If I was to ask logo designers what their five biggest bugbears were with logo design they'd all come out with quite a few similar ones to these five mistakes which affect logo design the most and can basically make for a very poor logo design.
Number one: Suitability.
Now how often do I see logos that have been designed because it's what the business owner likes? I could probably have lost count on how many times I've seen that.
Now yes it's your business and you want to like the logo that you have which is selling your services or your products but the logo's not for you.
The logo is to attract new customers, and your logo should be designed for them shouldn't it? Or Shouldn't be designed for you?
You need to study who it is you're targeting and you need to find out where they hang out what colors do they like and where do they, how do they spend their social time?
By building up a picture of your perfect customer then you can build a brand identity that specifically targets them.
If we want to sell our services to as many people as possible we need to have a target and be very specific. You'll have more success with that type of person and you will get residual sales from other people who maybe the logo isn't specifically targeted at but by building an audience then you will start to creep your brand out sideways with that audience.
But by creating a logo which is designed just for you then it's precisely that it's just for you and it's not going to help you attract and build a customer base.
If you're a designer designing a logo for a customer or you are hiring a logo designer make sure that the logo is designed for the audience that it's aimed at and not for the business owner.
Number two: Designing your logo as a bitmap.
If you design your logo as a bitmap graphic it's going to look great at the size it was designed at but if you want to make your logo bigger for some signage or for going on the side of a vehicle for example, you're going to run into problems because bitmaps the bigger you make them the lower the quality.
They start to get all pixelated and blurred.
You can go smaller that'd be fine, but if you want to go bigger it'll not going to work.
What you need to do is that when you have your logo designed make sure it's a vector graphic.
An EPS file designed in Adobe Illustrator or Corel Draw or something similar, because with a vector graphic you can resize it to any size you want size of the moon and it would not lose any quality and you only need that one file.
That one file can be sized and saved for whatever you want.
With a bitmap graphic if you want different sizes you're going to have to create that file at different sizes and it's a lot more work as well.
So Make sure when you're having your logo designed in a vector file format.
Number three: Making your logo design far too complex.
You get your logo designed and it looks great you've got everything you want on there. But if you want to make your logo quite small how do you think that complex logo's going to look?
It's going to be really difficult to make out all of its details at very small sizes.
Ideally your logo should be simple. Look at all the big brands: Nike, Apple. They're just so simple.
You need to think that way too when you're having your logo created.
Try not to over-complicate things and boil down your brand identity to its simplest form and then you could always get in the more complex messaging through your marketing.
You don't have to get everything into the logo. It doesn't have to say exactly what you do
all in one place.
Get something which is going to be recognizable works well on a page or on a screen
and you can build around it.
Number four: Using stock images and clipart in your logo.
Now this isn't something that a professional logo designer would do well at least I'd hope not. But you will find that if you go to the competition type websites for logo design or cheaper ones like Fiverr you run the risk of the designer.They'll pull them off and they'll add some text and they will pass it on to you and you're none the wiser. You're happy you love it and you think it looks great and you go and start using it.
The mistake is that stock images have very tight guidelines and one of those guidelines is that you
cannot use stock photography as part of a logo to trade off of.
So please double check that when you're having your logo designed that the designer is creating your logo from scratch.
Now even from scratch you want to make sure that they're not copying someone else's artwork or a piece of stock 'cause that's just as illegal it's going against copyright if they have that trademarked
you're in serious trouble and you could end up being fined for an awful lot of money.
So make sure when your logo is being designed that it is completely 100% original.
Number five: DIY logos.
If you need something designed use a professional designer. There's certainly cheaper ways to get your logo designed like designing a logo for yourself but if you're not professional you're just shooting yourself in the foot.
You should really be taking the advice and services of a professional designer who will make sure that what you end up with is exactly what you need.
Now there's a difference between wants and needs but they will make sure they give you what you need for your brand.
Please don't be tempted to tinker away yourself if it's not your professional career. I'd say the same
as well by using places like Fiverr and competition websites.
Those tend to be populated by amateur designers and you will run into some of the problems which I've already mentioned in this article because they're not entirely up to the grade of creating a professional logo design.
Contact a professional designer and they'll be more than happy to have a chat with you find out what it is you're looking for and you know give you a quote and let you know what the benefits are of using them as opposed to someone who doesn't quite know what they're doing.
these are top five common mistakes in logo and brand identity design. There are a lot of others and I'm sure I'll touch on those in future articles as we go through and really explore the world of logo and brand design.
But if you steer clear of those five mistakes mentioned you're off to a really good start and your brand identity is going to look spot on.
I hope you found this article useful! Thanks!
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