Designing a logo: Why clip-art isn’t enough!
It is quite common when initially designing a logo to go for a ‘clip-art style’ free (or very cheap one) to tide you over and let you get business cards out there. However, if you have read our blog post on how {cms_selflink page=’value-of-good-design’ text=’design can add value to your business’} you will appreciate that this choice can indeed be a false economy.
“ People make up their minds within 90 seconds of their initial interactions with a product.” (Singh 2006)
Your logo is one of the most important aspects to your marketing. It will be on everything from business cards to billboards to newspaper adverts to Twitter backgrounds – it will literally be everywhere that your business presence is. It will also be the first opportunity that a contact will have to form an opinion about your company when you hand over that beautifully designed business card!
As your logo will be everywhere and given that you probably don’t want to rebrand too quickly after starting up then it is imperative that you get it right first time.
Getting a face-lift now and again is one thing but completely changing your logo is another. Imagine if Apple started out with the apple then realised they would actually prefer a banana as their logo now, it would confuse everyone under the sun and you don’t want customers who knew your brand to wonder what’s happened!
Designing a good logo
When you are considering developing a logo for your business and weighing up whether to go the graphic designer or DIY route, consider the following:
- It should be unique – For example, you don’t want your new petrol station to have a giant yellow shell as it wouldn’t be unique and would likely promote someone else’s business. Use your logo to stand out from the crowd!
- It should be memorable – Also part of being unique!
- It must be relevant – take my Banana-Apple example previously as a good example of an irrelevant logo!
- It should be universal – Think of Facebook, whether you are 15 or 50 the logo is simple, clean and appealing to all ages.
- It doesn’t HAVE to contain images. Look at the logos below for inspiration and you’ll see what we mean.