the majority still wins. Ask them through surveys or directly on social media channels.
6 Don’ts for a strong brand identity
60% of customers will avoid a brand if their logo is unappealing or odd. Therefore, it’s important to pay close attention to avoid the following six mistakes.
1. Too much detailing
As we mentioned above, it’s always important to avoid detailing your logo design too much. This is the first don’t, and the way to go is to make everything simple in your logo design.
Complex and detailed logos make it harder for viewers to remember it. Also, it’ll easily get blurred when scaled on smaller sizes and a one-color tint.
You can start only by using one color and once you’ve finished, add your brand colors. This helps avoid saturated designs with too many color elements. Or, you can try another method by removing unnecessary design elements from your logo that won’t hurt the main message you are trying to communicate.
2. Not keeping your logo design consistent
A good logo design is something that remains consistent and doesn’t change. Your logo needs to be kept as long as possible. Changing your brand logo frequently means that customers will see you as unprofessional.
Logo rebrands are okay and making any minor changes isn’t a big deal, but you want to avoid making large changes in your design.
3. Not making your logo unique
The whole point of making an interesting design is to make your logo unique and allow it to stand out from the rest. It’s quite logical that you shouldn’t be copying other brands and if you do so, of course, it’ll be more challenging for you to stand out and leave a good impression on customers.
Instead of trying to make your logo design like someone else, it’s best if you get inspiration from it and make it your way.
4. Always trying to follow trends
Design trends are always changing and let’s face it, while it’s important to always remain informed about new trends and styles, they aren’t a good practice to follow for your logo design. Many of these trends won’t be around in the future anyway, and that is why it’s always better to avoid them in general.
Design trends are actually a good way to give you new ideas overtime on what kind of imagery you can showcase for other elements in your business. They can help in better transmitting your brand’s values and message, especially before you create your logo design at the beginning.
5. Using too many fonts
Every font has something it stands for, but something you need to know is that it is never a good idea to have too many fonts in your logo design since it can confuse your message to the viewer.
A general rule to follow when adding fonts to your logo design is to always keep the limit to two, and when creating your logo design at the beginning, use one and play around with its size and weight.
6. Not paying attention to negative space
Negative space is one of the most important design elements for your logo. Apple is a good example of a company that took advantage of its negative space with the bitten apple.
It’s always important to keep your visual elements apart from each other and not overlap. This makes your logo more visible and has more emphasis.
You are now all set
You are now well-informed about what you should and shouldn’t do with your logo design. Logo designs represent your brand’s personality and values so it’s always important to make sure you know what to avoid and what to do when during the design process.
While many businesses don’t know what direction they are headed with their logo design, you are now informed and can take action to make sure your logo stands out from your competitors and remains unique.