Many consider designing logos easy. After all, you only need an icon, your brand name, and a splash of colors, and you’re done! Unfortunately, this mindset might be okay if you’re not creating a logo that will become your brand’s silent ambassador.
That is what logos are! They are a company’s face to customers and the rest of the world (or community if your business is local). Unsurprisingly, well-established brands never play around with logo design. They take it seriously because they recognize the implications of a poorly conceived brand logo.
Great logos are simple, versatile, and memorable. One look and people recognize and remember the brand and its attributes, from products and customer service to trustworthiness, credibility, professionalism, and more.
So, how do you design a brand-defining logo? We have seven expert tips to logo design, empowering you to create a visual signal that embodies your brand.
1. Study your audience
No business can ever succeed without clients, customers, or a target audience. Remove customers from the equation, and you will have a self-serving organization. Logo-making is easy if you understand your target audience because their characteristics will help guide your design decisions.
For example, young children respond more favorably to playful and colorful brand logos, while professionals will always prefer conservative and powerful designs.
So, how do you learn more about your target audience?
Analyze your audience
You can start by analyzing your sales records, customer relationship management (CRM) tools, and online analytics (like Google) to discover your customers’ needs, challenges, and motivations. Interviews and surveys are helpful, too.
Research competitors
Although this sounds counterproductive, analyzing the competition, especially their customers, can give you an idea of their audience.
Why do clients go to your competitors? Can you top it?
Determine how audiences interact with your brand
Most audiences are online, whether on social media, community forums, or websites. This information should help you design a web-friendly logo.
On the other hand, some customers prefer more traditional methods, like print media, including magazines and billboards.
You will want a logo that works on both platforms – digital and print.
Knowledge of your target audience gets your foot in the door, allowing you to create a logo that resonates with them.
2. Draw inspiration from popular logos.
Drawing inspiration from famous logo designs doesn’t mean you can copy everything or even a portion. No, it doesn’t work that way. Besides, you will be courting lawsuits if you do that.
We offer these tips to kick-start your logo-making journey.
Understand the stories of popular brands.
Well-respected brands don’t take an image, slap it on a canvas, add a few details, and call it a logo. No. Instead, they dig deep into their history to find their passions and visions for their brand and customers.
For example, Amazon’s logo has a unique, almost unrecognizable feature (a curved arrow) connecting the first letter A to the “z.” The reason? Jeff Bezos wants the world to know that Amazon serves everything from A to Z.
Each brand has a story, including how they integrated this into their logo designs, making them inspiring. You could return to your brand, how you conceptualized it, and determine your motivation for establishing it.
Recognize industry norms and conventions.
You will encounter recurring themes as you learn more about how successful brands developed their logos.
For example, tech companies often prefer minimalist designs, while food industry players focus on vibrant, inviting colors.
Try to determine your industry’s “norms” and “conventions” and integrate these into your logo designs.
Identify gaps in the market.
While successful brands can teach you many things, there is a good chance you will notice gaps in the market.
You can focus on underrepresented elements or consider leveling up a traditional theme.
Although drawing inspiration from notable brands can help you design a memorable logo, we recommend focusing on your brand’s strengths and uniqueness. The learnings from other companies shouldn’t turn you into a copycat, but instead widen your understanding of what logo will best represent your brand to the world.
3. Appreciate the emotional connection of colors.
Do you feel excited and passionate when you see red? How about orange? Do you feel joy, warmth, and kindness? Some people are happy and hopeful with yellow, while others feel calm and peaceful with blue.
Our point is to help you understand that colors are more than visual elements. They have this uncanny connection to the brain, triggering emotions like words. That is the psychology behind colors, and you can leverage it to give an emotional spark to your logo.
Choosing a logo color can be daunting, especially if you’re unsure about the emotions colors evoke. For instance, purple conveys nobility, royalty, mystery, and glamor, while black speaks elegance and sophistication. Blue mostly stands for professionalism, loyalty, hope, and wisdom, while green has always been synonymous with nature, calmness, and freshness.
Colors can have cultural underpinnings, too. For example, Westerners might see orange as conveying warmth and a bountiful harvest, while Middle Easterners might interpret it as a sign of loss.
So, choose colors that best depict your brand’s personality while considering your target audience.
4. Be strategic in using fonts.
Your choice of font can make or break your business logo. So, pay attention, be strategic, and choose a typeface that best characterizes your brand’s identity and personality.
Just as there’s color psychology, font psychology exists. For instance, serif fonts (figures with a small stroke or line at the end of a larger stroke) are favored for their exceptional readability over distances and professional look, making them ideal in law and finance.
On the other hand, sans-serif fonts are ideal for small prints, making them great for contemporary logos. They are perfect for lifestyle and tech brands.
Slab serif fonts have powerful, bold strokes, which are suitable for sports, automotive, and outdoor recreation brands. Meanwhile, decorative fonts are casual and fun typefaces (think Disney), with unusual characters and quirky shapes. These typefaces are perfect for grabbing attention.
Modern fonts are catchy, while script fonts convey a more personal touch. You can also experiment with different typefaces, such as handwritten, vintage, calligraphic, transitional-serif, geometric, and modernistic fonts.
Note that your logo’s font should be readable regardless of logo size and platform (i.e., business card, billboard, magazine, or web).
5. Play with shapes and negative space.
Shapes can also make or break your business logo, and, like colors and fonts, they speak volumes about your brand.
For instance, squares represent professionalism, efficiency, practicality, stability, balance, and strength, while triangles convey law, power, dynamism, innovation, and masculinity. Circles are known for continuity, unity, and cordial relations.
You can integrate different shapes into your logo. For example, adding squares to circles can produce an image of strength and harmony.
Shapes can be frames or borders for your logo’s other design elements, too. You can check out this article to learn more about shapes in logo designs.
Besides shapes, you will want to experiment with negative space to make your business logo more interesting. Seasoned graphic artists consider negative space an optimal use of blank space surrounded by solid elements, giving meaning to an otherwise “useless” space.
For example, look at the white space between the letters “E” and “x” in FedEx. It forms an arrow, with the arrowhead being the left side of the letter “x.” This well-placed arrow shape denotes FedEx’s superfast courier service.
6. Add an “emotion” to your logo.
This tip is so much easier if you can harmonize your logo’s colors, fonts, and shapes (including negative space). Remember, these design elements have emotional meanings (i.e., blue conveys trust, serif fonts highlight professionalism, and square denotes stability).
Ideally, you will want to evoke positive feelings and associations about your brand. Hence, mastering the psychology of colors, shapes, and fonts is crucial.
Alternatively, you can experiment with logos that create a feeling of movement. A good example is X’s former Twitter logo of a blue bird flying upward. There is also the arrow sign in FedEx, Dove’s dove silhouette, and Singapore Airlines’ swan-like logo.
Revisit your brand story and pick unique attributes you can turn into symbols or associate with shapes, colors, and fonts. That should make your business logo “feel alive” and emotionally connect with your target audience.
7. Streamline your logo creation journey with online logo makers.
While these tips are proven effective, they still require a lot of work. You can streamline your logo-making journey with an online logo maker like Logogenie. You can get your professional, attractive, and brand-defining logo in minutes.
Logogenie leverages the power, speed, and precision of AI machine learning to recommend logo templates, shapes, colors, and fonts that best match your brand. Its user-friendly tools allow you to customize your logo and save your work in high-definition file formats for maximum scalability.
While designing logos is easy with tools like Logogenie, we encourage you to learn your target audience and clarify your brand identity. These will dictate how well online logo makers can produce professional logos.
Wrapping Up
Designing an attractive, professional, and success-driving logo starts with appreciating your customers (or target audience) and analyzing your attributes as a brand. Your choice of colors, shapes, fonts, and other design elements flows from this knowledge. Once you’ve covered the basics, you can turn to innovative AI tools like Logogenie to create your professional business logo in minutes.
