Your logo is the main distinguishing mark used to identify your business.  It is the heart of your brand’s identity. The strongest brands in the market today have logo’s that are simple, relevant and memorable. Creating a strong visual identity that appeals to your market is the best way to begin building a lasting brand.

Along with your marketing and advertising materials, your logo needs to reflect the values and philosophy of your company. Is your company traditional? Laid back? Young? Innovative? Taking these things into consideration when creating your logo will increase it’s effectiveness. (If you are re-designing your identity, you’ll want to ensure it retains at least some of the key aspects of the identity you’ve already established. This way, you will lose the least amount of brand equity you may have built over the life of your business.)

Symbolic logos work well for some companies and more abstract logos work better for others. You may even decide your logo is stronger as just type, set in a relevant, distinct font. However, I recommend your logo be as iconic as possible.

A Symbolic logo is a logo that can describe your business without the use of type. A builder for example may use the icon of a house. A brand that deals with intangibles could consider an abstract symbol as their logo. Finding out what your customers value about your business can be extremely beneficial when deciding between a literal or abstract approach.

You may discover that what customers value most in your company is it’s long history in the market. In this case, an object from history or even just an old building might work to create a sense of time through dated architecture. If you are an investor, a tree could be used to portray growth and abundance.

In conclusion, before you begin the design of your logo, first, analyze what you want it to convey about your business. Your logo’s design and message is a fundamental building block to a powerful brand identity that sells.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 27th, 2007 at 10:45 pm and is filed under Branding. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.