Top 10 tips for successful logo design

Published: October 31 2008

Design > Top 10 tips for successful logo design. Our design-master, Spiro Vouladakis shares his do's and don'ts on designing your brand.

1. Use 2 to 3 colours maximum. If you think of some of the top brands you know - Coke, Nike, IBM - many use just 1.
2. Avoid clichés, shapes, and metaphors "typical" of your industry - graphs for financial, globes for communication companies.
3. It helps to have a great name. Fresh Air Experience, Nature's Fare, Waterkind, and Advocare, are all names which relate an experience. It makes branding easy and inspires more ideas as opposed to Johnny's Sports, The Natural Food Store, Okanagan Irrigation Auditing, Kelowna Home Health Care which is what these previously mentioned companies could be named.
4. Clipart is the DEVIL! The last thing you want for a logo is an illustration from Microsoft Word's clipart library.
5. Small, BIG, faxed, black and white, and over top photos. A good logo should maintain it's integrity anywhere.
6. Consider the huge variety of ways your logo will be presented - business cards, powerpoint, billboards, newspapers, the Internet, TV, etc. Each medium has different display requirements. Ensure you have your logo in vector format so it can scale from 2 inches to 4 feet in diameter if necessary.
7. 1 font - good; 2 fonts - make them complement; 3 fonts - too many!
8. Go for timeless. Ever try on that suit you kept in the closet for 10 years and realized it didn't fit and the collar is all wrong? Which brings me to another tip, never be afraid to update or refresh your outdated logo. Sometimes all it takes is a little tweak.
9. The temptation is always to pack in too many ideas. Keep it simple.
10. Hire a great design team! Here's our number: 1-866-862-8010.