Does Your Logo Design Possess These 5 Characteristics?

Clarity

The clarity of a piece of design comes from two important factors:

• Accuracy of messaging
• Accuracy of delivery

A great logo design serves as a representative of the brand as a whole. So accurate messaging needs to reflect the personality of the brand. This is a big part of why researching the competition and understanding the values, purposes, and goals of the brand are so important prior to crafting a logo.

If your client company hasn’t presented you with a creative brief — ask for one. If they say, “But it’s just a logo,” then say, “Yes, exactly. It’s a logo design. The ambassador for your entire brand.”

Brand personality is a non-negotiable factor in logo design. It’s really impossible to create an accurate logo if you know nothing about the brand it will represent.

As an example of how every design choice can accurately reflect both the brand and the audience, take a look at this branding for Malyatko, which creates children’s education products and is targeted at families with toddlers.

It’s hard to find a more accurate way to express the personality behind the brand and the audience it is trying to reach at the same time, and every aspect of the branding works toward the same goal.

As you go through the design process, check your chosen elements against the creative brief and what you understand about the brand.

The second half of this characteristic, accuracy of delivery, is more about the technical aspect of logo design. To deliver your messaging accurately, ensure that your design choices are clear and easy to understand. Your font must be legible. Your graphic style shouldn’t be so complicated that it takes too long to grasp, or so simple that it’s impossible to know for sure what it’s meant to represent. Your colors must show well against each other, and details must not get lost in the shuffle.

This is a simple, clear example of how to blend color choice and font choice in a way that promotes accuracy of messaging. Both parts of this combination logo design — the font and the abstract graphic — fit well together and send the same message. Harmony between every element means that the message of the logo won’t get lost.

The upshot? Your logo needs to deliver a message about the brand, and it needs to be clear and understandable in order to ensure its efficacy.

• Physicians Office Logos
• Church Logos
• Factory Logos
• Bar Logos
• Bed & Breakfast Logos
• Beauty School Logos
• Grocery Shop Logos
• Business Logos
• Physical Therapy Logos

Focus

Statistics indicate that we form our first impressions in less than one tenth of a second. We make up our minds very quickly how we feel about what we’re looking at.

That means that your logo design needs to make a great impression at what amounts to lightspeed.

In order for that to happen, the design needs to make the focal point of the logo clear. Whether that’s a graphic or a word, it needs to be front and center.

But focus isn’t just a matter of centering the main element of your design. Every other element needs to play a supporting role and lead the eye to that focal point.

Hierarchy is an important tool in creating a focal point. Use hierarchy in color, size, spacing, or weight to push your main element to the fore. For example, you could use variations on the same color but with different levels of opacity to make a single element stand out amid

repetitions. Or the focal point of your logo design could be delivered in a heavier typeface than the other information, such as in the case of a combination mark that uses a lettermark in addition to the company name fully spelled out.

Employing hierarchy to create focus within your logo design is an excellent way to make the logo more dynamic, which also boosts the memorability and overall effectiveness of the design.

Versatility

A final, but no less important, key characteristic that your logo must possess is versatility.

Logos are designed to be used everywhere. Anywhere that the brand has to go, the logo must go. Business cards, promotional products, packaging, advertising, websites, print and digital marketing, billboards, buses — there’s no limit to where a well-designed logo will be used.

So it really needs to be limitlessly versatile.

A few important factors to ensure versatility:

• Type of file. Logos should be vector images in order to ensure that they can be shrunk down or blown up without losing clarity.
• Colors. Check what your logo design looks like with a limited color palette, or if some of the colors don’t show true. Make sure that there is enough contrast between colors that your design details won’t be lost.
• Black and white. It’s a good idea to run tests to see how your logo shows up in grayscale and black and white.
• Bordered. To keep your logo from blending in to the background, incorporate a border. Even if it’s just a narrow line, it will make a big difference in the visibility of your logo.