Logo development: 10 golden rules from the designer

Why is logo design so important?

Your logo is the first point of contact with the outside world. If people love your brand's design, they will be more open to whatever it has to offer.

The professional execution of a logo requires a combination of sophisticated design skills, knowledge of graphic design theory, and skillful application of skills. Any designer with graphic editor skills can create a logo, but it takes over 10 years to fully master all aspects of the craft.

Logo design is a small part of creating a company's corporate identity, but it is important to know that the logo or trademark is the centerpiece of a brand's identity. And we all know that this is the part of the corporate identity that is most often remembered by the audience.

10 golden rules of logo designer

When you think of a person who has influenced your life, you can probably imagine what he or she looks like. The story is exactly the same with logos. We can easily imagine a logo by thinking about contact with a product, company or service.

Where there was once no competition, now there are hundreds, maybe thousands of companies that compete for the attention of the buyer, and they all want us to take their goods off the shelf. This creates a growing need to visually differentiate brands from competitors.

The corporate identity and its key elements that work together form a distinctive picture in our minds and differentiate the company from the competition. Depending on the industry, identity includes designing uniforms, car styling, business cards, product packaging, coffee mugs, billboards, and a host of other elements, including website font choices.

Designers' job is to translate the essence of a brand into shape and color, as visual appearance plays a critical role in forming the connection in our brains between what we experience and what we encounter. In many ways, the company logo is similar to the character of our loved ones.

When a logo made by a professional is supported by a great product and does not change over a significant period of time, it becomes an invaluable asset to the company. Nike swoosh, McDonald's golden arches, Michelin man, Mercedes three-pointed star, Woolmark symbol are examples of professionally made logos.

But beyond the uniqueness of the logo, what are the traits that enable a brand to achieve status? There are universal techniques and techniques that allow designers to create professional and quality logos.

01. Investigate the situation

One of the most interesting things about being a designer is that you learn a lot with each new project. Each of your clients will have a different character, market, audience. And each time the designer has to study the client's business, research the audience and the market in order to create a unique strategy based on the research and develop a logo.

To make it easier for themselves, the designer uses a design process. The first stage of the process is characterized by an analysis of the situation and your role is to ask the right questions: why are you here? What are you doing and how did you achieve it? How are you different? Who are you here for? What do you value the most?

Image from Behance

The easiest way to generate ideas is to create sketches. Your brain transmits electrical impulses to your hands very quickly, so it's so easy to create a concept with and quickly draw an idea on paper. The perfect way to remember the logo you dreamed at night is with a pen and paper by your bed.

Designers carry a notebook with them, in which they constantly draw sketches. Today, you can also use your phone's camera for these purposes. Before creating the final design of the future logo, graphic designers create logo ideas on paper and share sketches with their clients without being distracted by fonts and colors. There can be hundreds of sketches, so designers show only the best ideas.

03. Work with sketches in a black and white palette

Designers leave the choice of color for the logo to the very end of the design, focusing on the key idea in the logo sketch, and not on what may change in the future. A bad idea in a logo will be saved by a trendy color palette. A good idea will still be a good one, regardless of the color choice.

Imagine a well-known symbol. This is the shape we remember, regardless of color. Lines, shapes, an idea, whether it be an apple bite, three parallel stripes, four connected circles in a horizontal line, arches, a crocodile – first you remember the shape, and then the color appears.

04. Create a logo according to the goals and objectives

The sign should correspond to the goals and objectives of the designer. The elegant font will suit a high-end restaurant more than a kindergarten. A palette of pink and yellow colors won't catch the attention of retired men.

Researching and analyzing the situation allows the designer to delve deeper into the design topic, so the appropriate rationale when creating a logo helps to sell the idea to the client. This is the most difficult stage of the project. Designers don't just design. They sell the logo to the customer.

When creating a logo, designers are guided by a simple rule “The simpler, the better.“ According to Gestalt, when recognizing a logo, our brain uses a set of patterns and patterns that help us identify a visual image more quickly. Therefore, a quick glance is enough for the viewer to recognize and remember a simple logo rather than a complex one.

Designers focus on simple concepts when creating a logo, and in most cases, brand identity has clear meaning and form. This is because the task of a logo is not only to be well recognized, but also to scale well in a variety of applications, from website icons to building signs.

06. Create outstanding logos

Designers know that the easiest way to stand out is to do something outstanding, and not like everyone else. Examine the competitive landscape of the logo to understand that your customers' competitors often use the same font, similar color palette, or symbol that sits in a standard place – to the left of the brand name and do something different. Designers know differentiation works and makes it possible to stand out from the competition.

But that much similarity in the market does not necessarily mean that your job has become easier, because it takes a brave client to reverse the trend. With your imagination in your portfolio, you are on your way to reaching the client you want.

When creating a logo that will differentiate your client, be prepared to defend your point of view. Because everything new can be met with hostility and it is easier for the client to be like everyone else and not stand out from the gray mass.

07. See the logo as a system

Rarely do you see a logo on its own, out of context: on a business card, in a drink menu, or on an app icon. This is why a customer presentation needs to cover many relevant touchpoints to show how the logo looks when seen by potential customers.

It's like seeing the whole picture. Create a complete environment for the logo and test its work on corporate identity media. From a design point of view, brand identity carriers are every potential element on which a client's logo can appear. Designers always think about how a brand identity would work without a logo, despite the fact that we perceive the logo as a central part of the corporate identity.

One way to get a coherent visual identity is to create a custom typeface that is used not only in the logo, but also in the typography of the corporate identity, with an emphasis on the headlines of the ad copy.

08. A logo is not a clipart

Don’t use clipart as logo. The logo should not reflect your line of business or tell you about the product that you are selling. In fact, it's best if the logo doesn't even hint at it. The more abstract the sign is, the more stable its development will be.

Instead, logos make it clear who you are and reflect your personality. In the eyes of the public, strong associations are formed between what a company does and what it is, using the shape and color of the logo.

09. Use symbols

Custom designed brands work well if the company name is unique, such as Google, Mobile, or Pirelli. What to do for those who have a brand name that does not have sufficient uniqueness?

Designers develop variants of the logo, within which there is an accent that reveals the meaning of the name. It can be an emphasis on a letter, on a color, or on a symbol that can be used as an additional element in the design of a company logo.

Resist the temptation to overdo your design just because the focus is on symbols. Legibility is a key factor in logo design and your presentations should demonstrate how projects perform at any size, large or small.

10. Make People Smile

Designers add riddles, humor, rebuses and Easter eggs to the developed logos, which makes the identity more attractive and helps the client become more successful. This trick is not suitable for every industry. There are logos, for example, created for the legal and financial sector, which are filled with commonplace and stereotypical symbols. Giving a small spark of humor to the created logo will add personality and distinguish the client from the mass of the same competitors.