Things to Think About When Designing Your Logo

So by now, hopefully you’ll be starting to think about the fundamental principles of logo design, have an understanding of the personality of your brand, and have some ideas about how that translates visually into your logo design. If you’re planning on using a professional designer to create your logo then you can use this checklist to help create your brief to them and if you’re using a DIY logo builder then you can use this checklist as you make your own logo. 

1. Include Your Business Name

Unless you’re a mega-corporation with global brand recognition, it’s a good idea to include your business name in your logo. This will enable you to start growing brand recognition and will make sure that customers looking at your logo know that it belongs to your business. Most business names are related to your product or services so including it in your logo adds some useful context that will let your customers know what your business is all about. There might also be logos that look similar to yours, especially if you use an AI-generated logo maker, so including your business name will make your logo unique and will stop people getting confused or mistaking your logo for something else.

2. Find the Right Fonts

The perfect font is easy-to-read, brings clarity to your design, and brings originality and personality to your design. Fonts are a great way to bring the character of a brand into the design and they should always look good, but never sacrifice readability for beauty. Try reading the fonts on different screen sizes with different levels of brightness to make sure that it can be read easily in different circumstances.

The best practice is to use one font type for your business name and a different one for your tagline or slogan. Make sure that they complement each other and say something about your brand. 

There are lots of different font types but here are some of the main types and a quick summary of what they convey:

• Serif – elegance, sophistication, tradition, respectability, and reliability.
• Sans Serif – clarity, forward-thinking, honesty, sensibility, and clean.
• Slab Serif – loud, bold, confident, dependable, creative, and important.
• Script / Handwritten – elegance, freedom, creativity, feminine, unique, and artful.
• Decorative – unique, original, casual, fun, creative, and exciting.

3. Bring Your Logo to Life With an Icon or Graphic

Often the visual element of a logo is what draws the attention of people, so choosing the right icon or graphic is important when thinking about standing out from the crowd and creating a memorable design. This is because humans identify with images much faster than text, so a logo with an icon or any kind of shape will help someone to remember your brand and logo much better than a text-only logo.

If your business has a specific set of products or services then you might want to include an image that directly relates to them. For example, if you run a dog grooming business it would make sense to include a visual of a dog within your logo. If your business doesn’t have a relatable product or service then you should consider including shapes and lines to create visually stunning images that will draw the eyes of potential customers and help them to remember it more easily. Most DIY logo makers will have thousands of icons to choose from. So, there should be something in their icon libraries that works for your business.

4. Use The Right Colors

The use of colors in your logo will emit a message to consumers about your brand, give it a personality, and a feeling when people interact with your products, services, and other customer touchpoints. There is a psychological effect on the brain when it sees colors and you can use this to manipulate how people view your brand. If you want to deep-dive on the psychology of color read this article on the fundamentals of color psychology from 99designs. 

Take a look at the list of colors below to find out what feelings they evoke in the brain. If you consider how you want your brand to make people feel, this should help you decide on what color you should focus on. Try to only include between one and three colors in your logo to keep it simple, clear, and versatile. Any more than that and it will become confusing and hard to look at.

• Red – passion, excitement, playful, young, comfort, love, romance, warmth
• Yellow – friendly, cheerful, happiness, energy, positivity, youthful, comforting, affordable
• Blue – wisdom, loyalty, respectability, calm, trust, healing, confidence
• Green – natural, balance, calm, restful, fresh, health, wealth, harmony, tranquility
• Orange – playful, energetic, change, warmth, vitality, active, invigorating
• Purple – royalty, sophistication, soothing, creativity, luxury, truthfulness, high quality, spiritual
• Brown – seriousness, grounded, supportive, reliability, nature, rugged, warm
• Pink – feminine, energetic, cheerful, soothing, sexual, nurturing, romance, love
• Grey – timeless, practical, neutral, efficiency, serious, mystery, classic
• Black – powerful, professional, seriousness, intelligence, glamour, luxury, modern
• White – neutral, pure, sophistication, efficiency, exclusive, luxury, clarity, innocence

5. Uppercase or Lowercase?

Small details like uppercase and lowercase text in your logo design can add to the message you’re trying to convey. More often than not, uppercase logos give off a sense of authority, assertiveness, and presence. Whereas, lowercase logos can give off a casual and approachable vibe. 

Upper or lowercase text alone won’t create a huge impact, but it is another layer to your design that you should think about to add to the overall effect of the design.

6. Do You Want to Include a Tagline? Here Are Some Guidelines

When taglines are done right, they can add context and personality to your logo design, but be careful not to confuse things or devalue your brand with a sloppy tagline. If you’re unsure that it adds value, it’s probably best to leave it out. Some things to adhere to if you are going to include a tagline are:

Character length – your tagline should be shorter than a business name in the design. Even though the font will be smaller allowing you to add more words you should still limit it to around 25-30 characters.

Font thickness – use a thinner font for the tagline which will allow you to make sure it’s smaller than your business name and allow your business name to be the prominent feature.

Font type – use a more basic font type for the tagline to make it easy to read even at a smaller font size. A more basic font type will also make it easier to complement your feature font type that you’ll use for the business name. Sans-Serif fonts work well for taglines. 

Think About Spacing

White space, or negative space, is important in any logo design because it’s needed to allow the eyes and the brain to process the visual stimulus. A logo design with adequate spacing will be much more memorable than a cluttered design because it’s much easier for the brain to digest everything from simple, well-spaced logo designs. If you decide to use a frame in your logo design make sure there is enough room between the edge of the frame and the visual and text elements of the design to avoid a cluttered and cramped look.

8. Ensure Readability

The main purpose of a logo is that it can be recognized easily, even from a glance, and sometimes even subliminally as you walk past adverts in the street or scroll past branding on your phones. To ensure your logo can do this, it needs to be readable on any type of screen and at any print size.

Font types, font sizes, colors, and spacing all play a role in readability, so focusing on those steps will help you to create a legible, easy-to-read logo. Take the time to look at your logo design on different screens, print it out at different sizes, and see if you can still see it clearly. If you feel like it could be better, try and go back to the appropriate step and optimize the design for better recognition and readability. It will be worth the effort! 

9. Alignment is the Key to Success

Alignment is the golden rule of design. Now that you have all of the elements you need on the page, it’s time to make sure they appear balanced. This is because the brain naturally tries to find patterns and symmetry, so having your logo elements aligned will draw the attention of someone’s eye and make it much more memorable and pleasing to look at.

There’s room for creative freedom here and there is no set rule as to how you should align your design elements. However, if you’re a beginner you should stick to aligning everything in the same direction which could be either to the left, right, or center.

10. Make Your Logo Versatile With Multiple Layouts

As we discussed before, your logo needs to work in a number of different locations from websites, to business cards, to billboards. So, having a variety of formats will make sure that you have a logo variant for every location that it might end up. Every business will vary in what it actually needs and will use on a day to day basis, but, if you have the budget there is no harm in having all the bases covered. Here’s a list of all the logo variations you might want to consider:

• Primary logo – This is your go-to logo design that includes all of the elements such as icon, wordmark and tagline.
• Wide – You might already have a horizontal logo design, but if not, you’ll need to think about creating one for when space is limited. For example, website navigation bars, Facebook cover photos, and letterheads.
• Tall / Square – Having a logo design that’s tall and fits into a square is great for social media profile pictures, website headers, and printed material that has limited spacing like business cards.
• Icon – Icons are great for when you want to include your branding when there really isn’t much space. They work really well in responsive web designs and can appear when screen sizes get too small to show your primary logo.
• Wordmark – Again this is used when there is limited space and when an icon is not appropriate. It might not have the visual elements but it will still put your business name in front of the consumer’s eyes.
• Single color – Having a single color variant is useful when including your logo over busy backgrounds.
• Black & white – A strong black and white version of your logo design will keep the design looking sharp and readable when it’s printed on low-res printers and when photocopied.