Posts Tagged ‘logo design’

Use a Logo Design Contest to Refresh Your Business

Friday, January 29th, 2010

No matter what type of business you work in, whether it’s a global corporation, a small store, or even an entire city, maintaining a fresh image is important. After some time of the same image for your business, it’s good to have a refreshing look. Often this involves a new website design or a new logo design. The problem with refreshing your business image is that it’s not cheap to do.

Generally you have to hire an external business to do the work simply because you need that professional edge over your competitors. However, over the past 12 months, one method of refreshing your business has become fairly popular.

A large number of businesses have started logo design competitions where anyone can submit their designs for the new logo.

The biggest reason why this method of refreshing your logo has become so massively popular is because it’s alot cheaper than having another company do it for you. Although you will need to offer some sort of cash prize for the winning logo, often it doesn’t have to be as much as you end up paying for a logo design company.

Another reason why this is good for your business is because it can create buzz around your business, especially if you offer a good prize. Several websites have appeared recently that are designed to host logo design competitions. Submitting your logo competition to a number of these sites will mean you are getting a large audience for your business. As an example, if you are after a new logo for sport and fitness logos for your business, you could attract for business to your sport shop.

Unfortunately, you may face some downsides when holding a logo design competition. The biggest problem you’ll face is that possibility of copied material. Some entries may be copies of existing logos in an attempt to get some extra cash. To try and avoid this, after the competition has finished, choose your favourite 10 and research into them. See if you can find anything similar on the web.

After all, this method of getting a new logo has worked for many cities and businesses, it can work for yours. Whether you are trying to get a new logo for school logo examples or mdeical logo designs, holding a logo design competition can be successful for almost any business.

First Impressions

Thursday, July 23rd, 2009

Ensuring your brand remains consistent across the entire marketing mix and across every communications channel is essential to maintaining a consistent and coherent image in any competitive marketplace and should be the first consideration of your design agency.The variety of marketing channels available to any company today have their own specific demands and their own rules. What looks good on your business card or letterhead may look completely different on a poster, tube card, direct mail piece, display advertisement or online.

Print management with a view to not only cost effectiveness, but also how your brand is expressed to its maximum impact across all above, below and through the line channels is vital to effective communication with your target audiences. Central to all this is the initial corporate identity design, aside from its creativity and how it captures the spirit of your proposition, how effectively it can be translated across all those myriad expressions will determine its longevity and impact. There are some important things to remember when designing logos or corporate ID and here are some guidelines to a successful outcome:

A logo designed in a vector based program such as Illustrator gives you much more flexibility in terms of colours and will give you a much clearer image especially if you are planning to use text in the logo and you want to use it in large format. With this in mind, it is often not a good idea to use photographs in a logo. If you don’t have access to a vector based program then design it as large as possible!

Stick to one or two fonts in your logo. Using too many fonts will often leave a logo looking cluttered and unprofessional. Any text used in a logo should be clear and legible, or don’t use text at all.

You may need to use your logo for a variety of different purposes. Remember that what looks good on A4 print materials may not be so wonderful by the time it’s been expanded to fit exhibition graphics or a billboard. Whatever you create should be able to work well across the smallest to the largest of applications.

You might need the logo to work on black or white backgrounds or other different coloured backgrounds so it’s important that the logo doesn’t just work as a stand-alone element but also in a coloured box. Allow for the possiblity that your logo may need to be used in mono (single colour) as well.

You have probably seen some designs that you like but it’s important to try to make your logo as individual as possible. There is no reason not to incorporate aspects from other logo designs that you find appealing, but when it comes to it being original is what will get your logo noticed.