Logos are often considered as the tools that leave an everlasting and best first impressions in the customer mind and impact their perception of the company brand, purchase decisions and develop an overall attitude towards a product. Thus, the designers are known to be in high demand. Logo is the first glimpse of the website that reaches the customer when they browse the internet for a query and also an everlasting image in the customers mind.
One of the most common assumptions is that a logo is merely a symbol but a perfect logo stands out from the others due to its uniqueness. A respectable logo serves as a medium to communicate with the user also satisfies the needs for social status, esteem, and recognition. This handy guide is designed to help you learn the process of designing a perfect logo for your website.
The tips for designing a website logo are mentioned as follows:
Tip #1. Understand the purpose
While designing you must focus on the approval of a specific set of audience. Note down your perception of the brand and also create a mood board with imagery that helps you to recollect the brands mission.
Make a sheet of questions on whether the brand is utility-driven or focused on evoking emotion and does it fall under the category of contemporary or quirky. Also keep in mind the customer requirements and the motive of the brand. Although staying up to date on design trends is necessary, it is more vital do justice for the overarching personality of the brand.
Tip #2. Focus on the target audience
It is suggestible to build a design targeting a specific set of audience as it yields more result. A highly-focused visual directed at that target will connect the brand to the audience. The preparation and presentation of the message medium, and tone should be done keeping in mind the traits of the best target demographic for that business. For example, if you’re designing a logo for a tech company, you can’t use swirls and handwritten fonts.
Tip #3. Start from black and white
Adding colour until the near end of the design helps in focusing on the roots of the idea rather than alterative parts. Also, it is to be noted that a poor idea cannot be profitable by having good colour, whereas, a bright idea is profitable without an interesting palette. Make sure you think of a well known symbol as that would be the form you remember before the palette.
Tip #4. Unique and clever
Having a unique logo is important as it helps the company to stand out from other competitors. hence being a trend helps the design to stick for a long time than becoming a periodic fad. Totally relying on the trend might also lead to your logo and brand to quickly become dated.
Tip #5. Pay attention to scalability
Stripe and its competitor Square have designed scalable logos from the start.
The feature scalability plays a vital role while designing a logo. Your logo needs to appear perfect in all sizes as it would be represented in various formats such as in social media posts, business cards, posters, and even billboards. Some brands even animate their logo as they consider that scalability is just as important as the responsiveness of a logo design.
Tip #6. Stick to two colors max
Apart from black and white, choose no more than two additional brand colors. In most cases, three and more colors are considered excessive and cost you a small fortune to print by the techniques that charge by color.
Although your design requires more colors, never use more than four different colors as it would make the design confusing and not appealing to the user view. The usage of colors consistently ensures that your logo can be easily spotted and recognized.
If the website that you’re designing the logo for has a certain hue, use that same hue. In the end, either your logo or the existing website will have to edit its color scheme so that they’ll be aligned. So, if your client has a website with a red color scheme, don’t add another red hue to the mix so you don’t end up with a bouquet of red colors.
Tip #7. Pick Fonts Carefully
Typefaces depict the personality of the brand. The process of selection of typefaces is done without any keen observation by the designers. Always make sure that while designing you avoid using gimmicky fonts and use your unique fonts in case you have created specifically for your logo. Also high quality fonts from the web can be used for the design process.
For example, typefaces used for building a toy website’s logo are mostly handwritten typefaces.
Another thing worth mentioning is to look at your client’s competitors and how they designed their logos. For example, if you are designing the logo of a time tracking app, look at the typography style, and color schemes that the other time tracking apps are using. Most likely, they’ve already went through the thought process that you are doing now and have figured out what the audience is looking for.
Tip #8. Make it horizontal
Online ecommerce stores are all about having designs which use the space effectively. This way a lot of information can be kept on the website without making it look clumsy. Horizontal logo generally ensures you get the most profit for your buck.
There are two uses to add a horizontal logo to the left-hand side of website:
- It’s the first thing you present to your customers
- Helps the visitors to see the products on your site without the need to scroll down.
Tip #9. Design for the long term
A logo design has to be done with keeping future enhancements in mind and thus, it is suggested to create the logo as a vector file for scalability, to appear legible at a micro size, and with Pantone colors to maintain consistency.
Tip #10. Make it flexible
One of the main features a logo needs to have is adaptability that is an ability to undergo alterations in terms of usage and according to the requirements. For example, consider the Facebook logo with a simple symbol F, but easy to recognize on the first glance.
Although minor details such as color changes such as blue to light blue to white, helps people to quickly identify the origin of, and this is defined as a flexible logo. The inability to place a white logo in a white background leads to the approach of changing the color or shape or size of your logo.
Tip #11. Leave plenty of white space
One of the most under estimated element of design is the white space. A few reasons why the white space is essential while building a logo design are mentioned as follows:
- White space gives your website a modern, professional, and uncluttered look.
- It emphasizes the content on your site making it easier to perceive and read.
- White space adds a sense of superiority and elegance to your brand.
Tip #12. Create several variants
Having a backup design comes in handy if your first variant gets rejected during the approval process. This plan concerns big companies more than individual entrepreneurs, but a backup is always a good idea in case your preferred variant appears much similar to an existing logo.
Also, make sure the presentation is top-notch. Use logo mockup templates to make your logo look great in real environments.
Tip #13. Never go out of fashion
Always ensure that your logo is a timeless representation of your brand.
Just for the purpose of consistency, do not build a new logo every few months just because you doubt yourself with the existing design.
Tip #14. Test your logo on different platforms
Although the requisite of scalability plays a vital role for designing a successful logo, one should also make sure how well the logo works on different platforms. A logo built for a business card or a pamphlet would not appear similar to the one on a website. Irrespective of the format such as digital, printed, app, and icon, it has to be ensured that the logo looks perfect.
While designing a website logo firstly, the concept and motive of the website has to be clearly understood. Following some tips and guides would only lead you half way through the design but in order to finish your design completely you have to ensure that your creating an effective, communicating, and powerful logo.
Another thing worth mentioning is that you should make sure that the logo can be converted to a SVG file, so that the website can load it faster. There are plenty of tools that convert from PNG to SVG and the other way around so don’t be afraid of SVG. It’s not only for coders.
If I were to run an e-commerce business, I would make sure to hire a service that will create a website because this will help garner more customers. Thank you for sharing here that it will be smarter to provide the necessary contact information. Aside from this, you made a pretty good point that there must be a color and deisgn scheme too.