Is your logo a good one?
As a graphic designer and design instructor, I’ve seen a lot of logos, good, bad, and ugly. I’ve seen the funny, the complicated, the so-simple-it’s-brilliant, and plenty of what-were-they-thinkings. A few logos have reached iconic status—think Coca Cola, IBM, and McDonalds. There are many, many more logos that are forgotten the instant the package hits the trash can.
When used properly and consistently, a logo becomes a visual representation of a company, product or service. It is a visual cue for a brand, (the logo is not the brand itself, a popular misconception) a trigger that makes the client/customer think of all the things he or she knows about the product, service or company.
This is a lot to ask of one tiny picture (or combination of word and picture).
This is what makes designing logos difficult. This is also why it is crucial that your logo is a good one.
So, how do you know your logo is a good one?
When evaluating logos (whether prepared by you, your staff, by an agency or by a freelance designer), here are several things you need to consider:
- First and foremost, your logo should be unique to your subject/product/company. Avoid anything that is too generic. Ask yourself if the design you are considering could be easily represent another company with the same name doing an entirely different service. If the answer is yes, consider other designs.
- Your design should be simple and SCALABLE. The design needs to be as clear and readable at the size of a postage stamp as it is at the size of a billboard. Avoid use of fine lines that disappear when a logo shrinks, and too much detail that turns into mush when reduced in size. Universities are fond of using detailed seals as logos. This is usually a bad idea, as those seals turn to mushy thumbprints when placed on business cards, or worse, when they’re faxed.Simplicity is also something to consider if you intend to put your logo on textiles, especially embroidered on T-shirts and hats. Commercial embroidery companies will have a difficult time rendering your logo if it has too many details and/or fine elements, including serifs on fonts.
- Limit the number of colors used. Unless your company has a money tree in your atrium, you’ll want to reduce the number of colors in your logo to one or two. The more colors your logo uses, the more expensive your printing costs will be. A good, economical approach is to use two “spot” colors (often black and another color), which are essentialy pre-established printing ink colors. Spot colors have the advantage of being consistent—important if you’re trying to build consistent visuals. Imagine if Coca Cola allowed its signature red to shift in the spectrum from orangy reds to purply reds. They don’t. They pick one spot color and stick to it.If you use three or four spot colors, the printing costs start to rival the cost of printing “four color process” where cyan, magenta, yellow and black inks are used to “build up” your color of choice. Process printing gets expensive, and doesn’t have the color consistency of spot color.
Bottom line, unless you are prepared to pay for process color each time you print, and don’t care about color consistency, choose spot colors for your logo.This does not mean that you can’t ever have a full, four color process logo to use where appropriate (on websites and product packaging, for example). Just make sure that if you choose to have a complicated design, that you also give yourself less complicated alternatives to use as needed. - Make sure your logo can be reduced to black and white. Sometimes printing in color is not an option—think advertising, photocopying and faxing. You’ll want your logo to look clear everywhere you print it, so you’ll need a black and white version (ideally without areas of grayscale, which often print poorly, especially on newsprint).
- Make sure you can “reverse out” your logo. Reversing out is the design term for your logo appearing in white on colored or photographic backgrounds. Again, this is a flexibility issue. You want to have your logo be clear and readable in all possible places it may appear. HINT: If your logo works in all black, it will be easily reversed out.
- Avoid using the font-du-jour. We all have cool fonts on our computers, and we all tend to have our favorites. There are a few fonts every decade or so that get done to death, and look dated very quickly. Some recent examples include Mistral, Papyrus, Copperplate Gothic and Zapfino.
There are a million fonts out there, and there can be no excuse not to find something unique for your logo design. It’s even possible to commission a font artist to create something completely new, just for you. - Avoid designs that are too horizontal or too vertical. Such designs can be difficult to use depending on the situation. It’s wise to create orientation variations of your logo, much like creating color variations (2-color, all black, reversed, see above), so that you have a good size to fit every situation.
Finally, as you are considering and evaluating logos, be sure to see some examples of a logo in use. Try using the design on a web page, or on a newsletter to see how it looks in context. You may find that what looks good as stand-alone on a presentation board doesn’t hold up as well when it’s placed on top a busy photo on your brochure cover.