The Secrets of Designing a Logo for Your Startup
As soon as you decide to launch a startup, every single detail matters. Your brand is not famous yet, so you need to use every single chance to become memorable and visible in the digital space. However, you might need to function within a limited budget, which restricts the magnitude of your marketing outreach.
An effective brand promotion tool is a logo. It acts as a symbol that tells your brand’s story better than a thousand words. Thus, you need to focus on creating a stellar logo able to produce a wow effect on the new users, leaving a trace in their hearts and accelerating your brand’s expansion.
At first, making a great logo may seem an overwhelming task. Still, with a proper amount of effort and a wise approach to the process, you can achieve pretty much even with limited resources.
Bridge Your Brand and Logo
Logo design is a responsible step in preparing your business for a market launch. A successful logo should communicate your brand identity and business personality, causing no visual confusion. Ideally, the logo should suggest your business niche and clarify the mission and vision of your business undertaking. Thus, you need to be careful in the choice of fonts, colors, and imagery to create the intended impression on the audience.
Find the Right Expert
Most startups find talented and experienced UX designers for hire instead of taking the risks of independent logo design. Working with an expert ensures that your logo will be trendy, sleek, memorable, and suited to the target audience. It’s much better to rely on the proven expertise rather than do the logo work yourself; the stakes are really high, and an amateur logo can kill a promising project.
Don’t Limit Your Research to Your Industry
It’s common for startups to look for logo inspiration among their competitors. Obviously, such an approach makes sense to a certain degree, as you can analyze the dominant trends and identify some useful visual tips and tricks. For instance, you may learn what colors and shapes dominate logos in your niche, what impression various color choices produce, etc.
Still, it may be pretty limiting to focus only on your business sector. Inspiration is all around you, and your task is to open your eyes and see it. Nobody knows which logo or which brand identity will strike you the most. But being open-minded and looking into other business sectors may serve as a good basis for designing unusual, memorable logos.
Credit: Digital Agency Network
Don’t Overemphasize the Logo
A good logo is essential for your brand’s visibility and recognizability. But still, it’s irrational to put too much emphasis on the logo, especially if you are a small team of startup owners with limited time and resources.
Don’t stumble upon a logo by putting other tasks aside; you need to make sure that the project goes on as scheduled to arrive at a successful launch. If you feel confused or stuck with this task, a good idea is to take a pause, reserving some time for the logo at the end of the development process. Once you have all other business elements ready, making up a logo may seem much simpler.
Never Skip Brainstorming
Even if you have hired a professional to do a logo for you, it’s not time to relax and tick the point off your to-do list. Keep in mind that the designer is an outsider with much less understanding of your product and business value. You are the brains behind the project, so you have better insights into what you need to communicate to the users and stakeholders. Thus, it’s vital to work with your logo designer in tandem, brainstorming different logo ideas and experimenting with the options they suggest.
Mind the Target Audience
No matter what you think about your brand and expect from it, the end-user makes the final decision. Even stellar logos can fail if they cause no reaction in the users. Therefore, the true image of your end consumer should be at the heart of logo design, typography and color choice, and the overall stylistic approach.
Who are your primary users? If they are young (children or teens), make a logo bright and playful to capture their attention. If you cater to adults and provide professional services, stick to elegance and minimalism in design. You can play with dozens of other logo design options once you create a target user profile and clarify their tastes.
Never Use Cliches
The worst nightmare of every startup is to seem trivial and boring. People will never try a new brand if they see no novelty and added value in it. Therefore, your task is to show how you differ from the competition, paving the way to users’ hearts. Being original is the key to success, and a unique logo can help you in this. Don’t use the image of a tooth if you design a logo for a dental firm; never apply a red cross for medical organizations. The rest depends on your creativity and individual business features.
Keep Scalability in Mind
A grave mistake that many startups make is creating a fixed-size logo. The problem with such visual solutions is their non-scalability. What will you do with such a logo if you need to place it on a huge banner? And what about a social media banner requiring a tiny logo icon? Keep all these issues in mind when giving your designer a technical task; logos need to be infinitely scalable to meet all your marketing needs.
Stick to Simplicity
Don’t forget that a logo is a visual complement to other brand positioning elements. It should be memorable at first glance, creating a holistic, consistent impression on the viewer. So, it’s better to make the logo as simple as possible, allowing people to capture its meaning and remember it within a second. Fancy logos will many elements are forgotten quicker; most people don’t even have time to capture their whole visual meaning as they drive their cars or scroll a social media thread.
Logos Matter
Never entrust your logo design to chance; it’s the business card of your startup that can play a huge role in your brand’s visibility and memorability. Research the current trends, make a list of your business values and work with professionals to enter the market with a stellar logo people will love.