How a successful logo is created

A logo is a company's business card, representing the company both offline and online on different mediums and in advertising. Clients memorise and associate the logo to the company's characteristics. For this reason it is particularly important that a company has a captivating and timeless logo. But how is such a logo created?

 

Simplicity

Visual simplicity is a logo's essential characteristic. A good logo must represent the message of a company or brand in a condensed form. It must be suitable for your company's content, offer and it has to be easly understood by the viewer. A logo should be as simple as possible and not be overloaded with elements such as complex shapes, filigree, small lines etc., because the logo must then be easily recognisable in any size you present it in. Ideally, one should be able to redesign a logo from memory. This ensures that people can remember the logo very quickly.

 

Uniqueness

A logo must be unique and inimitable. In this way, customers will associate it directly with your company and not confuse you with competitors. A good logo should be as timeless as possible, so that it can represent a company even several years later. It is therefore important to create a unique design and not just copy or take inspiration from something that already exists. One can be inspired by other logos, but copying another logo can be very costly in the long run and unprofessional. The logo should never be confused with that of potential competitors.
 

 

Colours

Ideally, a logo should have one main colour and possibly a complementary colour, because too many colours create confusion and it is important that the colours also reflect the principle of simplicity. It is not only the colour itself that is important, but also that the logo works on a black and white background as it will be used on different media. A final aspect to be considered is the psychology of colour, here too there are many guidelines and values to be paid attention to in order to achieve the right effect to be conveyed. 
 

 

Typography

Each font has its own character, one font may be better suited for a particular logo than another font. It is important not only to have one font for the logo and perhaps a second for the underlying tagline, but to make sure you know which fonts are suitable for later purposes, e.g. for web design. This is because in general, when dealing with logo design, you create a whole world of design, the so-called brand design, in which everything comes together to create a unified and coherent image.

 

Dimensions and format

A successful logo can be reproduced on all kinds of media: large or small, black and white or colour, online or offline, high or low resolution. After all, it will be used for both advertising and communication media.

With regard to size, it is obviously important that the logo works on both small and large dimensions. In the first case, we can think for example of browser sizes: when the logo appears at the top of a browser window, it must be recognisable.
In the second case we can imagine billboards: even with these sizes, the logo must be well defined and recognisable.

With regard to formats, it is important to have the following formats: .svg, .jpg, .png, .eps, .pdf and .ai. 
The .eps and .pdf formats are important for printing, the .png format has a transparent background, .jpg is the most commonly used image format. The .svg and .ai formats being vector-based, they allow the logo to be resized without losing quality.

 

Variants

In the case of a logo, it is necessary to have more than one variant. It is important that the logo works on:

• a banner format
• a format consisting of logotype and pictogram
• a format in which only the logotype (i.e. the 'writing') appears
• a format in which only the pictogram (i.e. the graphic sign) appears
• a format with several colour variants

All these different variants should be made available for the different application cases of the logo.

 

Style Guide

A professional designer always provides a style guide, i.e. a document that defines how the logo should be used. This document contains everything from typography to the use of colours, not forgetting the variations of the logo and how the logo should be used (e.g. spacing and which effects or styles not to use). There is nothing worse than a well-designed logo that ends up being positioned so badly that it looks ugly. A style guide avoids this problem. 

 

Intellectual Property Rights

This part concerns the contractual sphere, but is nevertheless essential. It is necessary to establish ex ante the subject matter of the contract that is to be concluded between the designer/agency and the purchaser, what the rights of the parties involved are, and what the intellectual property regulation of the service that is being realised is. If you are an Italian speaker, we invite you to learn more about this topic by watching this video. 
 

 

Need to design a logo? DevInterface also takes care of brand identity. Contact us for a free consultation.