How to Design a Logo for Your Business

Are you starting a new venture? Building a website or mobile app for your business? Do you think your present company or agency logo no longer fits as the brand emblem? Was it created more than ten years ago, in a hurry, and/or on a tight budget? If you answered ‘yes’ at least once, this article is for you and now we’ll tell on how to create a logo for your brand.

What Is a Logo for Your Business?

Simply put, it is the heart and soul of your brand and the face of your business. A great logo of your product creates a corresponding first impression of your business. It catches the eye of potential customers and enables you to stand out from your competitors.

While your business sells goods or services, your branding and logo are selling feelings. They should evoke an anticipation of future benefits, the joy of belonging to a privileged group right now, or a sweet memory of past purchases. And the customers will want more!

A cool professional logo tells everyone that you are… exactly, cool and professional. Even a garage startup of two guys instantly seems more trustworthy and competent if they invested in the professional design of its identity. So, if you are just starting ‘some kind of fruit company’, consider creating a quality logo for your startup. Years later, you won’t be ashamed of your first ‘oh-we-were-so-young’ logotype!

But Do You Need a New Logo For Your Company?

Here are some of the common reasons showing it’s high time for a logo of your company makeover or a massive rebranding:

• something is definitely wrong with the current situation, e.g., many people can’t get your business name right
• your business mark and taglines seem old-fashioned
• you are giving your entire business a makeover
• the business is about to go online
• you have introduced new products, or narrowed down from a wide range of services to one, etc.
• you believe that changes will give the company a shot of new energy and its products will receive a boost

Even if you don’t tick any of the boxes, there is always a chance to improve things with the power of graphic design. An expert logo designer can perform miracles. A wee font refresh here, a slight simplification there, some smoothing of the icon, and a little tint here and there can suddenly make your brand logo appealing for new demographics.

The redesign does entail changes in every branded item, along with appropriate costs, but they will certainly pay off. A professionally designed website, business cards, company signage, etc., can elevate your brand to a whole new level, and the change in the brand will increase the company’s reputation and can bring it new deals.

What You Need to Know

Let’s define some success criteria first. A good logo for an enterprise should be:

• be unique
• combine creativity and precision
• be memorable and easily recognized
• garner attention
• quickly and graphically express the positive attributes of the business
• be appealing to your target audience (and preferably beyond!)
• work consistently in multiple sizes and colors and in various media
• be able to stay current for a decade or longer
• be done by/in cooperation with a pro (full stop)

Whether you wish to create a logo for a startup, or redesign an existing emblem, or embark on a total rebranding, make sure to get professional help. Even if you managed to come up with a cool design on your own — show it to an expert anyway. An experienced logo maker can tell whether or not the design will transfer easily into print or onto a banner stand when it comes to the development of promotional materials.

Ask a logo designer for advice. They know how design elements impact customers on the conscious and subconscious levels. (The more reasonable it is to engage a pro: you wouldn’t let a dilettante meddle with the subconscious, would you?)

Branding on a budget is a real deal. A good trademark ideally should last a decade, so if you look at the amortization of its cost over that period, it won’t seem that much. You can view portfolios of great studios and independent designers on their websites and social media; thousands of them are sure to charge less than a local design studio does. But don’t be focused on the low price: the skills, experience, and knowledge of your field and needs are the priority.

Whether you wish to gain awareness, attract your first clients, or build authority in your niche, it is crucial to know what makes your audience tick. Before you start creating your company logo, look at the signs of other businesses in the industry and think about how to differentiate your symbol from those.

Time to think about your logotype format. There are basically three kinds to choose from:

1. Font-based logos consist primarily of a type treatment that makes them distinctive.
2. Signs that literally illustrate what a company does.
3. Abstract graphic symbols whose meaning is based on underlying associations.

Before selecting a format or a combination thereof, it makes sense to play around with very different ideas. The team can fill some notebook pages with rough sketches or utilize one of the online logo makers. The latter create a logo design for startups by automatically matching graphics with text. A nice, free and easy-to-use tool for testing ideas, but be careful using the results; such automatically generated marks, like clip art, can be copied by others too easily.