Are you exploring how to design a logo for a website? It might seem simple enough on the face of it but logo design is actually a job for graphic design experts like us at Intuitiv. We have extensive experience in logo design and branding, and we know exactly how to make a logo that dovetails beautifully with your brand. Read on to discover exactly what creating a company logo involves and enjoy our expert tips around having a go at designing a website logo yourself.
What is a Logo?
So, what is a logo? A logo encompasses your business’s brand values, distilling everything about the company into one clear symbolic representation. It makes the right first impression, warmly inviting people to engage and interact with the brand. It goes a long way towards a strong, definite brand identity. It acts as an instantly recognisable symbol for the business to be remembered by. And it distinguishes you from the competition.
Take the Lego logo. It’s clear and friendly, and the chunky, rounded typeface style suggests ‘fun’. The Twitter logo’s famous blue bird supports the business’s name literally, with the pale blue colour suggesting contemporary openness and frankness. Facebook’s logo majors on the name of the network, including a large lower-case ‘f’, right justified to suggest progress. The deep blue is a type of blue favoured by insurance companies thanks to its reliable, classic feel.
FedEx has a wonderfully clear, open and colourful logo, with the ‘Fed’ and the ‘Ex’ dealt with separately to suggest movement and a subtle arrow created in the junction between the E and the X. Macdonalds’ famous golden arches have been set against a classy racing green background in recent years, creating a smarter, better-quality impression than the cheap-looking red used in the original. As you can see, a logo says a lot more than you might expect!
Why You Need a Logo
You don’t have to have a company logo, of course. But it’s a great way to set the scene and a reliable piece of design to base the rest of the company’s branding upon. A logo is a sort of shorthand, the basis of your brand identity, created to say more than you could possibly say with words alone. Add a strapline to your logo and the intent becomes even more obvious. In a fast-paced world where first impressions can make all the difference between a click-through and a click away, your logo can have a powerful impact. It must be visually memorable, and it should clearly differentiate your business from your competitors. When you get it right, a company logo supports brand loyalty as well as attracting the gold dust that every marketer seeks: brand advocacy.
Logo Design and Brand Identity
Every great business has a really strong, attractive brand. And that means ‘brand’ is a key success factor for most businesses. A website logo is a key component of your brand identity. Everything about it has an impact. The tone of voice, the colours you choose, the typography, they’re all-important aspects of brand identity and they all say more than words alone ever could. If you already have a good, strong, popular brand informing the design of your website, vehicles, marketing and sales materials, premises and more, you’ll want to harness its power and use the same defined brand typography and colour choices for your website logo design.
Competition Research
You’ll want to do some careful research before you begin. Researching the competition is a great way to fire the imagination, and also a reliable way to avoid creating a logo that looks the same as the businesses you’re competing with. It’s also a good idea to explore the logos created by businesses outside your sector, which have nothing to do with your products and services. It makes a lot of sense to make a note of the logos you dislike, and why. And you’ll want to decide which logo style you’re going to use. There are plenty to choose from – here are just some of them.
- Wordmark, word mark or logotype logos, for example Mobil and Coca-Cola, only involve letters and words. There are no symbols, mascots, images or badges.
- Lettermark or monogram logos involve decorative designs created using a combination of one to three letters. They often represent a person’s initials, or the business name’s initials, and you can combine the letters with supporting imagery if you like. CNN and the BBC are good examples.
- Brandmark or pictorial mark logos are all about imagery, with no text. Think Twitter and Apple.
- Combination mark logos combine imagery and text to create a powerful logo – for example the Adidas logo with its self-explanatory brand name and stripes.
- Emblem logos use images and text too, but the text appears inside the image. Starbucks and Harley Davidson both have emblem logos.
Logo Typography
Typography is a hugely powerful design tool in itself, and sometimes it’s all you need to make the perfect impression. To make the best impact, the typography should match your brand’s identity. A classic brand with a formal outlook is represented well using a serif font, which strongly suggests tradition and seriousness. Take The Times newspaper, a powerful old brand trusted by millions. Sans serif fonts tend to feel more modern, delivering a crisp, clean impression. These work wonderfully well, as you can imagine, in digital presentations. Script fonts look easygoing and natural, giving your brand a fun and informal feel. Whatever you do, your font must be easy to read since logos appear on fast-moving objects like vehicles and can be printed very small as well as large.
Let’s look at some examples. A bright and colourful logo with a script typeface might not be the best idea for a funeral director, but a funeral director logo in black and grey with a serif typeface would feel much more suitable. A toy brand won’t get far with a plain grey wordmark logo, but a brightly coloured logo with an image of a child or a toy would attract the right kind of attention.
Logo Symbolism
This is an area of graphic design where symbolism and metaphor come into their own. Visual shortcuts, if you like. A simple symbolic image can be highly memorable and evoke important aspects of a brand. Let’s return to the FedEx logo, in purple-blue and orange with chunky sans serif lettering. The space between the E and X cleverly forms a forward-pointing arrow, which strongly suggests a forward-thinking company involved in moving stuff from A to B. No wonder symbolic logos are so powerful and popular.
Logo Design Tools
Having determined your key brand identity attributes, researched competitor logos and non-competing alternatives, explored logo styles, selected your colours and considered symbolism, it’s time to get designing.
This is the most challenging part of the job. Luckily you have a choice of intelligent logo design tools and sites to tap into. Logo design studio pro is very popular, as is Adobe Illustrator. Corel Draw and Canva support the creation of beautiful, powerful logos. And sites like Logo-Maker, Looka, Freelogodesign, Renderforest and Designevo are all very helpful.
Once you’ve created a suite of alternatives to choose from, it’s time to get feedback. You can ask your colleagues and employees, friends and family, business network members and social network followers. Make sure you ask them why they like or dislike your creations, so you understand where they’re coming from. You could even ask your target audience or your existing customers, making the logo choice process into a potent little marketing campaign to pin down which is the most appealing.
Don’t do it yourself – Design a logo the Intuitive way!
Get your business logo right and it’ll support great marketing, helping you create and grow a strong brand trusted by its customers. Doing your own logo design is one way to get where you want to be but you can’t really beat an experienced graphic designer. The graphic design services offered by Intuitiv provide everything you need. Walk this way to enjoy truly memorable, hard-working logo and branding from Intuitiv.
Or give us a call on 01844 888 777
or contact us.
