When you care for your business and want to see it grow to become a leader in the industry, then branding is something you can’t overlook. By transforming your business into a unique and powerful brand, you can stand out from the competition and show your customers why you are the best in the market. However, to do that, one of the most important things you need is a company logo.
The best way to get the perfect logo is to design it yourself. However, when you do that, you want to avoid making the following 8 common mistakes:
1. Making the Design Too Complex
The strength of a professional and timeless logo design lies in simplicity. Sure, you may want to make your logo look grand and elaborate in an attempt to reflect the power of your organization itself. However, what you really want is a simple logo that’s creative, memorable, and versatile.
2. Choosing the Wrong Colors
Reading this heading, you might be wondering, how can there be any wrong colors? After all, if a design looks colorful and attractive, that’s enough, right? Unfortunately, the answer is “no”.
When you are designing something in an art class or something for your own pleasure, then you are free to use imagination and push your creativity to go wild. However, it’s not the same when you are designing logos because believe it or not, logo colors have meaning.
There are certain rules that you have to follow to design appropriate company logos with the right colors. For instance, if you want to create a brand that’s associated with words like “luxury” or “royalty”, then purple is the color you want to focus on. Similarly, if you want to evoke the feelings of love, passion, and enthusiasm in your target audience, then you can make it happen by choosing the color red.
The thing is that there is a concept of the psychology of color in marketing and branding and you need to know how it works if you want to get the best results from your logo.
3. Using Raster Graphics
Using raster graphics for logo design is a really bad idea. This is because you want to use your logo everywhere- from your business cards to local billboards. However, this means that scalability plays a big role here for which raster graphics are a poor choice. Instead what you need is vector graphics. This begs the question, why?
Raster graphics images are created with individual pixels. So, when you try to scale them to different sizes, you end up getting blurry or low-quality images. Vector graphics images, on the other hand, are created using points and lines. Thus, you can scale them to varying sizes easily and without hurting the quality of the image.
4. Using Visual Clichés
When you are designing a logo from scratch, especially when you have never done it before, then it’s natural if you want to look at some of most beautiful typography quotes, logo designs, and images for inspiration. It’s a good way to get some fresh ideas for your own design. However, make sure that when you actually get to work, then you steer clear from visual clichés that have been used in logos a zillion times.
There are many clichés that inexperienced designers use today. For instance, auto service providers use icons of cars or wheels, doctors or medical professionals use a red cross in some form or the other, and brands that offer “creative” solutions use a light bulb to symbolize creativity as shown above. However, these are really uncreative and outdated ideas which you must avoid. You must think out of the box if you want your brand to be unique.
5. Getting the Typography Wrong
Typography plays a big role in every logo. Not only it should be up to the mark as in the design itself, but it should also be appropriate for the organization as well.
There are a few fonts that are widely used for logos which is why you might want to use one for yourself. However, each has its own personality and you want to pick one that suits your business:
- Serif: Serif is one of the most popular fonts in the world which is used in all kinds of places even today. It’s a classic font that represents trust and reliance. If you want to represent authority, then this is the font for you.
- Sans Serif: Sans serif fonts are clean modern and used to reflect a feeling of forward-thinking and ambitious attitude. It’s also a simple font that makes for a long-lasting impression.
- Script: Script fonts are elegant and formal at the same time, and can be used when you want to show the creative side of your business. The Coca-Cola logo is a script font that you can consider for inspiration.
6. Using Outdated Logo Design Software
There are all kinds of graphic design software today. Some are more advanced than others but some are easy to use too. For instance, not everyone can use Adobe Photoshop properly as it’s a premium software designed for professionals. However, there are advanced AI-powered logo design software in the industry too which can create high-quality and designs even if the user is a novice designer. In fact, you don’t need to have any kind of graphic design experience to use these software. So, as we are automating the future of graphic design, it’s highly recommended that you use the programs that are engineered for the present-day world.
7. Ignoring Kerning
Kerning is referred to the process of adjusting the characters in a font so that the text is visually appealing and looks legible. So, you want the letter-spacing to be just right. Bring the letters too close and they look cramped; put more than necessary space between them, and they look cluttered. Thus, you must focus on perfect spacing.
8. Copying Other Designs
It’s one thing to take inspiration from other logos, but another to blatantly copy someone else’s design. Sometimes, you may not even realize that you have copied some of the core elements of a logo. However, this can create problems later if the owner finds out, especially is the logo is copyrighted (most are). So, make sure that you keep your logo as original as possible.