How effective is your logo?
3 things that can elevate your brand
One of the first visual brand assets that most businesses will develop is a logo. As entrepreneurs with ideas constantly striking, it’s usually the first thing that we get excited about when we start a business - right away we want to go and create a logo to give our new venture life. It makes it feel a bit more real.
Now, a logo doesn’t have to illustrate or describe everything that you do.
The Starbucks logo isn’t of a coffee cup, the McDonald’s logo doesn’t have a burger in it, and Apple didn’t use a computer in their logo. But I’m sure you instantly connect them back to the brands, even if you only see a small portion of the logo itself.
Very simply, a logo is a visual bookmark that people can quickly and easily reference back to your business. The simpler it is, the more unique it is, the more identifiable it is - the easier it will be for people to remember it. They’ll remember it more quickly. And they’ll remember it for longer.
Your logo has a job to do, and to do that job, it needs to have certain qualities. Think of it as an online job listing.
Position: Logo
Job Description: To help people quickly and easily remember a brand and what it stands for
Essential Candidate Qualities: Unique, instantly readable, flexible across a wide range of applications
Let’s look at those ‘candidate qualities’ one by one:
Unique.
Firstly, a logo needs to be unique. It can’t be a knockoff or a variation of something that you’ve seen before. It might seem like a good idea to quickly knock up a logo using a Cava template, but with over 245 million Canva users, I can assure you that there’s going to be a lot of other people that also have a logo using that same template. It’s not unique - it’s just easy.
Instantly readable.
The second thing you want your logo to be is instantly readable.
If I can’t read the font in your logo, I’m not going to be able to instantly understand what it means. I’m not going to retain the information initially, and there’s no way that I’m going to remember it in a few days or weeks time, because it hasn’t been embedded in my memory in the first place. If my brain has to work overtime just to figure our your business name, I’m scrolling past.
So, it’s important to use a font that people can read (especially from a distance, and when displayed quite small) and it’s also important to keep your business name short and sweet and to the point. If you use a cutesy business name, that you have to explain “but we spell it with an E” it’s just too much for people to remember.
Keeping it simple and readable also comes down to your choice of colours as well. If you’re using colours in your logo that are very low in contrast, we can’t read it. Dark text on a dark background or light text on a light pastel background is very difficult to read, so how can anyone possibly remember it?
Flexible.
Logos also need to be flexible - able to be used across a variety of real world of marketing applications - in printing, on signage, possibly embroidery or screen printing, and maybe even on a billboard. You’ll need specific types of files and formats to use your logo in these marketing applications. So the AI logo you generated in 3 minutes that might look amazing on your phone, can’t acutally be used when you want to put signage on your car or shopfront. AI doesn’t give you the file formats, or the big-picture consideration that a designer will give you.
I recently had a client wanting me to design a cafe menu using her newly generated AI logo. The jpeg file she provided was quite small, so in the printing world we were retricted to displaying it at 3cmx3cm. Sure, it was doable, but it limited me in my design choices, and it certainly wasn’t going to give my client the best result. There was also no way she’d be able to get staff uniforms created or update her cafe signage. She agreed that we needed to recreate the logo as a vector - which was an unexpected cost.
So, when you’re creating a logo, or thinking about the one you already have, keep in mind that it’s sole function is to be a memorable visual link back to your business and ask yourself these 3 questions:
Is it unique, is it readable and is it flexible?
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