What are some of the best practices for creating a memorable and distinctive logo design?

Know your audience. Keep your passion. Remember to schedule to stop and reflect and plan the next stages regularly. Be courageous to be different!

This stage is so under rated and often overlooked as a luxury. But creating a strong brand foundations, that all stakeholders can agree with and get behind makes everything so much smoother. Forget about the audience itself - if your team, board,m or founders don’t all agree, how can this possibly align? Get this right first and ensure your brand strategy is in sync.

Research should never stop! Listen to the positive and negative feedback yet understand thisbis one opinion. Take information and then sit with it, think out of the box be courageous, insightful, bold and dazzle as you drive forward with your brand making it your own!

‘When everyone else zigs, zag!’ I love this quote when it comes to branding. But some staples are their for a reason. Going back to my initial comment, if you understand your core brand archetype, don’t fight it. There is plenty of creative space to find your niche without being so out-there it’s confusing as a marque to represent the story your telling.

Gather ideas and let them simmer. Think of flowers in a garden. What type of flower are you. Google attributes of you brand, select images. See what pops up.

Going to take this opportunity to give a very personal opinion of mine for a ‘what not to do’. I think symbols are huge in todays branding - but avoid creating a symbol from a random letter in your brand name. If your brand name is ‘Adam’ for instance, don’t make the icon in the D! Try to convey meaning and create a unique identifier, but don’t associate it with anything your market won’t associate with you. If Adam is your name then it’s got to be the A or something completely separate from your word mark. (Often these separate symbols hold more weight)

When choosing the type of logo, it is crucial to consider the impact it may have for the overall branding strategy and future development. Sometimes it's worth taking a step back and get better alignment with business and brand goals before making any decision.

I am a big fan of the symbol / wordmark combination. This gives you the flexibility to use these logo elements in a wider variety of applications while still keeping brand consistency.

There are a ton of resources for meaning behind colour and the differences in culture. Pair this with the knowledge you should have about what you stand for that you have cemented in your foundations. Be bold, but be deliberate. When it comes to fonts, it’s about pairing it with the brand look and feel overall. If your formal and you’ve gone corporate blue, but your looking to disrupt a market perhaps targeting a younger audience, pairing it with typeface that has more character can help bring it to life. On the other hand a formal typeface used in a new unique way with colours that break the trend for your market might also be the perfect pairing.

I start my logo design in black and white. This creates a strong foundation for the logo to be recreated in a variety of ways. Though this is becoming less of an issue with the decline of print, etc. But you still have to take into account video overlay and other online applications where you need that contrast. With a strong recognizable foundation, it also gives you a chance to play with alt colors, texture, and transparency.

Your logo doesn't have to symbolize every aspect of your company or what your company does. Don't try to shoehorn everything into one symbol. Over time, people will associate the various facets of your brand with the logo. Additionally, (and I'm old school about this) your logo should work in black and white. It's the simplest, bare bones form of your mark. Once you've locked that down, you can expand to colors, gradients, pattern fills -- whatever else is appropriate for your brand.

Keep everything simple! This is a tough one yet important. Find the right people to guide you with making logo and brand identity, research this do not rush into it!

My favorite rubric for good logo design consists of two evaluations. 1. Legibility 2. Readability There is a correlate in typography with these two words, however, I use them a bit differently. LEGIBILITY is whether or not the logotype or mark is technically discernable as it is intended, "Can you read it?" READABILITY is whether or not the design is appealing, "Do you want to read it?" Within that sense of appeal lives the logo's appropriateness to an audience. A "heavy metal" logo should be legible and appealing to a heavy metal audience. Likewise, a flower nursery logo should be legible and appealing to a green thumb audience.

I also subscribe to the philosophy that simple is usually best. Though some firms like Fat Punk Studios blow that rule of thumb out of the water with their tattoo-inspired designs.

I do believe you have to design a logo that will work in a variety of marketing channels we have today. But I disagree with the notion that you need to test it with audiences, etc. If you have done your homework and designed an identity that illustrates your company's vision and mission then your target market will respond. If they don't then those are not your customers. Your identity is like the door to your store - you design it to attract the people you want to visit.

Never design a logo in color. Always start in black & white and only introduce grey tones as a last resort. While this rule was born out of the cost of printing on paper and the number of inks required and that has fallen away to a great extent with RGB displays, the sobriety and discipline that this instills in good designers is still valid and useful.

I always make sure that the logo can be printed on anything the brand ever wants. At this point, brand won't do any prints but tomorrow they may want a logo printed hoodies. Having clean logos gives better look and results than detailed scribbly logos. Start with black and white logos before adding colors, logo should look good in black and white first and colors should bring more life into it.