5 Essentials for Creating the Best Business Logo

A business logo is a concise symbol to represent your company or brand. That being said, the best business logo will help your company stand out from your competition, so it must be memorable, impressionable, and most of all, eye-catching.

Here are 5 essential tips to use for creating the most effective business logo:

1. Analyze your company. This is the time to determine your target demographic, and what you want potential clients to come away with after seeing your logo.
2. Make it clear. Using a concise and clear color scheme and font will make an appealing and eye-catching business logo. With that in mind, your logo also needs to pass the test when printed in black and white. Does it look the same? Does it have the same effect? Does your logo look good printed in different sizes?
3. Convey a message. As an example, if your company is eco-friendly or producing green products, you may want the lettering of your logo to be green or have a symbol of the earth in the lettering to help people immediately recognize that you are an environmentally friendly company.
4. Make the logo artwork sharp. It is important to avoid color gradients and drop shadows when creating your business logo. These may look flashy and appealing on the computer, but when they are reproduced on a business card, for example, the effect will be lost. You will have a much more effective business logo without these additions by using a unique and sharp color that will catch attention.
5. State your name clearly. Last of all, your business logo must clearly state your company name so that people can read it. Even if you are substituting images for letters in your business name, make sure that it is still legible to anyone and everyone.

24 Rebranding Takes More Than Redesigning Your Logo

What many savvy marketers have realized is that a brand must often evolve to stay relevant in the market. In the same way, rebranding may benefit your company greatly to reintroduce your products and services to your existing demographic and new customer bases. However, there is more to rebranding than simply creating a new logo.

Here are some of the top mistakes to avoid when rebranding your company:

1. Focusing too much on the logo. Rebranding is much more than creating a new logo, and it encompasses the customer’s experience and perception of the company as a whole. This means making changes online, in the retail atmosphere, and in customer service.

1. Not having a plan. When you are rebranding your company, you absolutely must have a plan. This will help you to clearly navigate through all of the changes that need to be made in the presentation of the company, including whether or not you need to change your target demographic, budget, website, and marketing campaign.

1. Not staying relevant. If you are focusing too much on the history of your company, your rebranding may not be a success. You must analyze your target market and have an eye open for any new demographic that could be interested in your product or service.

1. Not understanding your customer base. When rebranding, you need to take a clear look at who is buying your products. This may mean having secret shoppers visit your website or call your customer service to find out how the customer is really treated. This can help you to make relevant changes from that objective point of view to reintroduce your company to the market.

Rebranding could be your saving grace if your company is on a sinking ship. Take these tips into serious consideration to have the best results in the reintroduction of your company to your customers!

Top 10 Logos Reviewed

What makes one logo more successful than another? What does it take to create a logo for your business that will make you as big as Nike or McDonald’s?

We will review the designs of the top 10 branding logos here so that you can see for yourself what turns a simple logo into a masterpiece:

1. BMW: The world is familiar with the BMW logo, and it uses a simple and clean color palette of blue and white to complement each other. The lettering in itself is quite dynamic against the black background, yet the logo is simple and elegant, just like the brand itself.
2. Puma: This popular sporting brand uses an actual puma image and the color green to symbolize energy and activity.
3. Nike: We are all familiar with the Nike logo and its lack of topography so that all sports enthusiasts can recognize it simply by its black check mark alone.
4. Coca-Cola: This logo is red and vibrant in a classic script, so it is timeless and synonymous with 1950s America.
5. Mickey Mouse: This is perhaps one of the simplest and most well-known logos with three simple black circles to create Mickey Mouse. So subtle that it catches your attention.
6. McDonald’s: The use of bright yellow is an energizing attention getter, and the logo design is simple and unforgettable.

How to Avoid Cluttered Logo Design

There is a massive difference between eye-catching and cluttered logo design.

What it comes to advertising, many companies want to cram in as much information as possible to maximize their advertising space so that at a glance, the customer can see what the company is all about. However, clutter in a logo often takes away from the attraction if there are too many components for the eye to understand.

On the flipside, simple and targeted advertisement is a successful choice for many of the top businesses on the market, with Google being the best example. Google is a plain and clean website that does not sell advertising space on the homepage, making it soothing and preferred by many Internet users. Furthermore, the ads that Google does place within the search engine results are even stronger because of this approach since they are relevant, regulated, and easy on the eye. Facebook is another ideal business model that is often preferred over MySpace because it uses much less advertisement so that it is still appealing.

With these examples in mind, it is important to understand how much more effective your logo can become if it is attention grabbing instead of merely cluttered. If there are too many words within an advertisement or too many advertisements in one space, it is difficult for your ad to stand out. This means that you are in essence wasting money on your ad space, simply because you have tried to crowd it with too much information.

The last thing to keep in mind is that navigation is key when attracting customers to your website. If a customer is able to click on a simple logo or advertisement, be directed to a clear and user-friendly website, and find what they are looking for, that guarantees success for the business.

Learn to Avoid Visual Hierarchy Problems in Logo Design

There may have been many times that you visited a fairly attractive website but felt that something was missing. A website may have appealing graphics, a nice color scheme, and the right alignment, but it could still feel bland overall.

In these instances, a graphic designer can use their design intuition to create different elements on the page in a concise hierarchy, which will generate intention and attraction for any visitor. This concept is called visual hierarchy, and it is mastered by the most skilled graphic artists. This means that you can control how a visitor views and reads your website, which will encourage any visitor to read all of the information on the site clearly. The purpose of this is to allow you as a company to clearly convey your message and leave a long-lasting impression on any potential customer.

To begin in establishing visual hierarchy, you must focus on the position of your text and images. This will include the order of the images and text used so that it is easier on the eyes for any visitors to process. Next on the list is using the right size of text and images. Anything that is large and bold will be immediately seen, with smaller text and images viewed later. This principle of visual hierarchy means that you want dominant images and text to convey the main principle and point of what your company has to offer.

Last of all, color can often be used to differentiate what is important on a page by drawing attention to specific words or images and detracting attention from others. This concept can be used to create visual hierarchy to highlight your brand, product, or service so that it literally jumps off of the page when seen by any visitors to your website.

Indispensable Logo Design and Tagline Tips for Effective Branding

What sets one business apart from another? Why are you doing better or worse than your competition? The simple answer is branding, and it is the reason why customers may choose one business over and over again while forsaking their competition.

The truth of the matter is that personal branding is the key to customer loyalty, longevity, and booming sales as a business in any market. However, much of that has to do with your tagline and logo design since this is what your prospective customers will see before even encountering your company.

Create a memorable logo:

The first step is to create a memorable company logo that people will start to recognize. You can think of any major brand, like Starbucks, as an example. Starbucks has a logo that anyone would recognize without even seeing the name of the company due to their popularity. Your logo needs to have a strong and uncluttered image so that customers can easily recognize it at a glance. You also need to use a style of imagery that represents your company, whether it is cute and bouncy for a children’s clothing line or strong and aggressive for an architectural firm.

Write an unforgettable tagline:

A tagline is a phrase containing 3 to 7 words to accompany your logo. Again, you can think of any top company and probably recite their tagline right off the bat, especially if it has been used in a commercial jingle. This needs to represent what your company is about, what product or service that you offer, and what you hope that the customer will take away after reading it.

When you integrate an impressive logo and memorable tagline into your personal branding concept, the sky is truly the limit in your business possibilities!

What You Must Know About Typeface Design

In the past few years, attitudes toward typeface design have changed significantly. The latest generations have grown up using computers, which now considerably influence all design decisions. The point of the matter is that typeface design is an ever-changing concept with new innovations being introduced regularly, and here are the top points to consider when it comes to cutting edge typography:

1. History:

   Even if modern typeface designers are not all conscious of typeface history, topography as we know it today has still been developed and built on topography of the past. This wide history has given birth to much of the typeface design that we commonly use, meaning that it is important not to throw out the old with the new.

2. Improve upon Design:

   Ideas in topography are just that: ideas. Typeface design needs to be critiqued, shaped, and developed to improve upon its original form. Even within a wider range of typeface design, it is important that users and designers are aware of how the typeface will look when printed, used online, or on different styles of paper.

3. Learn Scale:

   One of the greatest skills that a typeface designer can possess is understanding how to scale shapes at a particular size where they will still look suitable when reproduced larger or smaller. Typeface designers have an eye for detail in that they can assess an entire page or paragraph of text to influence their overall design choices.

4. Use Tools:

   Typeface design is influenced and shaped by writing tools, including graffiti, handwritten signs, and public lettering. In these instances, the typeface designer must be constantly aware of his or her surroundings to garner everything they can from their environment to influence their design.

When used properly, topography can be an innovative example of forward thinking designers, especially in this computer-driven age.

How Do Colors and Symbols Influence Memorable Logo Design?

What does it take to make a memorable logo? Really, what design is necessary to make your company logo literally jump off of the page? Logos are what symbolize the overall brand of a company or product, making customers recognize the brand and become instantly attracted to it.

Some of the most famous logos use a combination of color and symbol to personify their brand.

As the perfect example, we are all familiar with the golden arches of McDonald’s. In essence, it is a bright yellow “M”, making it jump off of the page or print so that people immediately know what it is. You can see in this example that the McDonald’s logo depends largely upon its use of color for its success.

Compare this with other simple logos that do not include color or even wording, such as the Nike symbol. This is a pure symbol in itself in the form of a check mark, yet it gets the job done in creating recognition for this incredibly successful sports brand. Would the McDonald’s logo work in the same way if it was in black and white? Absolutely not.

Color is often the most significant portion of the logo design since it can create psychological responses in its viewers. As an example, red symbolizes energy and movement, while blue offers a state of wisdom and calm. Green can be used to represent luck, money, and nature, and yellow is often used to personify optimism, happiness, and laughter.

Nonetheless, many companies choose a symbol over color since a picture is worth a thousand words. In these cases, a combination of text and images can be used to represent a brand and what type of products or services that they offer. With these ideas in mind, you must ask yourself what you want your signature logo to convey, and whether it requires color, a symbol, or both.