Tips for a Logo Makeover
How Big Red Dog Marketing gave JHL Marketing a logo remake
A business logo is the graphic version of the elevator pitch or a brief letter to the customer. It should attract the customer’s eyes and play to their interests. Does your logo say the most with the least?
Simple and Obvious
A logo should follow basic design principles such as:
- Uniqueness
- Functionality
- Simple messaging
As a business owner, you need to communicate in a simple way through a unique logo that allows customers to identify your business at a glance. The company logo is your brand stamp. However, it is difficult sometimes to refine your business identity to its simplest form. A rule of thumb in the marking world is, just as in writing good content, less is best. You know you’ve done the right thing when there’s nothing left to cut.
Style Choice
The logo should adhere to one of the five logo styles: brandmarks, wordmarks, combination marks, lettermarks, and emblems. You’ve most likely seen lettermark logos. Hewlett Packard’s “hp,” General Electric’s “GE,” and United Parcel Service’s “UPS.” Brandmarks like Target’s red target and Microsoft’s colorful flag make their brands easily recognizable. Of course, a brandmark without text may be best for well-known or established brands. Combination marks and emblems contain both text and symbols. Emblems have the text built into the symbol itself like a badge. Starbuck’s is a good example of an emblem logo.
Vectors
Tiny dots that make up a logo on a screen are called pixels. It can take over two million pixels for a standard 1080p panel. The only problem with pixels is that they do not scale. If you try to resize a graphic such as a logo, you’ll lose some clarity. That’s why it’s important that your graphic designer use vectors rather than pixels for your logo. Pixels are fixed to a certain size and do not scale. This causes pixelation and the image will lack sharpness. However, a vector image does not have this trouble. A vector is made up of shapes with color information that can be scaled up and down without losing sharpness. This means that you can use this same logo image for your email, letterhead, website, and brochures.
Essence of a Brand
When a logo is great, you won’t have to ask what brand you’re looking at because it will be obvious. A professional logo should convey the essence of the company’s brand. The impression it gives should be deliberate and immediate. A logo should be an honest representation of the company’s brand.
Look at Apple’s logo. Look at McDonald’s logo. All are simple and straightforward symbols. A great logo should exude a brand’s philosophy and instill confidence in the audience. The audience should feel that this company knows what they’re doing. They are spot on.
The best way to achieve this is for a graphic designer to really get to know the company’s brand. He or she should look at the brand characteristics and values that the company holds dear. The graphic designer should build a brand identity that audience members can relate to, so getting to know who the customers are is also important. Understanding the target audience should be one of the first approaches a graphic designer takes in the logo design process.
Our director of graphic design, Allison Averitt, recently designed the JLH Marketing logo transforming it from a generic ball cluster and dull font to a vibrant green leaf symbol with JLH inside the symbol.
Allison believes that getting to know the client’s expectations is crucial. Clear communication of expectations between the client and designer is crucial for those expectations to be met and exceeded.
Allison discussed with us her JLH Marketing logo project:
“During my initial meeting with JLH Marketing, the client and I identified what the logo needed to accomplish:
- Speak to high level corporate clients
- Live well on a proposal and on the existing website
- Convey digital growth
- Coordinate with existing tag line: “Experienced. Ethical. Elemental.”
We also discussed directions the client would not like to explore, such as a brand mark incorporating a person or the colors primarily used by their competitors: blue and orange.”
“The bold sans serif font communicates modern reliability. The staggered height of each of the letters evokes the image of growth on a bar chart. The leaf, of course, speaks to ethical, organic growth. The three digital blocks missing from the leaf are representative of the digital aspect of the company, along with being a nod to the three e’s of the tagline.”
As you can see, there’s more time and effort put into designing a logo than you may think. It’s not just clicking on an online logo maker app or throwing some shapes together in Photoshop. Excellent logo design involves researching the company and knowing a lot about how images are sized and used on different mediums and platforms.
Our logo designer here at Big Red Dog Marketing, Allison Averitt, has expertise in designing logos for many different industry brand names. A strong and unique logo says so much about your business. It should increase exposure for your business and bring in new sales. Give us a call today to start your logo design. We’ll be glad to answer any questions you may have about the logo design process and pricing.