BLOGHACK: If you already have a logo you love, skip to 9 & 10.

1. Know yourself: Your logo is a visual handshake you’ll use for years. What messaging does it need to carry to accurately represent you?
2. Know your audience: What are your target demographic’s preferences? Fancy or simple? Masculine, feminine, or neutral? Traditional or modern?
3. Keep it simple: Do you need a company name, graphic, and tagline in your logo? How can you simplify your mark to reduce visual clutter?
4. Be consistent: You’ll need to employ slightly different versions of your logo in different places, but make sure that they all have a cohesive look; make multiple impressions, not different ones.
5. Get vectored: You’ll need a vector logo (eps/ai) file for most offline marketing applications, so make sure your logo is designed that way—or have it redrawn as a vector.
6. Color: You’ll spend a lot of time choosing colors that communicate what you want, especially the psychological aspects. Make sure you know how your colors will look across platforms, and identify the exact Pantone, CMYK, RGB, and Hexadecimal to deploy across print and web. But don’t rely on color: create a logo that has clear and pleasing shape when it is used in only one color or reversed.
7. Shape & proportion: Will you go long, square, round, or with the more traditional 3:2 or 4:3 rectangles? Consider how your logo’s shape adds to or detracts from your message, and how it will fit in all the places you need it to go.
8. Uniqueness: The hardest part of logo design is doing something excellent that hasn’t been done before. Do some research in your region and your industry, as well as considering confusion that might be created with global brands.
9. Have formats ready: Don’t miss a marketing opportunity or deploy the wrong logo format because you can’t find the right logo file. Have a collection at your fingertips in a zip file: the all color format files (see #6), plus grayscale and one-color (and reversed, if applicable), vector and web-optimized, as well as any options with different layouts or taglines you might need.
10. Know that it’s never too late: Even companies with big brand recognition are not afraid to refine their logos to reflect changing times and tastes—or changes in themselves! If you’ve significantly tweaked your business, consider tweaking your logo to help customers see that you are evolving to serve them better.

Need help thinking through how a logo can best represent your organization’s brand? Ready to create a new logo or refine an existing one? Connect with us now.