Eight critical elements of an effective logo design

 

Have you ever noticed how certain logo designs stand out from the crowd? Take, for example, the logos for companies like Coca-Cola, Microsoft, Toyota, and Nike. It’s no secret that each of these companies devotes millions of dollars each year to develop their brand and promote their corporate individuality. But, by themselves, these corporate logos also have certain innate qualities that make them more memorable and easy to distinguish from other corporate symbols. These qualities are based in the designs themselves and in the techniques used in developing them.

Here is a list of these qualities and short descriptions as to how they work together to create a logo design that’s both original and unforgettable:

· Simplicity

Simplicity is one element all effective logo designs have in common. People are attracted to clean logo designs because they can easily absorb and recognize the symbol at a glance. Busy, crowded logos, such as designs featuring many complicated details, elaborate images or pictures, are distracting to the viewer and tend not to be as well recognized as cleaner designs.

· Proportionality

Ideally, a logo should function as a detached unit with a width not much greater than its height. Remember that a logo design should work well on anything from a business card to a billboard, and logos that are too long or too tall become difficult to read when they are reduced or enlarged.

· Small Color Palette

It is no coincidence that 80% of the world’s most widely recognized logos use either one or two colors. Truth be told, few good logo designs use more than three colors; this is because using more than three colors usually turns a logo to mud. A basic color palette of one to three colors (which may or may not include black) keeps things simple and allows the selected colors to clearly convey a mood or emotion.

· Easily Legible Fonts

Creating a logo design in elaborate script fonts may look classy, but what good is a logo if nobody can read it? The best way out is to choose a font that is distinctive but still easy to read. (Two thirds of most logos are designed with sans serif fonts, such as Arial and Veranda, with the other one third designed in serif fonts such as Times New Roman and Garamond.)

· Practical, Usable and Adaptable

What this means is that a logo design should be practically designed so it can be easily used in a variety of mediums. For example, a logo:

o Shouldn’t be designed with so many colors that it costs you a mint every time you want to print business cards or letterhead.

o Shouldn’t be designed with a picture, which is difficult to reproduce.

o Should be created so it can be easily converted to black-&-white.

o Should be created using Web-safe colors so your online logo looks the same as your printed logo.

· Originality

A primary task of a logo design is to clearly distinguish a company from its competitors, which means a logo design should be unique, one-of-a-kind and ownable (meaning the company should be able to trademark the logo with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and officially own the design as their intellectual property).

· Works Within Industry Conventions

Often there are consistencies among logos in certain industries, and following these conventions can help customers more easily identify what you do or what you sell. This doesn’t mean you should sacrifice originality, but it does mean you (or the firm creating your logo design) should be aware of patterns among logos in your industry and somehow incorporate these consistencies into your design.

For example, did you realize that the main color for the logos for Microsoft, IBM, Dell, Hewlett Packard and Intel is blue? The color blue is associated with stability and progress and has long been a standard color among high-tech companies. So if you were a technology company, you would probably want to incorporate blue into your logo design to take advantage of these positive built-in associations.

· Captures the Personality of the Company

Finally, a logo design should clearly express a company’s identity: who they are, what they do, how they work, how they want to be seen by the world.

The best place to start here is to think about your company as if it were a living being with a personality. What would that personality be? Conservative or daring? Traditional or modern? Complex or fun? Serious or whimsical? Once you have narrowed down the traits that define your company, you are then ready to start exploring the images, colors and fonts that best express these traits.

 

a Post-Reading Tasks

I. Find a variety of logotypes for different companies (at home). Analyze them according to the eight elements of an effective logo design (at class).

1. Are all eight elements present at any of them?

2. What are the most widely used elements of a design judging by the majority of logos?

3. What colours are predominantly used in logos?

 

II. Choose any product or company and create your own logo for it. Try to follow eight elements of an effective logo design.

 

 

A Pre-Reading Tasks

What famous brands do you know? What product do they represent? What logo do they have?

Match the following prominent brand names with the products they represent. Find slogans of these brands.

Brand Name	Product
1. Coca-Cola	a. computer
2. Mercedes-Benz	b. electronics
3. Microsoft	c. fast food restaurant
4. Apple	d. aerospace
5. Ferrari	e. cell phones
6. BP	f. toys
7. Boeing	g. soft drink
8. Panasonic	h. software
9. Lego	i. furniture
10. Cadbury	g. automobile
11. Ikea	k. food
12. McDonald's	l. chocolate
13. Nestlé	m. automobile
14. Nokia	n. petrol

3. Divide the above-mentioned brand names into two groups:

European Brand Names	United States Brand Names

BRAND

McDonald's, represented by the Golden Arches, is one of the world's most famous brands (pic. 5.1).

Pic. 5.1. McDonald’s

A brand takes the form of a symbolic construct created by a marketer to represent a collection of information about a product or group of products. This symbolic construct typically consists of a name, identifying mark, logo, visual images or symbols, or mental concepts which distinguish the product or service. A brand is often special and unique to be prominent among its competitors. Marketers attempt through a brand to give a product a “personality” or an “image”. Thus, they hope to “brand”, or burn, the image into the consumer's mind; that is, associate the image with the product's quality. Because of this, a brand can form an important element of an advertising theme: it serves as a quick way to show and tell consumers what a supplier has offered to the market.

Well known products acquire brand recognition. When a brand has accumulated a lot of positive attitude among consumers, marketers say that its owner has acquired brand equity or brand franchise[2]. Brand equity measures the brands value to the marketer. It is an assessment of the investment a company has made in a brand. Brand franchise measures the effect of this investment on the target market. When enough brand equity is created that the brand has the ability to draw buyers (even without further advertising), it is said to have brand franchise. A brand name comprises that part of a brand consisting of words or letters that humans can verbalize. A brand name that has acquired legal protection becomes a trademark.

Branding has become part of pop culture. Numerous products have a brand identity: from common table salt to designer clothes. Non-commercially, branding can also apply to the marketing of organizations which supply ideas or promises rather than goods and services – such as political parties or religious organizations.

Consumers as a group may look on the brand as an important aspect of a product, and it can also add value to a product or service. It carries the reputation of a product or company. Although two products may resemble each other closely, people have learned to consider the branded product as superior. In some cases they believe that because it costs more it offers better quality.

Advertising spokespersons have also become part of some brands, for example: Mr. Whipple of Charmin toilet tissue and Tony the Tiger of Kellogg’s.

Brands originated with the 19th-century advent of packaged goods. Industrialization moved the production of many household items, such as soap, from local communities to centralized factories. These factories needed to sell their mass-produced goods in a wider market, to customers familiar only with local goods. It quickly became apparent that a common package of soap had difficulty competing with familiar, local products. The packaged goods manufacturers needed to convince the market that the public could place just as much trust in the non-local product.

Many brands of that era, such as Uncle Ben's rice and Kellogg's breakfast cereal, provide illustrations of the problem. The manufacturers wanted their products to appear and feel as familiar as the local farmers' produce. From there, with the help of advertising, manufacturers quickly learned to associate other kinds of brand values, such as youthfulness, fun or luxury, with their products. This started the practice we now know as “branding”.

There is some criticism of branding, much of it is associated with the “antiglobalization” movement. In his book No Logo Naomi Klein claims that such global problems as sweatshop labor and environmental degradation have been permitted by branding. Criticism of branding also comes from within corporations, with some employees becoming depressed by being limited by brand strategies that restrict what they can say and how they say it. Some shareholders also have concerns about the amount of money invested in branding.

 

a Post-Reading Tasks