10 Logo Design Tips Every Logo Designer Should Know

These are some logo design tips for logo designers.

There’s a lot that goes into a professional logo design, and designing a high-quality logo that will help a business reach its marketing objectives is certainly no easy task. To succeed as a professional logo designer, you will need to make use of all the tips and tricks that you have at your disposal.

Thankfully, there are a number of tried and true design tips that have the ability to take your logo designs to the next level. If you are looking for a quick way to improve the quality of the logo designs that you produce, check out these ten logo design tips that every logo designer should know.

1) Use Colors In Your Logo to Convey Meaning and Emotion

Every good logo designer knows that color schemes and combinations are important for aesthetic reasons. The best logo designers, though, recognize that color plays a far more important role than simply making a logo pleasing to the eye. In addition to being a major part of a logo’s aesthetic appeal, the colors that you choose also go a long way toward conveying important messages and eliciting calculated emotional responses.

The color red, for example, is a powerful color that can be used to convey a message of passion and intensity and elicit emotional responses such as excitement. Blue, meanwhile, is a much more calming color that conveys messages of intelligence and tranquility. Depending on the business that you are designing a logo for, you can strategically use various colors in order to convey messages and encourage emotional responses that will help the company reach its objectives.

2) Keep Your Logo Simple

When designing a logo, it is often tempting to go overboard with intricate fonts, numerous colors, and complex design elements. This is an understanding temptation, as every logo designer wants to create a one-of-a-kind logo that is truly remarkable. When it comes to logo design, however, it’s usually best to keep it simple.

Logos are works of art, but they are works of art with a very specific purpose. When a potential customer views a company’s logo, they aren’t viewing it with the same focus and intensity as an art critic would view a painting. In fact, most people will only glance at a logo before moving on – and your logo needs to be simple enough to convey all of its important messages in the time it takes someone to quickly scan their eyes across the design.

A single, easy-to-read font, one or two colors, and a single central design element is most often the best recipe for a great logo. After all, most of the best, most recognizable logos in the world are more renowned for their simplicity than they are for their complexity.

3) Learn About the Brand You are Designing a Logo for

At the end of the day, a logo is a carefully crafted marketing tool designed to help companies reach their marketing and brand identity objectives. If you aren’t deeply familiar with what those objectives are, though, creating a logo that is designed to help your client meet them is going to be a tall order.

Before you get started designing a logo, take the time to become deeply familiar with the company that you are designing it for. What type of products or services are they offering? What kind of brand identity are they aiming for? What are the most important messages that they need their audience to know? These are all questions that will enable you to design a logo that is just as much a strategically designed marketing tool as it is an eye-catching work of art.

4) Consider How Your Logo Design Will be Used

Far too many logo designers make the mistake of assuming that the design they create will always appear as a digital thumbnail image on a white background. Unfortunately, designs that look great in this context often don’t translate well to other uses – and companies tend to use their logos in a wide variety of ways.

A logo that you design, for example, will indeed likely appear very often as a thumbnail image on a white background. In addition to this, though, the company may also print your logo design on their product’s packaging, use it as a design element in their building, use a black and white version of the logo on their stationery, or even place it on a massive billboard.

Since logos are often used in a variety of ways, the best logo designs are ones that are universal enough to still look great in a wide range of contexts. As you go about creating your logo design, consider the many ways in which it might end up being used. Will the design that you create look as good when it’s scaled up to fit on a billboard as it does in a small thumbnail image? Will the color scheme still work when the logo is placed against various backgrounds other than a white screen? These are important questions to address as you go about designing a logo that is truly a versatile design.

5) Make Use of Negative Logo Space

Not every design element in the logo that you create has to be direct use of color. In many cases, the negative space – the white background that the logo is placed on – can be an important design element in and of itself.

One of the best examples of well-used negative space is the FedEx logo. At first glance, the FedEx logo may seem relatively simple. If you look closely at the negative space between the “E” and the “X” in the logo, you will see a forward-pointing arrow formed out of the negative space.

This, of course, is just one example of the many ways in which negative space can be utilized as an important part of a logo’s design. As you go about creating designs, don’t ignore the white background that your design is placed on. With a little creativity and artistic talent, negative space can become another useful tool in your design toolbox.

6) Pay Attention to the Logo Symmetry

Human beings love symmetry. There’s just something about a design that is ideally symmetrical and balanced that is pleasing to the eye – and making your logo design pleasing to the eye is one of your most important objectives.

This doesn’t mean that your logo designs always have to be perfectly symmetrical. In fact, many of the best logo designs often aren’t. At the same time, though, you certainly don’t want your design to come across as unbalanced or noticeably asymmetrical. Even viewers without an artistic eye can easily spot symmetry or a lack thereof, and their opinions of a design are often formed based on this alone.

With any design that you create, you need to ensure that your design features enough symmetry to avoid coming off as unbalanced and difficult to look at. A logo design that is nicely symmetrical and balanced will be one that is much more pleasing to view.

7) Are You Creating a Passive or an Active Logo

Logo designs can either be passive or active, and one isn’t necessarily better than the other. However, it’s important to decide whether you are creating a passive or an active logo before you get started with your design.

Active logos are designs that portray objects in motion. For example, a logo that features a dog in mid-stride would be an active logo. Passive logos, on the other hand, portray static objects. A dog that is portrayed sitting on its haunches would be an example of a passive logo.

Even though all logos are still images, it is entirely possible nonetheless to convey motion through your design. When done correctly, conveying motion through an active logo design can help you communicate the right messages and create a logo that portrays a sense of excitement and action.

The Twitter logo is one great example of a passive logo that was turned into an active one. In the early days of Twitter, the company logo was passive and featured a bird that was perched and motionless. Today, though, Twitter makes use of an active logo that portrays a bird on the wing. The sense of motion captured in the current Twitter logo design is far more representative of the enthusiasm that the company wants to convey with its logo design.

Again, active logos aren’t necessarily better than passive ones, and there are plenty of great logos that don’t convey any sense of motion. As a logo designer, though, having the ability to accurately depict various types of motion in a static, two-dimensional design is certainly a tool that you will want to have at your disposal.

8) Take a Look at the Competition

Anytime that you accept a logo design project, one of the first things that you should do is research logo design ideas and the competition of the company that you are creating a logo for in order to get a feel for the type of logos that they use.

If you are creating a logo for a construction company, for example, you’ll need to keep in mind that your logo is going to be competing against the logos of numerous other companies in the construction industry – and it’s helpful to know what you are up against.

Researching the logos of competing companies is beneficial for a number of reasons. To start, taking a look at the competition can be a great source of inspiration and a way to get a better feel for the type of logos that are used in a specific industry. At the same time, getting a feel for the logos that you are competing with can also help you formulate a strategy for making your logo design stand out from the competition.