By Amber Lony
Logo Design from a Branding Perspective
A well-designed logo is a critical part of any branding strategy. It's the face of your company, and it can make or break customer perceptions. So how do you create a logo that's successful? It takes a lot of thought and planning, but following these tips can help you get started.
Name of the Product/Company
Logos are often used to represent brands and companies, with the name of your company or product appearing in its logo. A great example is the famous FedEx logo that also incorporates that clever arrow through negative space. But with or without this element the FedEx logo is recognizable through the representation of its name.
Industry
When dealing with a design project of a product or company that serves abstract goals or one that encompasses more than one product or service, the product/company name and description might not be useful. However, emphasizing the company’s industry can do the job instead. For example, AT&T describes itself as: “bringing it all together for our customers, from revolutionary smartphones to next-generation TV services and sophisticated solutions for multi-national businesses.
Our mission is to connect people with their world, everywhere they live and work, and do it better than anyone else.” The creative that will do the job of designing a corporate logo, such as AT&T’s, is not obliged to know details of each industry of every design project he or she will ever be handed. Instead, knowing how to use the design in the industry will lead to a design that works well. In the case of AT&T, the designer understands the company handles telecommunication that “connects people with their world everywhere.” Therefore, a globe with horizontal blue stripes emerges, which suggests a world being connected.
Brand History
The designer may need to consider the “age” of the company or product; more specifically, the experience that the company has with its buyers as well as its market maturity. How does this affect the logo design? In order to answer that question, let’s look at the Quaker Oats Company logo.
Although it has suffered a number of redesigns, it has retained the same central image and qualities that have served it well over the years. The Quaker Oats Company is an American food conglomerate founded in 1901, however, on September 4, 1877 the Quaker Man was America’s first registered trademark for a breakfast cereal. Quaker Mill and his partner Henry Seymour found an encyclopedia article on Quakers and decided that the qualities described — integrity, honesty, and purity— provided an appropriate identity for his company’s oat product.
Design Mission
The general mission of the design task is extremely important. Before giving a designer the task of designing something, the client must know why he will be doing it (the scope). One must know where a logo will be used, and if that logo should be designed in order to refresh the product’s look, update it, or draw out some other specific gain.
Websites can be created in order to sell or just to inform. To make this point even more obvious, below are some instances of the Avon logo which have minor differences.
The first logo on top is the Avon logo as it appears on Avon.com, their official homepage.
The middle logo is the one Avon displays on its representative webpage and for those that want to enter the Avon business. The third logo on the bottom is Avon’s online shop website, the one meant for customers that wish to purchase Avon products via the internet. These are only three examples of how a logo can be altered based on the general mission it will be assigned, or the place it will be used.
