Subscribe Feed (RSS)Creating an Effective Business Logo Design
April 25th, 2007 by Joshua Dorkin | Filed under Advertising, Marketing, Website Design.One of the first things that you’ll need to do when starting a business is to create a logo to represent your company. It seems like this may be a simple thing, but it is often more difficult then you think!
Some Logos Are Timeless
There are certain logos we’ll never forget: Apple, CocaCola, McDonalds, Google, Nike, Target, etc.
I don’t even need to show these, because we all have them imprinted in our minds. Pretty amazing!
I wish I could write a post about what constitutes a great logo. I don’t have any magic formula, but I know one when I see it. Creating a timeless and effective logo is not an easy undertaking. Large corporations often times spend millions of dollars on their brand.
I recently found a great resource to help you out with any logo questions (which actually inspired this post) called the Logo Design Blog. According to the site, the 5 characteristics of a highly successful logo include:
- Uniqueness
- Relevancy
- Appealing
- Consistency
- Contrast
For more details, read the post; it goes into detail about each of these characteristics. In another interesting post, the site discusses the various constituents of a logo, which include symbol, sign, emblem, or slogan. It is a great place to start learning more about logos.
What Not to Do in Creating a Logo for Your Company
While I can’t tell you the formula for a great logo, I can talk about what isn’t great. Since I’ve spent a lot of time in the real estate world, I have seen countless logos from companies who are all looking to create a brand for themselves. The interesting thing is that at least 90% of these logos have some kind of roof or home as part of the logo. While this seems logical, and we even played with a roof-esque logo, does it differentiate these companies from one another? No.
They all pretty much have the same theme and in my mind, are simply clones of one another. They do nothing to help people recognize the companies.
The Evolution of a Logo Design
I believe that an effective logo is one that instantly provides brand recognition. Lets compare the various iterations of my company, BiggerPockets, Inc.’s logos over the past several years.
This first version of the logo is nothing but disasterous. I thought that because the site was about making money with real estate, that money should be the central theme. This is nothing but an amateurish slapped together logo that does nothing to further our site’s brand.
Here we are making the mistake most companies make when it comes to designing a logo. They shoot for the obvious. Our little blue roof did nothing to differentiate our brand. We were yet another real estate related site . . . nothing more, nothing less.
In the above logo, we started to realize that the roof shouldn’t play as prominent a role. We wanted people to focus on our name, BiggerPockets, which represented what people would get from our site. This began an evolution towards our differentiation.
This logo actually came from one of my high-school students (I taught school for several years). I wanted something fun and unique involving money and a big ‘ole pocket. While this design certainly stood out and let people know more about who we were, it was a bit amateurish as well. We were going in the right direction, but hadn’t quite done it just right.
This final and current logo of the company, I believe, hits the nail on the head. It is certainly unique, and represents who we are. By itself, the iconic man in the pocket, representing how big your pockets can become, is symbolic of our site. I am extremly pleased with this logo, as I feel that it is clean, unique, and expounds a message. Does it have what it takes to become timeless? I suppose that is up to you and everyone else out there!
A Great Resource for Creating Your Logo Design
After I knew that my student was on to something with our logo, I decided to have some professional graphic artists clean it up for me. To do that, I found a great service that everyone should utilize: SitePoint’s Logo Design Contests. All I did was give the brilliant (and not so brilliant) graphic designers on Sitepoint (a huge and amazing webmaster forum) some ideas of what I was looking for, and let them run with it. There were many wonderful ideas put forward, and I was able help the designers modify and clean their logos up until I had somthing I was happy with. The best part about running one of these contests is that it is affordible and you do get many ideas to choose from.
Love the evolution of your logo - there’s still plenty like your first one floating around!
Have you seen David Aireys blog? He’s a designer & I think you may find it interesting. He posted about logos today.
http://www.davidairey.com/blog/whats-your-logo-worth/
The best logos are always simpler too. They’re geometrically easy to recognize instantly.
I always squirm when people use crazy fonts in their logo.
Thanks Chris. I actually forgot about some of those old logos until I did some exploring on the internet archive (archive.org). I did see David’s post about 1/2 hour after writing mine. . . strange. I’ve been active in the discussion over there as you can see from the link you posted (I altered to point to the post itself).
Shane - I agree with you on simplicity. Too much nonsense and you get distracted. Instant recognition is absolutely important as we both mentioned!
Thanks for the thoughts guys!
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I just came across this post and wanted to say that I love your final logo. Coming from someone with a design background I can certainly appreciate all the work that goes into a company brand. Keep up the great work!!
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Sometimes, you\’ll get overcome by the titanic sum of Business sources at your disposal.
It’s great to see a blog post showing this process. If there are oeple out there who need to create their own logo, this post should point them in the right direction. great job!
The graphic design process is crucial to any business, making it stand out head and shoulders from the competition. Whether it is the design of an entire corporate campaign or the creation of a simple company logo it still has to work effectively for you. There are four critical elements that should be seen in every logo design:
• It must be describable
• It must be memorable
• It must be effective without colour
• It must be scalable
Fairly obvious really but how does your logo stand up to these criteria? How does your company identity stand out from the competition?
There are some more interesting website design tutorials on http://www.templatesociety.com/articles/
I think that these are good advices, one must read them some times.
Completely agree, I actually need to work on my logo. lol
you are right.A good logo is what helps your public remember your business. The right one can be one of your strongest marketing tools. Always add the name of the business under the logo. That helps customers in associating it with your business.