Ingredients for an Appealing Logo

When you are ready to create your business logo, you need to take your time to make sure your logo reflects your business’s personality and that it is memorable enough. This logo will go on all your marketing materials, from brochures to custom business cards.

When creating your business logo, it is important to make sure that your logo will be an original and unique concept, not like any of the other logos that other companies use for the same product category. It should be relatively fresh to capture the interest of your target market, sufficiently. Having a logo which is also very simple but very profound is necessary. A complicated logo is not only overtly ambitious, but would also generate confusion and mixed signals for your target market.

Read on for the three most important ingredients you need to create a memorable and appealing logo.

One-of-a-kind
This might seem silly to point out, but there are a lot of copycat logos out there. You could have a copycat logo without even realizing it! You need to do some comparative research before you start designing your logo to avoid being a copycat. Check out your competitors’ logos, as well as other local businesses that you do not compete with. You want to stand out from your competitors, and you also do not want to resemble another business in your community or your product and business could be mistaken for the other business.

The next time you go to the store, look at many brand logos used for the same kind of product – which are the ones that stand out for you? Many of them will no doubt look similar to others. Take note of the quality that makes the one stand out from the others and try to incorporate that quality in your logo.

Choose usefulness over creativity
It is great if you can come up with a colorful, beautiful logo, but will that logo be beautiful in all your marketing materials? Can it be blown up for a billboard (does it have scalability)? Will it only look good on color business cards? What if you need to print some marketing materials in black and white? Your logo should convey your business’s personality no matter what context and what color it is in – from envelopes to brochures to your Web site.

Simple design
Some of the greatest logos are the most simple. Think Target or McDonalds. Neither the bull’s-eye nor the golden arches are complicated. They are simple, yet powerful. People can remember these logos easier – there are not any complex shapes and they are not “busy” with too many lines, shapes and colors. Their simple design is why they work so well.

Appealing logos like these also have one core message – nothing else is competing for logo space. It is easy to add a lot of unnecessary design elements just because you can and you want your logo to be interesting, but you run the risk of confusing people with too many design elements. That is definitely something you do not want to be associated with your logo and company – confusion.

In addition to one core message, your logo should be in one or two easy-to-read fonts. Logos with one message, one font, one color and/or one image are the most appealing.

Know more about color business cards and custom business cards printing.

Katie Marcus writes about the online printing and commercial printing technologies.