Logo Design

When someone first thinks about starting a new business they think about their logo and contact a logo design company to help them. It is wise to first consider what a logo should be and what a logo shouldn't be. A logo isn't supposed to tell the story of your business. It is a mistake to assume that people should be able to look at your logo and figure out what your business is all about.

A logo needs only to do two things:
1. It must be easy to recognize.
2. It must be memorable.

This is why the logo design used by Nike is just a check mark. The check mark has nothing to do with running faster, jumping higher or getting a lower score in your golf game. The logo is easy to recognize and memorable - great logo.

The world is filled with large corporations who all have logos that don't tell any story at all but they are easy to recognize and they are memorable. The at&t logo for example uses all lowercase letters and a ball or a globe. Maybe we can imagine the globe to be the world and the horizontal lines are telephone lines or maybe it is just easy to recognize and memorable. Whatever that logo design is, it doesn't say a thing about High Speed Internet, telephone service, cell phones, software engineering or any of the services offered by at&t.

Here we can see a logo design for one of the largest financial institutions in the world. Two things are interesting about this logo. Compared to the size of the website we are viewing, the logo is small. The logo is also nothing more than a few lowercase letters and a red curved line.

Here are some logo design misconceptions:
1. My company can't afford to advertise like a Fortune 500 so my logo DOES have to make it clear what my business is all about.
2. My logo should be big so people will notice it.
3. My logo should be created in my favorite color.

The problem with trying to make a logo tell the story about your business (other than the fact that it can't) is that your business is about many more things than any single image can describe. We often see for example a landscape company goes to the local office supply store and asks for business cards. The store will ask if they would like the clip art of the tree or the lawn mower. This is clip art and not a custom logo design. Even with a landscape company the lawn mower or tree doesn't tell the full story about the business. This is why we have brochures and websites; there we have room to tell the story of our business and show examples of our work.

In the second misconception we don't need to make the logo big on a business card, brochure or website because people will see it anyway. Most importantly people don't come to your website to see your logo; they want information about your business.

There is a great deal of research that has been done in the science of color and it is best to leave color selection to the advertising agencies.

Here are some examples of logo design