Today we will be looking at some of the common mistakes in logo design. Now, if I asked ten logo designers what their five worst logo design pet peeves were, I’m quite confident we’d all come up with a lot of the same ones. In this article, I will be talking about five common mistakes that affect logo design the most and provide a very poor experience.
1. Suitability
I have seen many logos that have been designed according to the business owner’s liking and not according to the market. Yes, it’s your business and you want to like the logo you have, which sells your services or products, but the logo’s not for you. Customers should be able to interact with the logo and find it appealing. So, companies should really not have logos created according to their customers’ preferences?
To do so, we’ll need to research your target audience: we must learn where they congregate, what colors they prefer, and how they spend their social time. By building up a picture of your perfect customer, what you can do is build a brand identity that specifically targets them.
We all wish to sell our services to as many customers as possible, but by having a target and being specific, we’ll have more success, a stable customer base and we’ll get the residual sales from other people who were not targeted. If you are creating or buying a logo that is just designed for you, it will not help you attract and build a customer base. So, if you are 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.
2. Create a Bitmap or Raster Logo
A raster graphic logo will look great at the original size, but what happens if you need to resize the image? Let’s say for some signage or for going on the side of a vehicle, it will be quite difficult because the larger the bitmap logos or images become, the poorer the quality gets. They will be pixelated and blurred. You can go smaller, that would be fine.
Whenever you get a logo designed, make sure it’s a vector graphic, i.e., an eps file designed in Adobe Illustrator or Corel Draw. A vector file is easily resizable and doesn’t lose its properties when blasted to moon size or contracted to stamp size. The image will stay razor-sharp.
With bitmap graphics, if you need different sizes, you will have to create different files at the required size. So, always ask for a vector logo.
3. Overcomplicating the logo
When finalizing a logo, always imagine it on the tiniest thing you have in your office that you would like to brand. Stamps, pens, webpages, favicons, and other items are examples. Many times, I have seen people opt for logos that are far too complex. They may look amazing on your screen or a billboard, but when it comes to branding, you have to place the logo everywhere you feel necessary. At such a small size, it will be quite difficult to understand all the details. So, an ideal logo should be simple yet eye-catching.
Consider a well-known brand such as Nike, Apple, or Pepsi — simplicity at its finest. Don’t you think so? Try not to overcomplicate things when producing a logo or employing a freelancer to do so. Try to boil down your brand identity to its simplest form, and then you can always get into more complex messaging through marketing. Get something that will be identifiable, that will look good on a page or a screen, and then you can build around it.
4. Use of Stock Images and Clipart
Stock images have very tight guidelines, and one of those guidelines is that you cannot use stock photography as a part of a logo to trade-off. Always double-check that when you are having a logo designed, the designer is creating your logo from scratch. You should make sure that they are not copying someone else’s artwork or a piece of stock image because that’s just illegal. It’s going against copyright. If they have that trademarked, you are in serious trouble.
5. Do-It-Yourself/Free Logos
When you need something designed, go to a professional designer. It’s what we are trained for. You may believe you’ve taken care of this by using free web tools, but it appears that you don’t value your brand. It may be quicker and cheaper, but you are just shooting yourself in the foot. You must listen to the advice and services of a professional designer, who makes sure that your final result is something that you need. There is a distinction to be made between wants and needs, but they will ensure that you receive something that your brand requires.
Reach out and contact a professional designer; they’ll be more than happy to sit down with you and find out exactly what you’re looking for, as well as provide you with an estimate and explain the advantages of hiring them over someone who doesn’t know what they’re doing.
Conclusion
So there you have it: my top five logo and brand identity design mistakes. There are a few more, which I’m sure I’ll cover in future blogs as we go deeper into the world of logo and brand design. However, if you avoid the five concerns I’ve highlighted today, you’ll be off to a great start, and your brand identity will be flawless. I hope you found the article helpful today; if so, please give it a thumbs up, follow me if you haven’t already, and share it with your friends on social media. It aids in the development of the target audience I’m aiming for. Until next time, stay creative!
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