The company logo is undoubtedly the most important part of your business identity. Many people, while choosing a logo, don’t really know what they want or what they need. This makes the process difficult not just for them but also for their designer. Knowing the basics of logo design and having a clear idea of what you want your logo to convey can definitely help save time and efforts.
In this article we’re going to cover the common mistakes companies and small business owners make when having their logo design and brand identity created. These mistakes range from what you would think are obvious to some things you may have not thought about.
1: Forgetting What A Logo Is
One of the first mistakes a company will make is forget what a logo is. If you are in the process of picking your first logo, it is possible you don’t really know what a logo is. This isn’t because you are ‘stupid’, nor should you feel that way for not knowing – in fact a lot of designers don’t know, or forget this. Truth is, most people don’t know what a logo is.
A Logo Is:
+ A logo is a design.
+ A logo for immediate recognition, inspiring trust, creating admiration, developing brand loyalty and suggesting an implied superiority.
+ The logo is one aspect of a brand or economic entity. It’s shapes, colors, fonts and images work to set it apart from others in similar markets.
+ Logos are created as a means to identify an organization.
+ That little piece of art that makes people think of your company as a whole, and sticks in their memory as a single ‘placeholder’ or ‘file label’ for everything your company is.
A Logo Is NOT:
+ A logo is not a photograph: A photograph may be part of your branding, but you cannot take a picture of the tree in your yard, and make it your landscaping business logo. If you go back to your definition of a logo it is supposed to identify the company, to set it apart, to create immediate recognition not only is it not scalable for large format, it takes too long to recognize.
+ A logo is not clip art: If you open up your design in the program that it was created, take out a magnifying glass and see little square pixels, you don’t have a logo. A Logo is and always will be in vector format. That way no matter what you put it on, no matter how big or how small it is, the logo will be able to be resized and put on anything. If you can’t make it as big as a house, it isn’t a logo.
+ A logo will not tell your story. Your logo is not your brand. While your logo is representing your brand, it’s job is separate.
Let us look at McDonald’s for example. They do not have the cheapest fastest hamburger in their logo but everyone knows that the arched “m” means cheapest fastest hamburger. The logo is what people use to quickly connect the two that doesn’t mean the logo should be a bird in the shape of a Q if you are a hamburger place called Billy’s Burgers. But, it doesn’t mean that a hamburger logo is going to help you. Just because a company sells a specific product or is growing, does not mean you need to include that in your logo. That is what your supporting branding material is for.
2: Forgetting What Your Company Does / Being too abstract
This may seem like a silly thing to say – after all you know exactly what your company does. But you have to keep in mind that while your logo may not need to tell your whole story, you have to remember what you do.
If you are an art gallery, so people file your brand in the right place, your logo has to seem to have some tie in in some regard. For example, using reds and silver’s with strong gradients, bright pops, and drop shadows will most likely make your company look like an IT company, especially if you pair it with an arbitrary symbol.
Remember a logo is a design that is for quick recognition, brand loyalty, admiration. If they can’t make even a slight guess as to what it is your sell, or your logo looks like every other IT company’s logo you will be forgotten.
There are a lot of beautiful and amazing designs out there, but they are not (nor should they ever be) transferable amongst different companies.
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