Welcome back to the 3G’s & MHO Checklist Series.
This is Part 5 in our series looking at logos and more specifically company logos, brand logos and product logos, for use wherever a logo will add value, including but not limited to your Facebook logo, Instagram logo, Twitter logo, LinkedIn logo, website logo, anywhere the business logo can be used to represent your business, ensure recognition, illicit positive association, and help drive sought after action.
Picking up from part 4 and all other articles related to this series that you can access on our blog, a core function of your logo is to make a good impression.
In addition to all that was covered under the planning phase, a good impression is in part driven by the quality of the design work, along with how and where the logo is applied.
Quality of the design work.
Long gone are the days when quality meant you had a to have a big budget in order to get quality design.
- Design tools are available from the free to the expensive, from the basic to the expansive, requiring no training on how to use the tool, to needing a substantial course to train on effective usage. And everywhere in between.
- Like in the planning for your logo, and in fulfilling your planning, there should be a process to the actual design. How long and expansive that process is depends on what all you want to accomplish, and what all needs to be covered – as well as how many opinions need to be appeased (decision by committee does have some ramifications that need tight management or risk derailing the creative process and ultimate output).
- High quality printed proofs, this is a bit of a mixed bag. For most part, this expense is no longer required primarily due to most branding now only appearing digitally, and secondly due to the overall improvements in the widespread design tools even for those instances when physical print is required. It will, however, vary from case-to-case depending on the complexity of the logo design, complexity of colour usage, and of course the nature of the application. But the majority is usually in the application of the logo than the logo design itself.
Where the difference lays now, comes to the quality and experience of the designer’s eye and hand, time available to do this, and the translation of the business into strategic visual communication.
- In the case of the designer’s eye, if you have a good eye for design (whether you are a designer or not) you either have that at its most basic level, or unfortunately you don’t. Of course it can be trained, but professional designers are not the focus of this series. So let’s not get side-tracked on that here.
- Experience definitely has it place, particularly when potential for complexities arise either in the planning, the logo itself, its application, the nature of the organization / decision making process. But again, that is not the focus of this article. We are working from the perspective that you either are creating a logo yourself or that you are the client that needs to brief someone to create your logo.
- Time, well how long is a piece of string? How much time is going to be needed is going to be dependent on the particulars of your requirements and your circumstances. But you don’t want to rush through this, as this is going to be how the world recognizes and remembers your business.
Design Tools
There are so many of these out there. Focusing on you designing the logo (and subsequently collateral) for your own business where you are not in the design business, below a list arranged in no particular order. Please note that we are not vouching for any of these nor have any affiliation with them, and these options have varying degrees of involvement / self-do (is there such a word?)
Depending on whether you are willing to invest money into design software or not, a worthwhile comparison resource is https://www.upwork.com/resources/best-logo-design-software
Design Process
If you are designing yourself using one of the design tools, then a significant part of the design process will be undertaken whilst working in the design tool in its relevant phase. Even then, we would recommend that you go through these steps outside of the actual tool usage so that you can ensure you have all that you need before kicking off the process.
Whether designing yourself, or commissioning someone to design for you, there are certain rule of thumb steps:
- Develop your brand identity
- Check, done as part of the planning in the previous articles
- Look for design inspiration
- This can be in your industry, competitive industries, unrelated industries, art, architecture, in nature, or even increasingly conceptual
- Here be aware of clichés, not saying you must avoid them but at least understand what they are and why, or why not, to go that route
- Choose colours that reflect your brand
- Keep in mind the impact of colour and where you will be marketing to (if marketing across cultural groups and/or geographic regions)
- Example white in western culture has a different meaning to white in Asian cultures
- If there are predominant colour usage in a specific industry, there might be something to that based on how society at large reacts to those colours in the context of that particular industry
- Example red is not usually a good colour in financial circles, unless you have a big budget and/or very clever marketing to position your company and this colour in a desired way
- Keep in mind the impact of colour and where you will be marketing to (if marketing across cultural groups and/or geographic regions)
- Pick a font
- Here think about whether you are going to use a single font in your design and all applications, or whether you will have a specific font in your logo but use a family font in collateral (example electronic letter head, email signatures) as you don’t want to use fonts that are either hard to read, or not widely available on computers, laptops, tablets, phones and the like, and so obscuring or even blocking what can be seen / read and what not.
- Create several rough versions
- For this the recommendation is completely different options, as well as variations on a specific option
- Get feedback
- Approach some trusted individuals both inside your organization, possibly within your client base, and even family or friends and without explaining the logo (or logo options) see what their response is
- A word of caution, you don’t want to let-the-cat-out-of-the-bag so to speak and give actual / potential competitors a heads-up.
- Nor do you want to present all options to everyone unless you are strong at managing numerous points of feedback on a variety of choices.
- From your feedback narrow down the directions, possibly going through this process a couple of times until the final direction is settled on.
- Depending on the outcome of the feedback, you would then need to either polish the design selected in its entirety as presented, or you would need to repeat steps of the above steps in a specific design direction.
- Polish your design
- The final design has been selected
- Depending on the design tools used, you may need to (or not) clean up the design. This could vary from cleaning up lines through to making minor adjustments in terms of positioning or scale of individual aspects.
So we pose our question again, what are your thoughts? Possibly considering some of these aspects of your logo?
Well, that was Part 5. Now your logo design is finalized and “signed-off”. Time to roll out the collateral design, in the next articles.
You are welcome to access the balance of our articles and other posts. Likewise you are welcome to reach out to us should you want to engage directly with us on this.
Happy Imprinting!
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