A Beginner’s Guide to Designing the Perfect Logo

Are you planning to build a website or start a business?

A well-designed brand and a strong logo are crucial to your marketing strategy and should therefore be eye-grabbing, catchy and intelligible. Your business's brand and logo can make or break your image, and if your branding is off or unappealing, you may be losing business as a result.

Your business’s brand and logo should represent your company’s values, the quality of your products or services, and it should be memorable enough to leave a mark on the user’s mind.

You will have a better chance of creating a logo with a lasting impression on users once you have a basic understanding of design criteria like shading, structure, and methodology.

There are countless examples of existing logos and brands that can provide you with inspiration and help you to decide on the direction for your own logo design and creation. Consider incorporating what’s known as a logo mark, which is an abstract symbol that in some way represents and captures your brand.

Before Getting Started

I recommend that you have a basic idea of the type of logo you want before you start the design process. This will avoid some unnecessary back and forth communication in the design process.

We recommend keeping the following factors in mind before you decide to proceed:
1. How the logo appears on your website or product.
2. How the logo will be printed on your marketing materials.
3. How effectively the logo will blend with your brand.
4. The notability and prominence of your logo.
5. How you plan to use colour variations for different surfaces.
6. Err on the side of simplicity and minimal colours in your logo design.
7. Optimizing logo colours for desired emotional connections and reactions from users.

Moving Ahead with the Design

This blog  will include examples of different logo marks and outline the strengths and advantages of each. Once you’ve decided on a type of mark, your designer can start working on it and will be able to come up with two or three versions.

In the next phase, the designer can incorporate your recommendations into your favourite design variation and should then deliver a high resolution logo. They should also create a complete branding doc and guidelines. We are sure our list of useful tips will help you create the best possible logo for your brand, and that you'll learn a few fundamental design tips along the way.

Here are the five basic logo classifications:

1. Pictorial marks/Brand marks (sometimes called Symbolic or Iconic)

A successful pictorial mark is one that resonates in the minds of the public and represents your company’s identity without the use of words or letters. In most cases, the image is conceptual and stylized in a way that is visually appealing. The mark should create a feeling -- take for example how the Nike “swoosh” creates the feeling of movement, like a ball being passed across a field or a runner whipping around a corner. Or the Twitter bird, whose beak is slightly open as though it were in the middle of friendly chirping to its fellow birds.

The marks below are all highly recognizable, memorable, and successfully capture the feel of each brand, from Twitter to Apple to Nike to Shell to WWF to Mercedes-Benz.

2. Word Mark

Are you fond of the Google, Facebook, Yahoo and Pinterest logos? Designers refer to these types of logos as Word Marks. This is the most popular logo design method, and it is accepted widely because of its straightforward approach. And consider, none of us will ever forget the Coca-Cola, VISA & SONY logos. This type of branding will typically include a simple but distinctive typography of the company name.
In most cases, the designer will create a custom fonts that is catchy and memorable. Google, Canon, Microsoft and Yahoo are some of the examples in this category.

3. Letter Mark

Letter Marks are quite similar to Word Marks but these use a typographic symbol, often including only the first letter or initials of the company name. This method is often used to illustrate brand names graphically rather than using the full name. These types of logos are a good choice for long company names, and where the abbreviation gives better impressions. For example, Hewlett-Packard (HP), General Electric (GE), Warner Bros (WB), Procter & Gamble (P&G) etc.

Which sounds better: “International Business Machines” or “IBM”? Don’t you think the current CNN logo is much better than a textual “Cable News Network” logo?
The usage of these monograms makes perfect sense, and we call them Letter Mark logos.

4. Combination Mark

In this we combine both the Brand Mark and Wordmark logos to get more freedom to use any of these or a combination of both for different purposes. The picture and text can be stacked or aligned in the same line.

Whether these are combined or separated, a well planned combination design will give a better impression in both cases.

At the same time this needs more intelligent research and design time. Around 60% of brand logos are developed as Combination Marks. Confusion due to similarity in logos can also be avoided by including text. This will also serve you well in acquiring trademark registration.

You can see lots of popular brands under this section, including Pizza Hut, Adidas, Hawaiian Airlines, and KFC.

5. Mascots or Emblems

These type of logos use special illustrations to depict and project their tradition and experience. Unlike Combination Marks, the text and symbol will be combined together, and in 90% of the cases the text is placed inside the logo/sign (like Ford's logo where one can find the text wrapped in the design). Both complete brand names and abbreviations are used in these kind of logos.

As they’re a formal and long-established style, Emblem logos are commonly picked by government agencies, universities, classic sports clubs, heritage companies etc.

See for yourself how old motor companies like Lamborghini and Harley-Davidson are designed in this format. Also my favourite sport teams like the Toronto Blue Jays and Manchester United also epitomize this category!