A graphic designer should know the importance of brand identity in today’s marketing world. You don’t want people to get the wrong impression of your brand, so you have to make sure to capture your brand’s identity.
Capturing your brand’s ethos given only a small image and a few words can be a massive task to take on. How can something (seemingly) so simple have so many profound effects on your brand? And, what if you pair the wrong logo to your brand?
Some crucial steps will have to be taken to make sure you create the best logo design to maximize your brand’s potential.
Whether you’re designing a logo for yourself or a company website, an active assessment of who you are trying to attract and to whom you’ll be presenting this logo is vital to the design. The idea here is to show, in an image and minimal text, that your brand contains the essential qualities your audience is looking for. An examination of who your audience is, what they hope to get from your business, what they might like about your business, and what you can provide them with are all excellent starting points for you to create the visual symbol of your brand.
For example, imagine if you were tasked to design a logo for a professional sports team. Chances are that this team wants their logo and what they represent to be high energy and intimidating. So, your design wouldn’t include something lifeless and dull like a wilted flower or a teddy bear. This design wouldn’t appeal to their audience, and wouldn’t represent them as a sports team, resulting in a failed design. So, when you’re coming up with your concepts, you’ll need to keep a couple of things in mind.
In all likelihood, you aren’t going to strike gold on your first try at a logo design. It’s best to come up with several designs to be able to present before narrowing it down to the perfect logo. In doing this, play around with some different designs that follow different trends, typography, and color schemes.
For example, take a look at the highly recognized McDonald’s logo. The Golden Arches entail a very minimalist design, all while having the appearance of an M, for McDonald’s. One of, if not the most successful fast food chain has created a logo in which almost anyone connect the design to the business.
(Photo Credit: Font Meme)
The color scheme uses red — presumably to represent movement and excitement — as well as yellow, to portray happiness and youth according to Label Value when characterizing color psychology. It’s extremely important to understand the subtle intricacies you can include in a logo to determine how you want to be perceived by your audience.
You aren’t planning on making the final decision of something as important as your brand logo by yourself, are you? A highly suggested measure to take is that you showcase the mockups of your logo design to see what people think about it — mostly your prospective audience. This step is vital to the process, because if your design doesn’t appeal to the audience you are trying to engage, then your brand identity campaign will flop.
One standard way to gain an audience’s opinion of your design is A/B testing. Optimizely’s expertise better helps explain A/B testing when they state, “A/B testing (also known as split testing or bucket testing) is a method of comparing two versions of a web page or app against each other to determine which one performs better.” This comparison is another reason why it is important to design several concepts — to pit the two against each other and see which one the audience likes better.
Testing to gain a better understanding of audience approval is perhaps the most crucial step. You can design concepts all you want, but if it isn’t appealing to an audience, you’ll need to shelve those designs and come up with one that will captivate your targeted audience.
Sometimes a design for a logo can be decided by you, and other times the decision will be decided by the company you work for. However, every time you’re designing a logo, you’ll want to consider the steps above to come out with a design that is clever, contemporary, and captivates the right audience.
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