Your logo doesn’t have to unintentionally depict a lewd act to be turning your customers off. Here are six common mistakes businesses make when choosing a logo and how to avoid them.

1. You Let Your Sister in Law Design Your Logo

Not the sister in law that has a degree in graphics design and up to the minute Illustrator skills, but rather, the one that did her own header for her Blogspot blog using Photoshop Elements and is sure she could do a really awesome one for you, too. With sparkle effects!

When it feels like you are hemorrhaging money in starting a business, it can be incredibly tempting to save a bit of cash by either trying to design your own logo, letting an eager amateur take a stab at it or farming it out to the lowest bidder.

Don’t.

Your logo sends an important message about your professionalism and credibility and should never be skimped on.

2. Busy, Busy, Busy

Sure, your intricate logo with all the scrolls and the bevels and the flowers and the multiple fancy fonts and shadow effects might be a work of art, but who has the time to puzzle out the name of your company and what you do?

People are able to best retain those images that are strong, clear and simple.

If you are married to the idea of a logo that makes Lady Di’s wedding gown weep for a lack of frills, you could always get it tattooed somewhere on your body, live with it for a year. Then, if you still love it, get ink it on the other side because it sure doesn’t need to be your logo.

3. You Didn’t Know What a Vector Graphic Was

This shouldn’t be a problem if you hire a professional logo designer, but to be on the safe side, make sure to ask if they will be using vector graphics software to design your logo. This will ensure that your logo can be reproduced to look the same in many different sizes, make it easier to edit should changes be required later, and make it more convenient to use in other forms of media.

A logo designed using raster graphics (bitmap) might serve well for the time being, but chances are you will appreciate the flexibility of using vector graphics somewhere down the line.

4. Your Logo Designer is an Artiste

And now the logo for your home skilled nursing care service is a very stark, very edgy, very hip masterpiece of design that confuses and distresses your customers. Of course, designers need to bring their own creativity to the table, but a good commercial designer will consider your target market and the nature of your business to come up with a logo that is stylish and works for you.

Before you hire a designer, interview them to get a sense of how well they will work with you and take a look at their portfolio to see if they can design for a wide range of businesses.

5. It’s Just Like Everyone Else’s

Ooh, ooh, ooh, here’s a clip art picture of a puzzle missing one piece! I can be that missing piece for my clients! Presto logo!

It can be challenging, but as much as possible, try to avoid having a logo that looks the same as almost everyone else in your industry, using clip art or relying on cliché images.

You want your logo to set your apart from the crowd, not leave you firmly in the middle.

Warning: You need to be extremely careful about using a logo that rips off another company’s logo. Always be sure you have a license to use stock or clip art images. Otherwise you could be setting yourself up for a very expensive problem.

6. You Totally Ignore Convention

Because you’re a rebel, you decided on a baby doll pink logo with bubble letters for your tax law firm. Although it will probably win over both of the people looking for a effervescent, free spirit to represent them in tax court, it’s likely that most people will mistake it for an ad for Legally Blonde 3 and look elsewhere.

Creativity and the unexpected are awesome things, but you have to make it easy for people to understand what your logo is about in the fraction of a second they will glance at it and that means respecting the associations people make with various colors and design elements.

Red is passionate, pink is feminine, green is earth friendly. Helvetica is neutral, gothic is heavy, papyrus means you want people to shoot you.

When done right, a logo is a distinctive way to establish your credibility as a business by looking sharp and professional, a way to stand out in a crowd of competitors and an easy way for your customers to remember and recognize you in the future.

A poorly designed logo makes you invisible or worse, loudly screams your lack of credibility to the world.

But your clients, prospective clients, friends, colleagues, employees etc. do not know about your logo and they have hardly seen it. Is this good as well? Ofcourse NOT!

If you got a logo designed, then you must have had an objective, as to what purpose the logo design will serve for you. So, now that the logo is ready, it is time to use it effectively, to ensure that your brand awareness objective is met.

You must ensure that your logo is being viewed on a regular basis. Your brand identity has to be developed – actually hammered in people’s mind.

How do you do this?

Very simple. Start using the logo.

• Use it on your Business Card, Letterhead and Envelopes.
• Use it in your Posters, Flyers, Brochures.
• Use it on employee T-Shirts.
• Use it in your Email Signatures.
• Use it as your Forum Avataars.
• Use it in your Newspaper, Yellow Pages and other Advertisements.
• Use it in your Outdoor Advertising like hoardings etc.
• Use it as your Mobile Wallpaper.
• Use it in your Company Presentations.
• Use it as the Wallpaper of your company workstations.
• Use it on the Corporate Gifts that you present to your clients or employees.
• Use it on the Mouse Pads that you use in your Office.
• Use it on your Company Vehicles.

and the list goes on…

There are SO MANY ways to make your logo visible all around. Let the world see it. This will surely help you in your overall branding and generate instant recall for better credibility, thereby boosting your sales and profits.

Hang on! Did I hear you say “All this is nice but I don’t have a logo yet”? What are you waiting for? Just click over to the Logo Design Team website and get yourself a dazzling new logo. It is simpler and cheaper than you thought.

Fact: While a graphic does enhance the visual appeal of the logo, your logo can look quite elegant and have an instant recall even if does not have the graphic. Some nice strokes or a different-than-usual font can make your logo stand out among a sea of graphical logos.

What’s more – you are not tied up to a particular product or service and can make your brand name popular. This is specially useful for the consumer goods industries like electronics and fashion.

Take a look at the following logos and tell us about your views on a text based logo vs. a graphics based logo.

These text based logo designs have instant recall and look quite elegant.

Which other text based logos have appealed to you? Please post a comment about those too.

Are they doing so? Insist!

But first let us understand, what difference does it make.

The raster format is a rough equivalent of “this point here should be black, this should be a shade of green, the next point will be dark green and like”. However the vector files talks in terms of shapes like lines and curves. So how does it matter?

The raster file formats do not allow you to enlarge graphics for printing purposes. When you hire a logo design firm, they will deliver your graphics in an electronic format. Many logo design companies will take your money, produce a logo and send it to you in a raster format. That might seem fine as you integrate the design into your website and throughout your online business.

However, when you decide to bring your logo into the “real world,” you will be very upset. Your raster logo design might look fine on a web page, but you will never be able to effectively bring it to life offline, as in a big poster. If you try to pump it up to the necessary resolution, the result will be distorted beyond recognition. It will be unusable.

Vector file formats are different. You can enlarge a vector graphic to any size without showing any distortion whatsoever. In other words, it will convert perfectly for printing or any other use.

Many of the “other logo design companies and freelancers” supply their customers with files in a raster format. That might be a byproduct of laziness, an indication of an unwillingness to go the “extra mile,” or evidence that they don’t really understand how important a great logo design really is to a business’ overall well-being.

Others will hold out the possibility of getting the vector format files for an additional fee, almost like a form of logo blackmail.

We don’t play games.

We send vectors. We send them to all of our logo design clients – even our Budget Package includes delivery of the vectors. When we complete your amazing logo design, you will receive it so you can use it however you’d like. You may have planned to use your logo design on the web, but we are not just selling cheap “web logos.” We go deeper. Our original logo design artistry is the kind of material you can (and will want to) put anywhere and everywhere.

Why settle for second best when you are talking about the very symbol of your enterprise? You deserve the best from top to bottom. The best designers, the best team, the best experience, the best artwork and, yes, the best file format.

Your finished logo design will be ready to copyright, trademark and use as you see fit-both online and offline. We make sure of that by supplying vector graphics with all of our packages.

Don’t accept mere rasters. Demand vectors!

Here is a thought-provoking image. Do you find anything alarming here? Who copied whom? Did somebody just get inspired by someone else or went a step further?

Or is this just a coincidence? Share your thoughts…

Do you think these logos are too similar?

Colours are powerful! They can influence opinion in less time than it takes to blink an eye. They create a sublimal effect. And one should have a very good understanding of the colour psychology to create great logos for one’s clients.

A logo is the most repeated and frequently displayed symbol of your business. It’s on your letterhead, your website, business cards, products and more. It’s your “brand” and it’s an inseparable part of your business identity. In fact, your logo is you.

Does your logo create a bonding with the clients or turns them off? Using colour psychology to your advantage isn’t easy. You can look at a simple chart that lists common colours and explains what they tend to represent. Here are some colours and their significance:

• BLACK: Mystery, secrecy, tradition.
• BLUE: Power, calmness, success, trustworthiness.
• BROWN: Earth and nature, simplicity, seriousness.
• GREEN: Harmony, health and healing, nature and animals, money.
• ORANGE: Affordability, fun, youth, creativity, celebration.
• PURPLE: Fantasy and dreams, justice, royalty.
• RED: Excitement, action, adventure, love, passion, food.
• WHITE: Simplicity, cleanliness, innocence.
• YELLOW: Cheerfulness, playfulness, curiosity, amusement.

However this only scratches the surface of what impact colours can have. We go beyond those simple colour connections. We combine that information and with knowledge of negative colour connotations. We also understand how people react to different combinations of colours. We can create the right colour scheme and merge the messages of colour psychology with great design skills.

If you are in the market for a rocking logo designed and create a memorable identity, consult with us and watch us use the science of colour psychology to your advantage!

It can indicate a direction, growth, movement, success, sharpness, drive, effort, motion, development, emergence, increment, profit, accuracy depending on how you use it.

Arrows are quite popular props in logo design and we have compiled some logos from leading companies that include an arrow or an arrowhead.

It is amazing to see the variety in which such a simple thing can be used in a logo. In some it is very eminent and in others it has been used in a subtle manner. You can easily locate the arrow in some of these designs, while you might take a few seconds to notice the arrow in some others (for example where is the arrow in the Fedex logo?). Enjoy!

Logos with arrows and arrowheads

Feel free to add a comment with other logos that you find involving use of an arrow in the design.

When getting your logo designed, you must keep in mind the following:

1. Your logo must be memorable. Name written in an unreadable tricky style, too much curiosity factor, mismatched graphics make the logo difficult to remember.
2. The logo must be scalable from very small to very large without any loss of details and without getting distorted. You should avoid gradients and shadows for this very reason. Also it should be possible to reproduce your logo on a large number of media like business card, envelope, web site, billboard etc.
3. Your logo must be unique. Using a slightly altered design from someone else’s logo make you look copycat or even associate you with them. Your unique identity does not get portrayed.
4. Your logo may have to be reproduced in a single colour medium sometimes, like newspapers. Therefore you must have a black and white version of your logo.

Finally, a good balance is essential – this simply means that the overall look and feel of the logo should be balanced to the onlooker’s eyes.  Every element must be in proportion to the other; no single element should overpower the other. Balance everything carefully – colour schemes, font faces, shape and line density must interact well with each other.

Taking care of these factors will ensure that you will end up with an impressive logo that will give you a memorable identity. Check out the Logo Design Team for getting a logo design that complies with all these but is still highly affordable.

A business having a good memorable logo has a fantastic top-of-memory recall and this can be the tipping point that makes a hesitant prospect place orders with you. You can convey the image of a confident and credible business with an appealing logo or mess up the deal with a shabby one. Does it make sense to avoid having a great logo and make your business reputation limp all the time, specially because it requires such a low investment?

We have been serving the business owners with some exotic logos for a long time, since 1997 to be precise. And have lots of interesting experiences to share. We have had raving evangelists – and some pretty lousy mess-ups. I hope to bring these to life on this blog – coupled with some interesting case studies and industry insights. So make sure you subscribe to the RSS feed in the right column and stay tuned.