Our Views on Effective Design
Look at your logo from your customer's point of view
You may have sent your potential customer a mailshot, handed over a business card or perhaps they stumbled across your place in cyberspace. What that person sees when he or she looks at your logo design, defines your company in an instant - whether your business is reliable or not, whether it is modern or old fashioned, whether it is vibrant or lacklustre. In other words, your potential buyer already has a mental picture of what they need from an organisation like yours, and it is your logo's job to communicate the right values from the outset, reassuring or pleasantly surprising them.
Project the right impression
If your logo design is good, it will project exactly the right impression to your target market and will be one of the keys to unlocking many, many sales leads. Once unlocked, the right logo will act as a beacon, attracting repeat sales from your happy customers. And if you sell a range of products, a strong logo design will help to turn a single sale into sales across an entire range. If you want your customers to recognise you, remember you, be reminded of a positive business experience and come back to you, you must have a professional logo design.
- Your logo design must be distinctive: Your logo needn't be unique, but it must be distinctive enough to clearly identify you within your specific marketplace
- Your logo design must be practical: Logos always look great on letterheads. But logos can and do end up appearing everywhere, from exhibition displays to promotional pens. A logo must still work when it's printed small, or in black and white
- Your logo design must be immediate: Any logo must communicate in purely visual terms without the need for intellectual interpretation. Even a typographic logo (wordmark) can be recognized by form alone (you don't have to "read" Virgin 's logo more than once or twice)
- Your logo design must be simple: A logo must be understood in an instant so there's only room for one key idea (or hook). If there's a picture or symbol, the accompanying name should be unfussy. If the logo design is typographic (a wordmark), just one interesting device will make it distinctive. And the more unique the name, the simpler any graphics should be.
- Your logo design must carry only one message: Successful logo designs express no more than one key attribute (such as power or precision or tradition) and convey the company or product's market position (e.g. upmarket/downmarket).
Logo design for a single product or service
If yours is company which provides a single product or service to its clients, you will need a single, strong logo design which conveys your corporate values, because your business is your brand. This would typically be something like a firm of solicitors, a chain of estate agents, or a manufacturer of one product.
Logo design for a range of related goods or services
Or maybe yours is a business which provides a range of related products or services, all marketed towards the same group. For example you may be a provider of internet services or a publisher of related books or magazines. If you fall into category two, you may get away with a category one approach. However, if your product range is complex with a diverse appeal, you may need to consider a family of associated logos which differentiate your services or products whilst keeping them strongly related to one-another. This helps customers to recognise the brand family and purchase other goods or services from the same group
Logo design for different products or services
Or is yours a company that delivers a number of unrelated goods or services, sold in entirely separate markets? If you fall into this third category, you will most likely need to consider a number of disparate brand logos, each attuned to that product's target audience. These brand logos may possibly be endorsed by a secondary, corporate logo design which over time, and assuming you manage your brands well, will add weight to the credibility of the of other products from the same group, encouraging further sales.
- Complicated or detailed pictures: They look great on well-printed letterheads, but logo designs like this never survive in small-space press advertisements or on promotional goods. If you want to be recognised instantly, avoid too much detail.
- Complicated themes: Your customers will not take the time to interpret or decode a complicated subject. Don't waste their time or yours with a challenging logo design.
- Make it easy for your customers: If you have an unusual name, this will prove memorable by itself, so don't confuse the issue with a complex logo design.
- If you have a bland or forgettable name: If you have a bland or forgettable name
- Brand values: Really communicate with your customers by defining your core proposition to them and ensure your logo design expresses these values clearly