Your company logo design is the primary visual representation of your brand. It’s the most common and basic way your business communicates itself to the world. It influences what prospects think about you and it’s a big part of how your customers remember you.
No matter how someone interacts with your brand, (whether they visit your website, pick up your business card, or see an advertisement) your logo is the first thing they see. With consumers’ attention spans getting shorter and shorter the importance of a good logo design becomes greater.
Here are the defining factors of a good AND bad logo. Now you can assess your own and plan for a successful redesign if necessary:
A good logo:
- Communicates what you do: Huge corporations have marketing budgets so large that they can get the public to associate any image they want with their company. The Nike “check” logo, for example, doesn’t explain what Nike does, but because they’ve done so much marketing, we all associate Nike with the check symbol. For smaller businesses, your company logo design may be the only impression a prospect has of you. For that reason, your logo has to immediately communicate what you do. Choose imagery that represents your industry. That way consumers can look at your logo and automatically know what kind of business you are.
- Communicates who you are: A good logo doesn’t just communicate your industry, it communicates your brand’s personality. Is your brand highly professional or relaxed and fun? Old-timey or super-technical? How about eco-friendly? These are all attributes that you can convey visually through your logo. It’s important to build a brand identity with your logo because prospects will always choose the business that they relate to personally.
- Is reasonably unique: Your logo should be unique, but within reason. If there is a standard look to most of the branding in your industry, stick to it, but give it your own twist. Don’t stray so far from the norm that people don’t know what they are looking at, but make sure your logo is unique enough to be memorable and identifiable.
- Matches the rest of your website: A good company logo design is consistent with all other visual branding your company produces. It should fit with the color scheme and typeface used on your website.
A bad logo:
- Is vague: A bad company logo design is just a name or a symbol that doesn’t have an explicit and identifiable meaning. You’ve only got a few seconds to capture a prospect’s interest, whether they have landed on your website or are seeing an advertisement. If you can’t look at your logo and understand your business in that amount of time, it needs work.
- Has no personality: Unless the brand identity you are shooting for is “flat and boring” you need to find a way to inject your company’s personality into your logo. That could be a color scheme choice, a typeface choice, or a graphic choice. Look at your current logo and ask yourself, “If I didn’t know anything about this brand, what could I assume based on this logo?” If your logo doesn’t have much to say other than your industry, you should be thinking of ways to incorporate your unique personality into the logo.
- Is either too familiar or too out-there: If your logo looks eerily similar to other company’s logos in your industry, it’s not doing you any good. Logos are one of the essential ways businesses stand out from competitors who offer the same products/services. Adversely, if your logo looks nothing like anything your prospects have seen before, they’ll be confused and/or turned off. Find the happy medium.
- Looks out of place on your website: Do your logo’s colors clash with the colors of your website? Does the shape of it fit nicely or does it look out of place? Make sure your logo is in line with all of your other marketing materials, especially your website.
Which category does your company logo design fall under?
If you’re realizing that your logo isn’t up to par because it doesn’t communicate the type, quality, and personality of your business, consider a redesign! Plum Direct Marketing offers professional logo design services that help build a brand identity that stands out and appeals to your target market. If you are interested in learning more, check out: https://plumdirectmarketing.com/services/branding-creative/