First Impressions
Ensuring your brand remains consistent across the entire marketing mix and across every communications channel is essential to maintaining a consistent and coherent image in any competitive marketplace and should be the first consideration of your advertising agency.The variety of marketing channels available to any company today each have their own peculiar demands and their own rules. A design might look great on your business card or letterhead but may look completely different on a poster, tube card, direct mail piece, display advertisement or online in your website.
Print management with a view to not only cost effectiveness, but also how your brand is expressed to its maximum impact across all above, below and through the line channels is vital to effective communication with your target audiences. Central to all this is the initial corporate identity design, aside from its creativity and how it captures the spirit of your proposition, how effectively it can be translated across all those myriad expressions will determine its longevity and impact. There are some important things to remember when designing logos or corporate ID and here are some guidelines to a successful outcome:
A logo designed in a vector based program such as Illustrator allows for much more flexibility in terms of colours and results in a much clearer image especially if there is text in the logo and you want to be able to use it in large format. With this in mind, it is inadvisable to use a photograph in a logo. If you can’t use a vector based program then make the design as large as you can!
Restrict your text to one or two fonts. Over-use of different fonts can make a logo look cluttered and unprofessional. Make sure that any text used in a logo is clear and legible, or don’t use text at all.
You may need your logo for a variety of different purposes and in different ways. Remember that just because something looks good on A4 print materials it may not be so wonderful by the time it’s been expanded to fit exhibition graphics or a billboard. Your final design should be able to work well from the smallest to the largest of applications.
You might need the logo to work on black or white backgrounds or dark or light coloured backgrounds so the logo should work equally well as a stand-alone element or in a coloured box. Allow for the fact that your logo could sometimes be required to work in mono (single colour) as well.
You have probably seen some designs that you like but try to make your logo as individual as possible. There is no reason not to incorporate aspects from other designs that you find appealing, but in the end you want to be noticed because your logo is original.
This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 29th, 2009 at 11:40 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. 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.
Leave a Reply