The fiasco over at the Gap got me thinking about what should go into the creation of a good mark (logo). Now, there are many excellent ways to go about this and what I'm about to outline is by no means the only way, but the experience I have with mark creation has led me to the following methods.
Step One:
Know your company. Know its past, know its present, know its potential future. Know its employees, know its attitude, know the state of its current public relations. Know its motivations, know its products, know its customers. THAT is your brand. The logo comes after, and cannot be done correctly without that knowledge.
Step Two:
Find yourself a freelancer or design firm, either one is great, but avoid crowd sourcing at all costs. I feel like a lot of companies out there have had great experiences with crowd sourcing, but I am 95% positive they could have had better results working with a freelancer or firm. Why? With crowd sourcing, and this depends on the site, but most of the time your company will post a request along with details on what you think you might want your mark to look like. After that, you're flooded with results and give input on the ones you like until the deadline expires. Once that deadline expires, if there are enough entries you MUST choose one of the logos and pay for it whether you're 100% happy or not.
Sometimes this works out, sometimes it doesn't, but your result will never be as good as if you were working through the mark face to face with your designer. We're not just people specialized in using computer software, many of us have been trained to think in ways business people do not. We are constantly pulling in visual information and combining it all into a vast pool of knowledge for current trends, aesthetic combination, and experimentation. This allows us to make leaps towards ideas when having conversations with you that can't otherwise happen online. Face time with a designer also ensures they're getting in-depth research into your company asking what motivates you and your employees, why you believe in your product, how customers use your product, what the history behind your foundation is, etc. All these things combine to create a mark that really represents your company, and is near impossible to achieve in a crowd sourcing environment.
Did I mention crowd sourcing also means potentially hundreds of non-winning designers not getting paid for the work they put into your company? I digress.
Step Three:
Listen to your designer. Chances are if you picked them you looked through their portfolio and liked what you saw. If you're telling your designer you think Comic Sans would be a great choice to modify for your mark, or a gradient would really liven it up and (s)he says that's a bad idea, listen. They are the expert you hired to get the job done, and the expertise becomes null and void if you don't use their advice.
This is not to say you shouldn't make suggestions! On the contrary, it is the designer's job to listen to everything you have to say and make your suggestions a reality in a way that is pleasing to the eye. Understand that NO DESIGNER wants to create a mark that looks like a pile of elephant turd, because each project they have has the potential to be their next great portfolio piece, which gets them more work. That makes them just as invested in the job as you are.
Step Four:
Ask for iterations. Make sure your designer is giving you multiple options for your mark. There is never one single almighty solution for any design problem, and every designer will solve it differently. A competent designer should be able to come up with multiple directions for you based on your needs and their research. More iterations means you'll be closer to a mark that best represents your company, rarely is the best sketch the first one.
Step Five:
Make sure you remain in regular contact with your designer. If they're not contacting you each time they finish a step in the design process (and they should) make sure you talk to them. Also make sure you are quick to respond to any correspondence they may have with you, whether an email, phone call, or a physically mailed proof. If a project doesn't have regular contact from the client it becomes easier for the designer to put it on the back-burner and do work for the clients who are responsive.
Step Six:
Test it. Once you have a mark you think is going in the right direction ask for opinions. Make sure the public can read and understand it by posting it on forums and asking people who have no idea who you are or what you do.
Closing Remarks:
And that's about it. After those steps your designer will take the tested version (if it was successful), clean it up, and give it to you in a bunch of different useful formats. Make sure you love it and you're not settling, no matter how long and arduous the process may seem at times. It's not worth your money if you'll need to change it soon. Some general design pointers for you in no particular order of importance:
- Avoid gradients. Not only do they look cheap, they are difficult to achieve with exact reproduction in prints.
- Alter your typeface (font) if one is used. Ask your designer to do a little something special with it so it's not the default.
- Keep it simple. A mark needs to be instantly recognizable.
- Avoid fads. Believe it or not, they exist in design too. You don't want to end up with a mark that needs to be changed 3 years from now. The goal should be timelessness.
- Keep it small, keep it compact. If for some reason it needs to show your entire business name that's twenty characters long, try and come up with a second design that compacts it (remember, Target's full name is Target Corporation which you NEVER see in its entirety).
- Never say "I want it to look like 'company X's logo." First, you could be treading on copyright infringement. Second, you want to be original.
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