Logo Design

What is a good logo design?

Most times, when people talk about whether a logo is or isn’t any good, what they’re actually describing is their opinion on how it looks. While aesthetics do matter, it is secondary and subjective. Before evaluating how pretty a logo is, it’s more important to determine whether a logo fulfils its primary functional objectives, which are:

• enabling consumers to identify your brand
• helping consumers remember your brand
• allowing your brand to be represented consistently and recognisably across varied contexts
• protecting your brand from competitors and counterfeiters

In other words, developing a good logo is about objective strategy, not subjective art. In order to fulfil the key functional objectives above, a good logo needs to be:

Distinctive

You don’t want a logo that people might confuse with other well-known logos. Achieving this requires good research of the markets in which your business operates.

Easy to decipher

Ensuring that a logo is easily legible/discernible such that consumers can decode it in just a glance, requires the mindful application of specialist know-how of typography, symbolism and colour.

Resizable

A good logo must fit on everything from a 16-pixel-wide icon in a browser or app, to the side of a pencil, a patch on a t-shirt, a billboard, or giant signage on a building.

Recognisable in single colour and “flat” colour formats

When looking at images on your phone or computer, it’s easy to forget that not every medium allows for so many colours and gradients. For instance, single-colour printing for legal documents and embroidered logos on staff uniforms are just two examples of common applications where it’s important for a logo to still be recognisable even when not in its “full colour” format.

Trademarkable

Safeguarding your investments in your brand against anybody trying to damage or hurt your business interests is definitely a good idea. Trademarks are an important way of doing that, and even if you haven’t trademarked your brand name and logo yet, experts strongly recommend that you do so as your brand’s popularity grows – before somebody else does. Good logos must be distinctive enough to be trademarkable.

Why not just use a free or $5 logo?

Although it is possible to find logos online for as little as $5, and there are even tools claiming to be “free logo generators”, here are a few factors you should keep in mind before using going ahead with such options:

• Providers achieve low costs by using generic or stock design templates and elements, that are often reused by thousands of designers worldwide, for as many clients. It can be difficult or impossible to ensure that logos obtained from such sources are actually unique and proprietary to your brand. We’ve come across several instances of businesses that were shocked to find that what they thought was a logo developed for them, was also being used by other businesses.
• Generic or dissimilar logos typically run into difficulties with trademark registration, and often cannot be trademarked at all.
• Aside from using generic stock elements and icons, we’ve often had complaints from customers about cheap freelancers and design students on places like Fiverr, who plagiarised some other logo and turned it in as original work.

All of these issues can be avoided with a design service that offers a bespoke design and thought behind the design to best represent the uniqueness of your business. Lime’s professional logo design services start at just $90 + GST.