The five principles of effective logo design

It is an ever competitive market out there, so having brand materials that give you a visual edge over your competitors is essential. Making a positive start to a new business or an effective venture into a new market is vital. So a good logo is often your first chance to make an impression on your target audience. Many companies often under value the impact a good, or a bad logo, can have on their business success. Whilst your logo will form part go your brand [strategy], on its own your logo can have the power to speak to your clients when you cannot and create an impression of your core business values. Get this wrong and it could make it more challenging in an already tough market to establish your venture successfully. Sadly, some business owners mistakenly undervalue the importance of a good logo and try to save on the cost of logo design – something that often shows in the final design and ultimately could be the difference between success or failure.

What is a logo?

In order to understand what a logo is, it is important to first understand what the main purpose of logos is. The design process must aim to make the logo immediately recognisable, inspire trust, admiration, loyalty and an implied superiority. Often confused as your brand, a logo is one aspect of your brand strategy, and it’s shapes, colours, fonts, and images usually are strikingly different from other logos in the same market niche. Logos are used to identify.

A good logo should be a distinctive, appropriate, memorable graphic and simple in form. It should also conveys your intended message. A concept or “meaning” is usually behind an effective logo, and it communicates the intended message. Often over looked in the design process, your logo should be able to be printed at any size, legible at a small size and, in most cases, be effective without colour. It is also important to consider how your logo will be used. For example just some of the considerations you should make are, whether it will be embroidered onto uniforms, foil blocked onto brochures or needs to work as an app icon too. For ease of execution, logos that will need to be embroidered should not be overly complex. A great logo essentially boils down to two things: great concept and great execution.

The logo design process

Some people wonder what’s so difficult about creating a good logo. They’re usually small and look easy enough to design, so no problem, right? Most people only see the final result of a designer’s efforts, so it is understandable that the design of your logo might look like it was a simple task. But it’s not. A logo takes research, application of design theory, thought and creativity. These elements combine to make an effective logo design.

When creating a logo, a good designer will follow a process that ensures the final design meets the needs of your business. Below, I have illustrated the typical process that professional logo designers follow.

So what are the five principles of effective logo design?

As I have mentioned, a good logo should be a distinctive, appropriate, practical, memorable graphic and simple in form. It should also convey your intended message. Your designer should follow these five principles below to ensure that your logo has the best chance of meeting all of these criteria:

Simple

A simple logo design enables easy recognition. This will also usually mean that the logo is versatile and will memorable. Good logos feature something unique without being overdrawn.

Memorable

Following closely behind simplicity, is memorability. An effective logo design should be memorable and this can be achieved by keeping simple and appropriate to the nature of the business. For example how many of you see the well known golden arches and instantly associate this with McDonald’s? The McDonald’s logo is simple yet effective by using a simple design and applying colour psychology as discussed in my previous blog post here.

Timeless

An effective logo should be timeless and avoid trends – that is, it will endure the ages. Will the logo still be effective in 10, 20, 50 years?

Probably the best example of a timeless logo is the Apple logo. If you compare it to the Microsoft logo, you can see just how effective creating a timeless logo can be. The Apple logo has barely changed since 1977. That is timeless design, whereas the Microsoft logo has changed a bit more over time.

Versatile

An effective logo should be able to work across a variety of mediums and applications such as digital, print, embroidery and engraving. A logo should be functional. For this reason a logo should be designed in vector format, to ensure that it can be scaled to any size. It is not a good idea to use photographs in logos because of their resolution limitations and lack of scalability. The logo should also work both in horizontal and vertical formats.

Question whether a logo is still effective if it is;

Printed in one colour?
Printed on the something the size of a postage stamp?
Printed on something as large as a billboard?
Printed in reverse (i.e.. light logo on dark background)
Put onto clothing?

Appropriate

How a logo is positioned should be appropriate for its intended purpose. For example, a logo for children’s toys shop, it would be appropriate to use a childish font & colour scheme. This would not be appropriate for a law firm.

A logo doesn’t need to show what a business sells or offers as a service. i.e., car logos don’t need to show cars, computer logos don’t need to show computers. The Harley Davidson logo isn’t a motorcycle, nor is the Nokia logo a mobile phone. A logo is purely for identification.