Logos are important. You knew that already. A good logo represents your company, helps people to remember your brand, and even attracts new customers.
A bad logo, on the other hand, can undo all the hard work you’ve done to get your company up and running to begin with.
There are several basic elements that go into designing a logo. The color, font, shape, graphic choice, spacing, and style all play an important part in whether your design is successful or not. But just as those basic elements need careful attention, there are also several mistakes that are shockingly easy to make.
Fortunately, with a little advance warning, they’re also easy to avoid.
Let’s take a look at seven mistakes that are frequently made by new designers, and how you can keep from falling prey to them.
Use A Raster Image
This is a very basic one, but it’s important. And if you don’t have a lot of experience with design, you may not know this off the top of your head.
Logos need to be flexible and scalable. Your design will be used in a variety of ways, across a plethora of platforms — from your website, to your social media, to print ads, emails, maybe even billboards! Obviously, your design needs to be able to go from very small to very large without losing its clarity.
A raster image, however, is based on pixels, which means that when it is sized differently than its original, it gets pixelated, or fuzzy. A fuzzy logo not only looks amateurish, it also is completely ineffective because it’s impossible to see the true, authentic logo as it was mean to be.
Your design needs to use vectors, rather than rasters. Vectors are built of mathematical equations using lines and curves, allowing them to be resized without losing their integrity. Make your logo effective at any size by using a vector design.
Design Is Too Complicated
There’s a reason why “simplicity” comes up as a popular design trend year after year — simple is effective. Simple works.
Conversely, if your logo design is too complex, too busy, has too many elements, the effectiveness will be significantly reduced. In fact, the more elements you have, the less likely the brand design is to be remembered and recognized — two major factors of what makes a good logo to begin with.
Rather than letting your brand identity be a free-for-all and shoving as many elements as possible into that little space, be choosy. Strip your elements down. Keep removing them until the logo operates at the lowest common denominator, as simple as possible. Remember, simple = memorable, and memorable = effective.
Using a logo design tool for ideas can be helpful in this regard, as they usually offer you the simplest of suggestions, rather than anything too complex.
Too Reliant On Trends
Trends certainly have their place, but that place usually changes from year to year, or even from season to season. It’s difficult to predict what trend will come up next; and it’s equally difficult to predict when, exactly, a given trend will end.
This means that if your design is too reliant on a popular trend, it will look dated as soon as that trend is over. You could choose to update your design on a regular basis, of course, but that won’t help with recognition or memorability.
Instead, design your logo based on classic design principles rather than individual trends. Looking at the long-term for your logo makes more sense than leaping onto whatever bandwagon comes your way.
Bad Font Choice
Individual elements such as fonts need attention, too, because they play into the overall effectiveness of your logo as a whole. If you have a well-designed logo, but have chosen a font that doesn’t fit or is downright illegible, it will tear at the effectiveness of the brand image.
One important tip when it comes to fonts: ask for feedback. A font may seem perfectly legible to you, but may not be nearly as clear to others. Remember that just as beauty is in the eye of the beholder, sometimes good font choice is, too.
Poor Color Choice
Running right along with the issue of choosing a font is the issue of choosing your colors. There are several sub-mistakes that can be made here.
• Choosing colors that clash. Don’t design your logo in a palette that makes the viewer’s eyes bleed. Just don’t.
• Choosing colors that render text or other elements invisible. If you don’t have enough contrast between your text and your background, there’s going to be a problem.
• Choosing colors that just don’t fit your brand. Take a look at some of the information on the psychology of color.
• Making your logo completely reliant on color. Remember that your logo may be printed or used on different platforms, and not all of them will have the exact same color capabilities. It’s even a good idea to make sure that your design plays well in black and white, just in case.
Doesn’t Fit The Brand
Branding is the act of creating a visual representation of a personality, and allowing it to communicate with others. The personality belongs to your brand — the others are your audience. Your audience identifies with your company on a personal level because of branding.
Which puts a lot of pressure on visual branding elements, such as your logo design. If the design doesn’t fit the brand personality, it sends a wrong message to your customers, and hinders their ability to identify and engage with the company.
Basically, if your company is traditional, values-driven, and family-oriented, your logo should be, too. This is true if your company is edgy, youthful, and quirky, as well as if your company is grassroots, home-grown, hand-made, your logo should be, too.
To create a logo that doesn’t align with the brand personality is to create a communications misfire. Make sure that the brand and the design are cut from the same cloth.
Your Logo Looks Too Much Like The Competition
A final mistake that is frequently made in logo design is the creation of a copycat, or lookalike. This can be attributed to one of two things:
● Lack of market research, so you don’t know what your competition is doing and you accidentally stumbled onto a lookalike logo design.
● Desire to capitalize on an existing design; you’ve done your market research, found a competitor that is doing well, and created a logo that could be mistaken for the competition in order to draw sales away from confused customers who aren’t paying enough attention.
Both of these causes are detrimental to your company, and both of them need to be avoided. Market research is always recommended before you start a company, anyway — and it’s a vital part of excellent, effective branding.
On the other hand, choosing to create a lookalike logo won’t really do you any favors, either. People will catch on, and your brand will suffer because of its apparent inability to trust in its own uniqueness.
Trust your brand — and create a logo to match
Logo design isn’t as simple as some may think, but that doesn’t mean it’s beyond your reach. Just make sure to avoid these seven potential mistakes, and you can create a successful, effective, memorable logo that perfectly aligns with your company brand.