9 Tips for Building a Successful Logo for Your Company

A company’s logo is the face of the organisation and is the best tool for establishing a visual link in customer’s mind. The goal is to reach a level of recognition where the customer is able to recall and identify a brand without prompts.

The Market Inspector infographic displays 9 tips on creating a strong, yet simple brand logo:

Your logo should reflect positioning, values and business goals. Furthermore, research your audience and make sure your logo aligns with communication strategies. These aspects are a good starting point, and only when one knows the character of a brand can it be reflected in a logo.

Focus on easy and clear design. Design experts say that good logos have such qualities as consistency, simplicity, recognition and persuasiveness, so avoid complication and designs which mislead the point of the logo and brand itself.

For inspiration it is acceptable to analyse your competitors and various other design trends. Nevertheless, being true to the core of the business is important and should remain top priority. Make sure not to imitate or violate any copyrights along the way. Ideally, it would make most sense to have something that is unique to the brand.

Creative activities are hardly ever linear and people have their own tendencies. Generally, the design process is part of the whole branding process and somes steps are as follows. 1) Designing a brief. 2) Research. 3) Reference. 4) Sketching. 5) Reflection. 6) Presentation.

It’s not enough to merely have a beautiful image. It is important to see a logo in different formats - on a pen, t-shirt, business card or a website, because it might look completely different. Also, some colour psychology should be implemented in order to make it catchy.

The very first ideas should be filtered through in order to find the best possible match for your company. Having such illustrations such as light bulbs for ‘ideas’ or globes representing ‘international’ have already become very widely used, which brings no value or originality to the brand logo.

It is important to stop at around 10 most relevant designs instead of being overwhelmed. To generate ideas and inspiration use a dictionary for keywords or Google images for visuals.

Such techniques are useful for filtering and developing ideas, as well as mixing up images. After playing with keywords and synonyms they the can be moved onto a mood board to see their combinations.

Keeping all sketches makes a great resource for ideas. This is more relevant for the actual designers, so it also might be a good idea to hire a professional to make the logo. A designer might already have a great idea in his/her work portfolio.