Brand Logos – How Do You Pull Them Off Successfully?
So you’re currently planning to open a new company.
Congratulations! Not everyone has the kind of confidence and risk-taking attitude that a lot of successful business owners have at the beginning of their businesses.
And not all business owners are very keen on sharing their “thought processes” when thinking of their branding approach.
So if you’re curious as to how you can “make it” to the big leagues of businesses in your market, you might want to buckle up and prepare for a ride.
This article explores one of the essential aspects of branding for your company: brand logos .
In this piece, we’ll introduce you to the beautiful and crazy-fun world of creating brand logos for your business.
And remember, while these steps may seem a bit overwhelming, you’ll find this very easy to master in the long run. Here are those factors:
- Sort out your branding elements. A vital part of perfecting brand logos is to sort out what features you want to use in the first place. This doesn’t just mean “draw” your concepts, but make sure you get your common artistic elements laid out. These include shapes you want to use, fonts you wish to utilise, and even colours you want to add into your overall concept. This is important, as securing these spare you the time of endlessly thinking about ideas and instead of having a set of individual elements to work with. For instance, if you want to advertise your company that makes car games , your iconography should focus on cars and racing.
- Try to sort out what sort of elements you want to use for your brand logos. These include all the iconography, typefaces, and motifs you want to use. The more, the merrier – as this allows you to formulate more design options and prototypes that can make your logo choices much more diverse. The more options you have, the more flexible and dynamic your preferences can become.
- When choosing elements like icons and fonts, don’t forget to pick them not just on how they fit your brand, but also on how they can potentially meet each other as common elements. These allow you to filter out your choices much easier in the long run.
- Think of your branding message and combine your chosen elements in a way that best presents them. This is the fun and also challenging part of your logo creation, as you need to mix and match your design elements to make this work in your favour.
- Use only the elements that work for your message. While we did advise you to keep as many as your elements as possible, don’t use them all at once in your concepts. Remember to choose only the ingredients that work together to present your message. Less is more here, and use combinations of your elements in ways that best communicate your message.
- Work with a message in mind. Based on your branding guide, what’s the leading personality and message of your brand? What main image or message do you want your audiences to remember? Keep this in mind as you play with your existing elements. And make sure that you explain your rationale as to how you want to manipulate certain parts of your items to fit said “message.” This allows you to continually be aware of what elements you want to add to your brand logo, and what may or may not work based on your analysis.
- Take note of your branding vision and mission when making your brand logos. You need to make sure that logo concepts you’re coming up with actually represent this vision and mission. Remember, your logo serves as the first look people will have of your company, as such it’s essential to ensure your brand logo gets to communicate this properly.
- Based on this message, try to think of a theme or a motif you’d want to follow for your logo. It can be a word or a short phrase that your logo should be representing. Having this word in mind when making your logo can make your ideas more coherent and more consistent with your intended logo design, and this can make choosing your final logo much easier to do.
- Transform your brand message into something concrete and actionable so that you can fit it better in your logo. This works well if you incorporate dynamic action and meaningful phrasing into your logo, as it’s this symbolism that usually lets brand designers come up with unique designs that help your company stand out.
- See how your brand logos can affect brand presentation. Another essential element in the logo creation process is to assess how the logo can change the way you present your products, services, and other offerings. It’s essential that you ensure your logo can help you show your offerings in a way that is consistent with your brand message. You can do this by adjusting your logo elements to fit your niche. If you think your logo cannot work with your offerings, you might want to improve your details.
- Check your current slate of brand offerings and how these products and services should be presented to your customers. Before you apply your logo to your products, you should first decide as to how these products should be appealing to your audiences in the first place. Should these products be appearing cheerfully, in a professional manner, or a more humorous way? You should consider these “core” messages, as they can help dictate how your logo can be boosting their appeal.
- Check if your brand logos can fit your various products and offerings. For example, can a bubbly logo fit designer suits? And likewise, should a toy brand have a very severe and angular logo? You need to think about how your logo fits into real things you’ll be releasing.
- Check if your logo is something people will attach to your products. This is hugely related to your branding message, only this time this has a lot to do with ensuring your logo can be something that people will recognise when seeing your products and vice versa.
- Make your logo flexible for adjustments. When you conceptualise your logo, make sure you open your logo for alterations and modifications. This doesn’t mean making a logo that’s of poor quality. Instead, this means making sure your logo can adapt to changing trends and seasons. What will your logo look like during the holidays or special events? A flexible logo that retains your branding can be beautiful to your audiences, especially since they’ll see your brand as something that adjusts to their tastes. This is something you should consider.
- When you think of your logo, don’t just think of how it can appear “today.” Instead, think about how you can plan your logo in such a way that you’re one or two steps ahead with regards to graphic design and branding trends. You should think of how your logo will fare with customers when it appears on shelves or your website a few years or even decades or now.
- Was your logo designed in such a way that it can retain its message and overall quality despite changing times? Try to predict what sorts of trends might be forcing your company to change your logo design, so you can start thinking of potential changes and adjustments to your logo in the future.
- Think of modifications you’ll allow with the logo. Almost all branding documents have this section. When you plan your logo, you’ll also present what can and can’t be done with it when it comes to fitting it to various designs and scenarios such as placing it in documents, logos, and on different backgrounds.
- Assess what sorts of decorations and modifications you’ll add to your logo in exceptional circumstances as well. What if you’re celebrating a holiday or an anniversary? Try to think about these situations to further add to the flexibility of your logo.
Brand Logos – It’s More Than Graphics
With the above taken into consideration, it’s important to remember that there’s more to your brand logos than just the graphical thought process.
You need to think of what each stroke, each font, each colour, each character, and each graphic mean for the entire brand identity .
Taking all of these into account can seem overwhelming for a drawing. However, the results may all be worth the while.
Remember, it’s your brand logos that people will remember when thinking of your name.
As such, think of your logo design process as a make or break process for your marketing.
Brand Logos that are Unmistakable in their Messaging
A while back we discussed the various aspects of representing your brand’s main idea in its logo design .
We touched on brand psychology as well as those iconic brands who are so well-known that they don’t even need to consider brand messaging in their logos.
Today, we’re going to take a look at those relatively new brands that approached their logo design that left its customers in no confusion as to what service they offer.
These are the brand logos that are unmistakable in their messaging, and if we’re completely honest, we love them.
Amazon
First up it’s Amazon and the logo that is often misunderstood as representing a smile and nothing more.
It’s an understandable mistake, especially given their latest ad campaign for Christmas.
However, the truth of the Amazon logo is much more impressive than a parcel with a smile.
Recheck it, and you’ll see the clear arrow pointing from A to Z.
This is meant to represent the fact that you can buy everything from A to Z on the site.
To those of you that already understand what the logo represents, it’s as clear as day, but to those who don’t, they’ll wonder how they never spotted it in the first place.
As far as brand messaging goes, this logo is so on point we’re wondering how it has never won any awards.
PokerStars
As one of the largest online poker platforms in the world with a name that is synonymous with the game (obviously!) PokerStars have a real uber-effective yet straightforward logo.
As we said, the company branding is quite simple, yet the logo is undoubtedly an excellent piece of design work.
Yes, it is that good.
With poker-related logos and branding, the obvious choice is to opt for one of the suits from a deck of cards.
Unsurprisingly, spades or clubs are the two most suitable options given that both hearts and diamonds aren’t specific to card games.
However, what PokerStars did with their logo however was to opt for a red spade as opposed to the traditional black one.
Not only did this set their logo apart from other companies using similar branding but it also allowed for a more aesthetically pleasing effect.
Not only that, but red is also a much more powerful colour than black as it commands attention.
The Bronx Zoo
The Bronx Zoo logo is nothing short of incredible and more than worthy of its place on our list.
The giraffes and birds are pretty obvious additions in that they represent the animals of the zoo, but it’s the negative space in the giraffes’ legs showing the New York skyline that wows us.
Simple, yes. However, so very effective.
There’s nothing more we can say about this logo other than it’s masterful.
The Guild of Food Writers
Now, this may not be an association that you have ever heard of, but one glimpse of their logo will leave you in no doubt as to what they’re all about.
Yes, we’re aware that the name is a dead giveaway but bear with us on this.
That fountain pen nib is an obvious choice for anything related to writing, but as with the Bronx Zoo, this logo is all about that negative space.
At first glance, you may not have noticed but take another look, and that spoon set in the centre of the nib is hard to miss.
It’s a beautiful example of how we can combine two wholly separate and unrelated images to create one a la MC Escher.
This logo is so good that you’ll find several smaller companies have taken the same route with their branding .
They do say the highest form of flattery is imitation, right?
Although there are many more brand logos are easily recognisable, these four represent their brands in the best possible way.
With clever design and clear messaging, there’s no mistaking what each of these logos is trying to convey.
If incorporating your brand message in your new logo is a priority, then you could do far worse than to draw inspiration from these examples.
Contributor: John Salazar is a certified techie-at-heart, but he shares a love for all things science and technology, health and wellness, and even a bit of music on the side. As a creative writer, John makes sure to write both informative and entertaining pieces. He loves writing, and he plays the guitar when he has free time.
