Have you ever seen someone whose mood didn’t match their environment? Maybe you saw someone who seemed sad at a party. What about someone who looked nice, only to turn out to be cold and unfriendly? When people’s facial expressions don’t match their situation, it can be confusing for the others around them.
What you may not realize is that logos can actually have the same effect. When a logo doesn’t match its brand personality or connect with the audience, it confuses customers and can even make them stop engaging with the company.
So how do you create an epic, engaging logo? With these 7 logo design tips from Company Folders! You’ll learn how to make a logo design that matches the brand’s identity to a tee and connects with its customers.
Appeal to the audience
If you want to appeal to a target audience, you have to know who they are and what they like. This includes studying up on their age, gender, career, education, and interests. The more you learn about your target audience, the more you can reach out to them with a design that intrigues them on a psychological and emotional level.
Be unique in your industry
Cliché logos have a place in this world—in the garbage. In some industries, the logos all tend to look alike because they use the same design elements. But this creates a new problem in which the logos all run together, and none of them are truly memorable. If everyone in your industry is using a certain color or font, try something new so your logo stands out from the pack.
Opt for timeless traits
Redesigning a logo can be extremely costly, both in regards to your time and your wallet. That’s why it’s important to create a logo that will last—and to create it the first time around. If you study the evolution of brand logos, you’ll find some that have barely changed in the last 50 to 100 years (the Shell gas station seashell and McDonald’s arches are great examples). Be sure to build your logo on timeless design elements that will appeal to an audience for multiple generations.
Bring in new elements
Timeless logos are founded on the past, not mired in it. If you take the concept of timelessness too far, you’re likely to create a logo that’s boring instead of classic. You can counteract this by adding one or two cool modern twists to your logo to spice up the design and help it be more appealing to today’s audience.
Simplify your design
All the nuances and tiny details of complicated logos may look cool, but they also make it harder for the brain to register, process, and recognize the design. It’s best to streamline your logo so that customers can recognize it at a glance and make an immediate connection to the brand, rather than struggling to understand what they’re looking at. The best way to streamline a logo is to stop bombarding people with ideas. Focus on sending one brand message.
Make consistent choices
Logos are comprised of many tiny elements that include color, typography, shapes, icons, and white space and negative space (yes, there’s a difference). It’s easy to get sidetracked by design elements you think will cool. To make sure you don’t lose track of the design’s intent or make choices that contradict the message, keep the brand’s identity in mind for every selection. You may even want to work with your creative brief nearby, so you can reference it to maximize your design’s consistency.
Adapt to any situation
Logos are quite the little travelers. They appear everywhere a brand chooses to market itself, whether that’s on websites, print marketing materials, promotional items, or freeway signs. With so many places to go, logos have to be able to adapt at a moment’s notice. Be sure your logo scales to any size and is readable in different colors (or without color).
Summary
An epic logo has a tough job to do. Not only does it portray a brand’s personality, it has to do so in a way that motivates the audience to start engaging with the company. These 7 tips are designed to give you a leg up on the competition. Put them to good use, and you’ll be creating epic logos in no time!
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