Logo Design
and Branding

Logo design and branding are the most important parts of the design. How a business is marketed will be determined directly from the way a business is initially branded. The designer, owner, and stakeholder in the business will need to coordinate to brand and market a business closely. How a business intends to market itself should be closely considered at the beginning of this process.

Evaluating Similar Types of Businesses:

Once the business model and the owner’s vision are understood and documented, it is critical to evaluate what other businesses of this type are doing that have had success. Learning the business owner’s business model and finding others closely related will go a long way to how the projected audience ultimately receives the branding.

Starting with The Logo:

The first step in branding the business is to come up with a logo that the audience will associate with the product or service that is being offered. A good logo will give the business more credibility that can build trust in the product or service offered. Once a logo is presented after the initial design, it is important to evaluate as much feedback as possible.

Age of The Business:

The age of the business will be another factor when branding. Updating a logo that may be outdated could cause existing clients to disassociate from the business. How much effort was spent on the initial branding will be a determining factor. More harm than good could be done with a complete overhaul of a business that already has an audience that associates a logo with that type of business or service

Long Term Marketing Strategy:

Understanding the long-term marketing strategy is another key factor. A local service industry type intended to market through more traditional means might be a better candidate for certain branding types than one that intends to market only via the internet.

Building Up the Association of the Brand:

Getting an audience who can associate a visual reference such as a logo with the product or service offered is the ultimate goal of any successful branding campaign. This can be done via marketing techniques such as social media campaigns that target a specific audience type.

Good Branding Needs Word Associations:

A properly branded business should contain the logo and graphics, and words that make up a tagline and slogan that the audience can associate with what is being offered.  This is where the market study will be important. This full-spectrum approach will increase the association between the audience base and the products or services offered.

The Making of a Powerful Logo: How It’s Done

Making a logo is an art and a science. If you want your logo to stand out and represent your business well, you have to do it phase by phase. Graphic artists usually create a mock-up first in black and white. This sets the contour of the logo, so the artist becomes better acquainted with the form of the logo. Color is added later. Color is trickier because you have to add color carefully, or the design might break.

Think of logo creation as being similar to making a dessert. Everything about the logo is delicate, and the main goal is to make sure that everything remains visually balanced and effective. Unlike ordinary images, the logo has to have personality, and it must immediately capture the interest of the person viewing the logo. There is an instant association that forms when a person sees a logo for the first time, and the logo helps that person recall the business and what the business offers in the first place. These are all complicated referents that the logo has to espouse all at the same time.

The next challenge is determining how to position the text and the image. There are two ways to go about this. Sometimes, designers meld the image with the chosen text for a more textured effect. Other times, the logo ‘device’ or the logo’s primary image is separated from the text. Either way, you are going to create an effect. But which effect resonates more strongly with the objectives of the logo creation and the business?

There are countless moments of fine-tuning involved in finalizing a logo, too. For example, the logo’s general appearance may have been finalized, but the integrated font for the central area of the logo may not be that effective yet. The graphic designer will have to cycle different font styles first before arriving at a final font that works. This applies most especially to logos with one or more large letters as the main elements of the logo.

What about clipart? Should a business use clipart to reduce the cost of having the logo created? No. The best logos never use clipart. The best logos in the world are very expensive, and the branding efforts can be pricey too because these efforts involve several channels in print and digital format. However, for many of the businesses online, simply avoiding clipart will help save an ailing design. Clipart may look good in theory, but using such elements often results in a flat design that looks plain or generic.

As for the words, you have to be very selective, too. Unnecessary words in a logo can dampen or water down the impact of the logo. The goal of adding words to a logo is to make it more memorable than before. An excess of words produces the opposite effect. Words should pull in the viewer and make the viewer focus more on what the logo means. Every line and speck on the logo surrounding the chosen words will either amplify or dampen the visual effect.

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