CAN YOUR LOGO STAND THE TEST OF TIME?

Stanley Chidera
5 min readJan 22, 2022

A logo is a visual representation of a brand. This is what represents you even when you are not there. It preaches the gospel of your company. It is typically a graphic symbol that represents a company, organization, or person. It is the basics branding of any organization.

So what makes a logo stand the test of time? The logos of Nike, Apple, McDonald’s, Coca-Cola, and other global majors are unforgettable. So what made them so? That owes to the fact that such brands stick to the rules of creating an unforgettable logo and experience.

In fact, the simplicity of the design was the number one factor behind the memorable logos in surveys and studies. The first thing your potential client or customer will see is your logo. Here, I am not talking about those locally made logos, whereby a computer operator gets to put spoons, pots, and plates on a logo before you are convinced such brand is a restaurant, or where you get to put bottles and cups before you are people get to know its a winery or a drink store.

A perfect, simple yet effective logo, designed and implemented by a professional Visual Designer. Such a logo helps to show your clients the value and experience they would get. Professionalism starts right from the concept of your logo.

A logo is a visual and versatile imagery that would be used on letterheads, business cards, office signage, and even website headers. Your logo plays a large part in presenting your company branding. As such, it needs to be memorable, identifiable, catchy, and instantly recognizable.

Here, I have helped you conduct a helpful survey on what makes your logo stand out, and I found out these few yet powerful steps.

Get to Know the Brand & Customers

Getting to know the brand or clients of such an organization helps improve your logo’s look and feel. More than a beautiful and professionally designed logo helps hook new clients (and even run-away clients). Your logo has the power to attract people to you if well-created and matches the brand.

You must also know the brand’s history if it has been around for years. Then, find out who are the competitors. Have a look at their visual identities like a logo. Such details are crucial inputs to know about a brand.

Be Different, Stand Out with Difference

A memorable logo stands out from the crowd of logos. It can be tempting to look at the logos of your competition and replicate the same thing. What works for them might work for you, right? Well, probably not. cause, copying their logo will only create confusion. If the other business has been going for longer, the resemblance might make your clients think you both are the same firm or organization. Worse than that, imitating another company’s logo could get you into all sorts of feedback with copyright wahala and the rest.

Right Colors, Right Impression.

The human brain remembers color so well, so a good memory technique is to associate what you are trying to remember with a color. It’s the color scheme that is used that helps clients and people remember your business and brand so fast. That’s why the rightful use of colors is important in designing your brand logo. The colors you use give an impression of who you are to prospective clients and thereby play an important role in the successful promotion of your brand. Most colors can create an emotional response in people. Red can convey danger. Blue can be indicative of calm. Careful consideration should be given to your color choice to ensure your logo sends the right message.

Choose the right logotype

Testing it in Black & White

Another significant feature of a memorable logo is to maintain its value and impact in its colorless versions. A logo appears colorless in most media and broadcast mediums like newspaper ads, photocopies and fax documents, stationeries, promotional products, and many others. This means that your logo must still portray and convey the same value it has in its colored form too.

Designing such logos and business symbols is a proven tactic of a professional logo designer. And the first step for this is the paper sketch of that logo. Satisfaction achieved with the sketch is the same which would be gotten when the logo is converted to be colorless on other mediums.

Scalability

A logo would appear on a wide range of ads of various scales and media of different resolutions. For instance, On-street billboards and advertising boards may be scaled and enlarged for clarity to viewers from long distances. Or it may be reduced to fit into tiny surfaces of a stamp, pen, website thumbnail, USB sticks, and a wide range of other mediums.

To keep your logo memorable and stand out from your competition, your logo must be able to make that leap without any loss in clarity or detail. Only a professional logo designer can help you design a logo that must be flexible to fit well into different backgrounds and other mediums

Simplicity is key

Simplicity is the best word that depicts the level of professionalism to which a logo designer is. A simple logo is that which is appealing to the viewer. The design itself depicts value and conveys its meaning in a simple and understandable form.

Simplicity does not mean just any other ordinary logo or just an icon, it takes only a professional to provide you with such. For example, the FedEx logo is a simple logotype but it has some twist in the negative space. It has an arrow placed in the space between E and x, which connotes precision, direction, and speed. Do you understand what a simple logo is now?

Get Feedback

Finally, getting feedback from professionals. Nothing beats having a mentor s guidance and feedback on a logo. Opinions from experts go a long way in creating a memorable logo design. Your logo is not something to feast your eyes on, but for your clients. So, a third-party perspective about the logo is important. Do not make any negative remark from the client about an issue. After all, the client knows the business more than you do, and the logo is for the business and not for your ambitions.

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Stanley Chidera

Product Designer | Focused on User-Centric Design, Blockchain Technologies, and Fintech | Designing for Humans.