How to Make a Stand-Out Logo for Your Business

It’s a fact that your company logo is a significant part of your brand identity. It’s your symbolic identity, and is mostly the first thing people notice about your company. Therefore, it is essential that it stands out and sticks in their minds.

• 27 Gradient Logo Designs for Inspiration

If you have a stand-out logo, you won’t need to mention your name as it’ll speak on your behalf. If you’ve just started your company, or you feel the need to revamp your existing logo, there are various things you need to consider.

Creating a good logo takes time, and it goes beyond putting your theme colors and fancy fonts together. You have to have a meaning for your logo, and a vision of how that meaning relates to your business. Having an unsatisfactory logo impacts your brand negatively. Here’s a simple guide on how you can design a logo that will stand out and get noticed as a proper representation of your business and brand.

1. Ask Yourself the Important Questions

Like your business name and your other identifying factors, your logo needs to be meaningful. It’s crucial to know where your logo design is coming from and why. According to the experts you need to answer some questions about it to have something you’re seeking to achieve come out in the overall design. As an essential part of branding, here are some questions you need to answer before you get into designing the logo:

• How is the brand different?
• What’s its origin? Values? Goals? Mission?
• What’s the brand’s personality?
• Who is the brand targeting?
• How does the logo fit into the overall branding strategy?

Knowing the end goal of your logo will help you come up with a design that stands out from the pack as it’s built for your specific brand.

2. Dare to Be Different

The first thing to know in standing out is being different. To that end, logo generators and other reputable online logo maker tools come in handy. They can help you create original designs that are expressive of your brand. If your logo looks eerily similar to your competitor’s, you’re barring yourself from actually standing out and creating confusion in the process.

Besides, you may find yourself defending a copyright infringement lawsuit for using another brand’s copy-written elements. Dare to be different, original, and bold. Create a logo that reflects your business values. Avoid things that make the logo appear generic such as multicolor gradients that make it difficult for your audience to pick a color to associate your brand with. Stay clear from too much text, dull fonts, random symbols, pictograms, and dots.

3. Try to Keep Your Design Simple

The human brain tends to remember simple things than it does complicated stuff. Think about all the logos you know. They’re simple, straightforward, and easy to remember. They don’t need any explanations–they just need to be seen. You need your audience to understand it without having to think too much about it. 

A simple logo design is timeless, and doesn’t typically require modifications with time. And they’re easy to incorporate. You would think that including many things will make a logo stand out. But that’s a significant logo design error. If you have too much visuals, it becomes too much for the eye and the brain to process and remember.

If you look at the most popular brands around you, it’s easy to notice that their logo designs have nothing much to them. Simplicity is their common denominator, and that’s what makes them stand out.

4. Make Good Use of Negative Space

Knowing how to use the negative space can help you create a logo design that stands out. This is the space that surrounds the main logo element. When you use this space creatively and effectively, you can design an eye-catching and memorable logo, which is your goal.

5. Use the Psychology of Color

Your choice of colors can make or break your logo design. You can’t choose random colors and expect them to work. Color grabs attention quickly, and communicates powerfully about your ideas, thoughts, and beliefs as a brand. That’s why you need to choose logo colors mindfully.

You’ll need to merge your target audience’s needs, what you want them to perceive your brand to be, and your business goal, into one.

Although there’s little you can do about how an individual perceives color, different colors are generally related to certain emotions and qualities. For instance, purple is perceived as rich, royal, and mysterious, while blue is dependable. Green is for health and wealth, while red is seen as passionate and bold.

Also, consider creating the logo in multiple color variations if a situation demands that it be displayed in either a darker or lighter background. However, it needs to be recognizable no matter the shades people see it in. Experts advise on having it in black and white, as there’s a high likelihood you will need it both ways at some point.

To create a perfect combination, you may want to learn a few things about colors, as color can add depth to the message you want to convey in your logo.

6. Create a Practical Logo

Another thing that makes a logo stand out is its ease of implementation. Creating a logo that looks good on paper is easy. But can the design look as good when placed on your website, storefront, merchandise, or a marketing ad? If it can, you’re good to go. The point is, your logo should be capable of being reproduced in different dimensions without losing its quality.

This creates consistency, and there’s no time the audience will be left guessing if it’s your logo or not. With time and as your business grows, you may need to display the logo in different media, such as huge banners in a trade show, or on a newspaper ad. To create a practical logo, minimize clutter. Many elements, fonts, and colors make everything complex. It makes it challenging to apply the logo in different shapes, situations, and ways. A practical design creates a versatile logo.

Final Thoughts

The worst mistake you can make in your logo design is lack of originality by copying another brand’s logo or a trending concept. Create something that tells your audience about your brand in a unique way. If you follow the items discussed above, you’ll be on the right track to designing and creating a stand-out logo for your business.