Along with your business name, your logo and word mark your meaning and say a lot about your company’s personality. Like dressing well in an interview, a clean, smart and iconic logo won’t guarantee success, but a bad one can send the wrong signal to your potential clients.
Take for instance, Apple’s original logo:
Now there’s no way of knowing whether ditching this logo for the iconic apple with a bite out of it was key to the company’s success. But few of us would look at the logo above and think “progressive design and technology leader.”
Graphic designer Jacob Cass lists five important design elements that all good logos share. They are:
1. Simple: A simple logo design is easily recognizable and often features something unique.
2. Memorable: Simple logos, because they’re simple, tend to stand out and are easy to recall – something we can picture in our mind’s eye. Think of McDonald’s, Nike or BMO.
3. Timeless: None of us can predict the future, but when you look at a logo does it look too trendy? Are the font, colour or graphic too similar to other logos you’ve seen recently? AT&T’s logo from the 1990s was similar to a variety of other logos designed around the same time.
4. Versatile: An effective logo ought to work in different mediums – online, print, TV, point-of-sale – as well as in different sizes and either horizontally and vertically.
5. Appropriate: Are you designing a logo for a children’s product or a mutual fund? You can imagine a logo treatment for one audience or product wouldn’t work very well for the other.
Cass also points out that a logo doesn’t have to be literal. Nike’s doesn’t show shoes and Harley Davidson’s logo isn’t a motorcycle. In fact, he says 94% of the world’s top 50 brand logos don’t visually describe the company at all.
But sometimes, they sort of do:
Keep in mind too that while many logos include icons like a panda or a globe, it’s not required. A stylized word mark – Coca Cola is a classic example – can be just as powerful.
For a wonderful repository of logos from around the world, click here.