So you think it is just like designing a sphere, typing your brand name and fill some red and black and the job is done here. Some newbie designers may give you such useless advices. You might found thousands of individuals in logo designing industry, dishing out crappy logos from logo designing contests and crowd sourcing sites. But as a serious, professional and dedicated logo designer, you have to stand out from these clutters and create quality logo that never sucks.
1. Use Visual with ambiguous meaning or Double Entendre
Best logos utilize a technique called Visual double entendre, which is a fancy way to say that design has 2 different pictures enclosed in one through crafty interpretation of an idea or concept. The PepperHorn logo is a best example.
This Pepper Horn logo express a shape of horn, which suggests music or sound, but it also look as a red hot chili pepper at the same time. Logo that uses such technique come off as memorable and clever. Audience love this little mind game, spend time to understand and are more lying to appreciate such designs.
2. Give Importance to the Color
Color palette isn’t a superficial decision, it carries important meanings and communicates concepts and ideas. At times you are fixed to the colors used by a brand and sometimes you will have the liberty to explore more. See the rich color palette used in this Zion Logo.
All the colors in it pull you in, bring life to this illustration and provide further context to the landscape. Remember that a perfect logo is versatile and the same time must function well in grayscale. Beyond the grayscale, it must also fit in single color version and only black and white and negative space. This sounds a little tricky Zion logo shown above, however definitely possible.
3. Consider Negative Space
Along same tone as a double entendre is the ancient trick of using the negative space in a logo design in some clever manner. The most popular and industry standard example is the FedEx logo with its hidden arrow utilized meaningfully as an empty space.
Cannot recognize it yet? It is there, keep looking. That is what really amazing about FedEx logo, how subtly and subliminally they used that negative space. Many people in world see the FedEx logo every day for years but they never ever even notice that arrow.
4. Never Use the Cliche
Often, several new fads keep coming in logo design industry who never love to research and study the new trends in the industry. We might even keep suggesting to jump onto a few fashions and crazes to be with the times, however with logos no one loves it especially when a lot of designers use the same idea repeatedly.
The basic epitome used in above logo is being used repeatedly in logo design industry and it is getting outdated quickly. So it is better to use designs that you really thought up by yourself instead of ripping off what others out there are doing.
5. Understand What the Logo Actually Means
Every other good logo have a background story behind. Just being simply a nice-looking sketch and appealing text line and colors, strong and effective logos are filled with some meaning, both hidden and obvious. Again the logo of FedEx with its hidden yet obvious arrow simply indicates the meaning of moving forward and making quick deliveries. Similarly the Apple logo has a missing “byte” and similarly the bird used in the logo of tweeter is flying in an upward direction. The best thing a designer can do is to show the extent of reasoning and thought that went into the whole logo designing process.
Most of the time it is seen that no company providing custom logo design services come up with the reasoning and meaning after the logo is already created, however regardless, it is excellent when a designer or brand expert can follow such approach and think about the story behind the design elements used in the process.
Most if not all the clients might consider that all they need is something cool and fresh, however if a designer instead come up with a logo that ties with in the company’s core values, vision and mission, it will help a designer to blow their mentality and believe they will love your work for it and prove it by giving future design work.