Your logo is a central component of your marketing strategy. It creates the first impression consumers attach to your brand, making a decisive impact on whether customers decide to investigate you or ignore you. It positions your marketing message in the eyes of your target audience, helping determine how buyers perceive your brand. Ideally, it should make your brand memorable so that customers think of you instead of your competitors when they’re getting ready to buy.
The important functions your logo performs make it worthwhile to invest some time in developing an effective logo design. Here are four keys for designing a winning business logo.
Communicate a Clear Concept
An effective logo should communicate a clear message to your target audience. What do you want consumers to think of when they think of your brand? What ideas should they associate with your company? What benefits should they associate with your product? What emotions should they feel when they look at your logo? Formulating a clear concept of the message you want to convey will help suggest ideas for your logo and help determine which logo design communicates your brand’s identity most effectively.
To develop a logo concept, 99design contributor Deanna deBara suggests using brainstorming to come up with ideas. List all the adjectives describe your brand. List words that describe how you want consumers to perceive your brand. List words that describe how you want people to feel when they see your logo. When initially making your lists, write down all the ideas that come to you without censoring yourself. Then narrow your lists down to your top ideas until a clearer picture of your logo concept begins to emerge.
Keep Your Design Simple
Once you have a clear concept to work with, the next step is to translate it into a design that expresses your concept. This involves selecting the right image, font, style and other design elements that contribute to your logo.
A good logo design should be simple. The more complex the logo, the harder it is for consumers to remember. Simple shapes and minimal lettering are more likely to make people remember your logo than cluttered designs.
Use Strong Color Schemes
One of the most important visual elements of your logo design is your color scheme. Colors help determine what associations and emotions consumers attach to your logo, which impacts how memorable your design is. The study by Signs.com found that consumers remember logo colors better than other design elements, regardless of logo complexity.
As with other logo elements, color schemes should be kept simple. Strong colors with bold contrasts will leave a more vivid impression than busy color schemes. Logo and brand identity specialist David Airey suggests ensuring a simple color scheme by working in black and white until your logo design is in its final stages.
Make Your Logo Mobile-friendly
In today’s mobile economy, an effective logo must be designed to appeal to smartphone users. Nineteen out of twenty Americans now own cell phones, including over three in four who own smartphones, according to Pew Research Center data. One in five Americans exclusively use smartphones to connect to the Internet.
Essential considerations for a mobile-friendly logo include screen size, pixels, and resolution, which helps companies develop effective online logos. Popular mobile screen sizes currently range from about 4.7 inches to 6 inches, with pixel size averaging 1920×1080. Given these dimensions, ideal logo resolution should be 300 dots per inch.
An effective logo is characterized by a clearly-conceptualized message, a simple and memorable design, robust color schemes and mobile-friendly resolution. Following these guidelines will help your logo grab your audience’s attention and stick in consumers’ minds, helping your brand stand out from the competition.
