Logos are essential, and without a great logo, marketing your company and brand will be difficult, and your chances of success will be reduced. A logo is the primary representation of your brand; it will be displayed everywhere, so it needs to be great.
This article will discuss the creative stages of logo design and everything you need to know about these stages. This will help you create a high-quality logo representing your brand correctly and improving your branding and marketing strategies.
Research
Different types of research need to be carried out. This includes customer research and marketing research. You need to make sure that you take your time when researching. This will ensure you have a solid foundation to design the logo.
Customer research includes getting to know your target audience. You will need to know their preferences, their psychology, what they want, and more. Knowing this will help you create a logo that will be received well by customers and increase its chances of successfully representing your brand.
Marketing research includes getting to know the market that your brand and company is in. Your logo needs to be unique so it stands out from the crowd, so finding out as much as you can about your competition and what their logos look like will significantly help you. Not carrying out thorough research will increase the chances of failure, and you want to avoid this as much as you can. If you don’t know how to do thorough research, then hire a logo design firm that will do this for you.
Creativity
In this stage of logo design, you will have already researched customers and marketing, and you will be ready to start the creation process of logo design. When in this stage, you will need to start creating different logo designs to decide what direction your logo should go in. These different logo designs need to fulfill your branding and marketing goals, making sure that you consider these goals when creating these different logo designs.
During this stage, the created designs can range from logo quick sketches to high-fidelity digital drawings. The goal of this stage is to select the style and direction of your logo. This will include the color palette used, the shapes that make up the logo, and the placement of different elements within the logo.
Let’s quickly look at the features that your logo should have. Every successful logo has these features, so yours must do too.
- Uniqueness
- Simplicity
- Versatility
- Memorability
- Timelessness
- Consistently used
- Recognisability
If you are not sure how to design a logo with all of these features, you should hire logo designing services to help you create a logo that will look like you and do what you want it to do.
Finalizing The Logo Design
Once you have reached this stage, you will have already chosen a direction and style for your logo. Now it’s time to finalize the logo and make any improvements to be polished and made more significant than it is. This is the stage where you can focus on the more minor details of the logo and make sure all the logo’s elements are just right.
Once you are finished with the stage, you will have a final version of your logo that can be presented.
Testing The Logo Design
A logo needs to be tested. Even if you think it cannot be improved anymore and this is how it will look when used, it still needs to be tested. Designers who don’t try their logos find out too late that they have made a mistake, and then they need to spend so much more time and money fixing it. Do not make these mistakes; you need to test your logo. This cannot be stressed enough.
Your logo needs to be tested in many different ways; the main tests that you need to run when trying your logo are:
- Testing your logo on different devices and surfaces to check whether it looks appealing
- Find out what it looks like surrounded by other images
- Show it to a diverse group of people, including your target audience, and find out how it is received
Your testing results need to be analyzed, and any changes that can be made to improve your logo need to be made. This will increase the chances of your logo being successful.
Creating A Style Guide
It would help if you created a style guide for the final logo design. This is important and should not be skipped. Why is having a style guide critical? It helps make sure that your branding is a consistent experience no matter where people see your brand. This consistency will help increase brand awareness and brand recognition and help build customer loyalty. For these reasons, every company needs to make sure that they create a great style guide for their branding and marketing strategies.
If you need help creating a great style guide to ensure your branding stays consistent, you should hire logo design firms to get the work done right.
Let’s go over some more reasons why style guides are so important and why they should not be ignored.
- It will help set the right tone for your company.
- Help customers understand your company’s and brand’s messaging more easily.
- Avoid making mistakes when designing new branding elements.
- Make it easier to create new branding and marketing strategies and elements.
- Consistency. This cannot be talked about enough when talking about branding and marketing. This point alone is enough for you to create a style guide.