The company logo has become so integral in modern business that it can directly impact the success or failure of an organization. With a carefully tailored logo, a business can establish its presence in the market and engage its target audience. In other words, it is a vital brand visual with various functions in modern business.
It’s one of the essential tools for delivering the right brand message, and in many cases, it can be used to directly convert the target audience into paying customers. For these reasons, we can safely say that being a logo designer is a good career choice.
However, there are more and more designers specializing in this design work, and this means more competition. This is why you need to work on bringing your logo design to another level.
Here are five essential logo design tips that can help you achieve this.
Stop Using Photoshop and Switch to Illustrator
The two most popular graphic design programs today are Adobe’s Photoshop and Illustrator. Photoshop is more popular, and it excels at modifying imported graphics or images that have been captured or created somewhere else. On the other hand, Illustrator is an advanced tool for creating vector graphics.
Illustrator has amazing drawing capabilities which are superior to Photoshop. It can be used for crafting free-flowing and organic forms which are superior to basic square and circle presets. It allows designers to draw shapes on a whole different level and save them as vectors.
These vectors can be later resized without losing any quality. This is ideal for logo design because you often need to change the size of the logo depending on its purpose. At the same time, the logo will often need to be printed, and that’s where the ability to resize comes handy.
Create Mind Maps to Organize Your Ideas
Mind maps can be defined as diagrams which help organize ideas visually. This technique is very useful for all design work, and does not apply to logo design alone. Here are some of the benefits of creating mind maps:
- Productivity boost
Mind maps help you establish a free flow of ideas and their visualization. This means that there is less chance of drifting off and getting lost in your project.
- More productive meetings
Mind mapping displays all the essential points without even saying a word. When in a meeting with a client or your coworkers, you can easily use mind mapping to show everything they need to know without missing a thing.
- Better project management
Mind mapping simplifies tasks and allows you to create to-do lists which everyone can follow. Additionally, it can be used to add relevant project information.
- Improved communication & collaboration
When working with remote teams or clients, mind mapping can be a useful online tool for communication and collaboration.
Choose the Right Option
One of the most common issues many logo designers face is not being able to choose one design option they came up with. To be precise, whenever you are working on a logo design, you will come up with different ideas, and sometimes you could end up liking them all. This leads to a dilemma.
However, it’s not about what you like the most, but what will work best for the brand. You need to ask yourself several questions while creating and choosing between designs:
- Is the design readable and understandable?
- Does it stand out?
- Is it in line with the organization’s message and goals?
- Will it look good in the future?
- Does it have authentic value for the target audience?
These are the essential questions you need to answer. At the same time, these are the goals of each logo design. You can achieve them through different colors, imagery, and typefaces.
Make Sure the Colors Match the Brand
Logo colors are probably one of the most important visual elements of your design. You can create an amazing design, but it won’t matter if your colors don’t match the brand image. Make sure that you look at the other visual elements of the brand.
This includes their layouts, website, social media, and other visual assets. See which colors are most dominant and which options go best with them. The key here is consistency. Bear in mind that the logo needs to fit in with the brand identity, no matter where it’s placed.
At the same time, you need to make it stand out, and that’s why you need to include some new colors to add a twist. Test out different options by placing the logo alongside other visual elements of the brand (for example – the website).
Use Google Lens
Brainstorming new ideas can be very difficult, especially for hard-working designers who need to continuously work on something creative. However, whenever you are traveling, walking around the city, or simply reading newspapers, you can find interesting elements that could inspire you.
You might also see interesting local logo designs. Luckily, we always have our phones with us. By installing the Google Lens app, you will be able to save interesting ideas and search for them online. This will help you do some research and learn whether there are similar designs already.
Google Lens is a simple to use app which works for both Android and iOS. It allows you to search the web by inserting images rather than keywords.
Elevate Your Skills as a Designer and Climb the Ladder of Success
These are the essential logo design tips that will help you hone your skills as a designer. There are quite a few good design companies out there, one of them being Back Office Pro. The group of professionals out there have been designing for reputed companies for several years now and know exactly how important logo design is for companies and how much it can help them reach their goals.