Three Basics of Custom Logo Design

Successful custom logo design is a creative process. It’s easy to focus on the end results, but it’s important to understand the basics. Your choices of fonts, colors and images are critical. You know that you’re dealing with a professional designer when he explains why these three decisions are so important.

Focus on Fonts

Falling in love with a typeface is easy, and it can be a mistake. Your logo might not include the company name, but it stands next to vital information. It must be clear enough to read and crisp enough to print well. The font included in the icon that represents your company should complement the text on your business cards and letterheads. Your logo is a design that will transition across ad campaigns, street signage and the Internet. Legible fonts are easier to merge into a sharp icon, and they’re easier for potential clients to read.

Care About Colors

The most successful logos are simple in design and rarely incorporate more than one or two colors. The rainbow Apple logo comes to mind as an exception, but even it has become monochromatic over the years. The principle is basic: less is more. Your goal is to put your brand forefront in the customer’s mind. Too many colors are distracting, and they run up printing costs. Promotional materials are always part of the budget, so holding down their expense makes good business sense. A sharp, one-color logo costs less to print on everything from brochures to company ball caps.

Limit the Image

By definition, custom logo design should allow you to use any image that represents your company. A professional designer will recommend that you only use vector art. That group photo of your crew looks great on your business cards, but including it in large format printing becomes problematic and expensive. Photographs are raster images composed of thousands of tiny dots. Vector art is computer generated and built on sharp clean lines. It renders your logo in a format that looks just as powerful on a roadside billboard as it does online.

Knowing why your designer recommends one choice over another makes the process of custom logo design easier to understand. A successful collaboration eliminates the guesswork and streamlines the job. It ensures that your custom logo will always look as good on your business cards as it does on your signage and your company’s website.