When a business or individual decides to invest in a logo, it’s always worth making sure the end result will not only look good, but be able to work well in a range of situations. To explain more about this, here are a few guidelines that we work to and would encourage anyone designing or commissioning a logo to think about during the design process.

1. The design should be unique and distinctive. It’s not just about standing out from the crowd (which that cliche doesn’t), but I would encourage the development of a logo that has a bit of ‘personality’. Like the difference between a stock image and a commissioned photograph. This is why we take the time to build a relationship with our clients, sometimes the idea for a logo will come from the person behind the business, rather than the service on offer.

2. Simplify. Many of the best and most memorable logos are also the simplest. This success lies partly in the genius of the designer, but also in the way our brains process information (96% of information the brain processes is visual). Because we innately read signs, a good logo creates a ‘shorthand’ with the viewer using icons, shapes and visual metaphors.

A well used example of this is the Amazon logo, which uses the curve to make a smile (to show happy customers no doubt) but have you noticed how the smile also makes an arrow pointing from A – Z to imply that they have everything you might want?

Even the simplest logo design should provide identity and association with a particular client group or market place and also indicate the tone of a business, whether that’s formal, quirky, relaxed or luxury, for example.

3. Practical. Because many businesses trade online it’s easy to forget some of the more fundamental elements of logo design. I still believe it’s useful for a logo to work well (i.e. be visible and recognisable) in greyscale or black and white as well as full colour. Back to Amazon as an example, it’s logo is colourful on the website, plain black on the boxes.

Because of the technology available to designers (and non-designers!), it’s easy to create a design that has many effects applied to it. However, this may not work so well if you need to shrink the logo down for a business card or advert. We always produce ‘vector based’ designs, using Adobe Illus­tra­tor ® or In Design ® rather than Pho­to­shop®. This means that the logos we create will be scalable (up and down) without losing clarity. It also means the file size is usually smaller and we can provide logos in formats that will be print ready as work well online.

We would recommend that anyone commissioning a logo design also requests a Logo Guidelines document. This is a useful guide that you can send to printers, publishers or other designers to ensure they use your logo correctly and don’t use the wrong colours, fonts or distort your logo in anyway). If required we can also draw up a guidelines document for existing logos.

To see some examples of our logo design work, visit our portfolio page.

If this has been useful, or you have any feedback please leave a comment below. Thanks!