1. Designing for today and not for tomorrow
When designing a logo you must consider longevity, not the current fashion. A good logo will never need to be redesigned to stay up to date. It should be timeless. In 10 years from now it must still look contemporary. An outdated logo will make you look unprofessional and will not evoke trust in your company.
2. Overdoing colour
Too many colours can cause confusion and lower the likelihood of people remembering your brand. A maximum of four colours is a good rule of thumb when designing a logo but some will argue that even four is too many. Another rule to remember is that it shouldn’t have to rely on colour for impact. A logo will always at some point be printed or displayed in black and white; therefore this should have been considered when it was designed so that you can be confident that your logo is always representing your company proficiently.
3. Making it too complex
A busy logo is difficult for your consumers to remember and therefore is not fulfilling its duty. Test your logo’s recognition ability by showing it to people who haven’t seen it before for 3 seconds and then ask them to draw it. If it’s doing its job well you should receive drawings that clearly mirror your logo.
As you can see above, there is just way too much going on in the logo for someone to remember at a glance. Therefore it has failed its most important role as a logo.
Simplicity is key! You can introduce one quirky element to make it unique and give it some flavour but never have more than one of these elements in your logo. For instance, don’t have something quirky in the text and something else quirky in the icon next to it. This will only reduce the value of your logo and make your company appear amateurish.
Try to avoid using gradients (blended colours) and photos in your logo. They may look pretty but they do not work well as logos. Firstly they are not very versatile as they can cause problems when applied to different media and background colours. Also as mentioned before in this article, logos need to translate well in black and white, whereas gradients and photos do not always do so.
Evidently the black and white version looks very dark and dismal without colour and wouldn’t give you much confidence in buying a boat from them if you saw their logo like this.
4. Using too many fonts
A logo that is made up of too many fonts will be ineffective for a couple of reasons. Firstly you want to relate a specific font with your company and keep it consistent throughout all of your branding. Therefore having too many in your logo doesn’t tie everything up nicely the way it should. Another reason that is quite straight forward is because it will likely look a mess. You wouldn’t use different fonts in a paragraph of text because it would look very unattractive and hard to read. Try and keep your logo to one or two fonts as this is ideal. Use a maximum of three fonts but only if it is a necessity for some reason. Below are two examples of logos that use too many fonts.
5. Copying other logos
Copying other logos does absolutely nothing beneficial for your company. Your logo needs to symbolize your business in a unique and personalised way. People should see your logo and immediately think of you. If your logo looks similar to another companies logo, your customers may start thinking about them as well or instead of you. Make sure that your logo jumps out amongst your competitor’s logos and that you haven’t copied any aspects of them.
6. Not designing with vector software
If your logo hasn’t been designed with vector software like Adobe Illustrator or CoralDRAW then it will be a pixelated raster image. These images cannot be scaled up without losing image quality. Raster images are made up of a series of pixels (tiny squares) that can be placed close together to give the illusion of a crisp line or edge. When stretching a raster image you tend to get a blurry image with jagged edges. This is because the pixels have been enlarged and you have revealed what they truly are.
Vectors graphics however are unlike raster images. They are comprised of paths, which are defined by a start and end point, along with other points, curves, and angles along the way. Because vector-based images are not made up of a specific number of dots, they can be scaled to a larger size without losing any image quality. This makes vector graphics ideal for logos, which can be small enough to appear on a business card, but can also be scaled to fill a billboard.
If you do not have your logo in vector format you might want to consider getting it redesigned this way as it will save you time and money in the future.
If you’d like some help with your logo design, please take a look at our range of logo design packages email us or call on 01992 582 824.
