Well thought out, well designed logos are important because they establish a personality and brand for your business. Shapes and colors are recognized before words and they are more memorable.
What makes a good logo?
- The logo should be designed first as a grayscale image. There will probably be times when you will not be able to use a full color image, so having important parts of the design lost on a black and white image would be bad. This also means logos should never have soft or gradient edges.
- The logo should be designed in a program that creates a vector image, like Adobe inDesign, which is what I use. The reason for this is a vector image is one that uses a mathematical equation to store the lines and shapes for your image, not pixels. This means that your logo will be able to be resized to any dimension and keep the exact same image quality.
- Great attention to detail.
- Slight adjustments can make a large difference in the look and feel of the logo.
- Flaws are more noticeable as size increases. It is important that logos are symmetric and baselines are exact, otherwise, if you ever need a large sign you might find that your brand identity looks sloppy.
- Timelessness: Logos should be more timeless than a website or brochure. You should work with someone who understands this because if you get a logo that applies all the current trendy image effects like drop shadows or reflections you’re going to look dated pretty fast.
