New Year, New You

If your logo is starting to look tired & you’re still using that website you got years ago...

make 2021 the year of change!

Are you getting lost in the crowd?

People tend to have a ton of tabs open all the time, whether it’s on their web browser or their phone. Are you getting the attention you deserve or is your brand getting lost amongst the competition?

Bold icons that make good use of a square space do best. If your icon is much wider than it is long (or vice versa), you’re going to struggle. Keep text down to a single letter & make it look unmistakably yours! No one’s looking at that G trying to remember what it stands for & no one’s clicking on all their tabs trying to figure out where Facebook has gone....

Does your logo work in different formats?

Your logo isn’t just going to end up on your website and letterheads. Someone might add your website to their phone’s home screen, so you’ll need app icons for iOS, Android & Windows Phone (yeah, some people still use them!). You’ll need a logo on your business card, which will need to be small enough to allow for space without losing readability.

You might want to get it printed or embroidered on clothing (embroidery is tricky and designs have to be bold and simple to work). Your logo might end up on another company’s list of clients or in a tradeshow exhibitors list in a single colour. You might get it engraved on something or make it into a sticker. You might need to scale it up for a massive banner....

Ok, you get the idea… You’re going to need your logo to be bold & easily recognisable at all sizes. It’ll need to be scalable with no loss of quality, legible in a single colour & you might need to be prepared to have different logos for different situations. For example, your logo could be made up of a wordmark, tagline & symbol – this is called a signature.

Single-colour logos

These are often used as watermarks e.g. on YouTube videos or in places where several companies are listed e.g. client lists on websites. Negative space is a must. Transparent areas in your logo help it to work in a single flat colour. Let’s test these logos in a flat grey. . . .

Without any transparent areas, this outdated logo is just a grey oval . . .

but this logo is totally recognisable, even without the blue in the N.

Signature

Making your logo in three parts makes it easier to adapt to different sizes and dimensions by only using certain elements in certain places e.g. symbol for app icon & social media profile pictures.

You can use the symbol (in this case, a letterform) as your website’s icon, the full signature on the desktop version of your site & letterheads, & ditch the tagline for mobile & business cards.

Would people recognise your brand at a glance?

Part of a good logo design is making sure you’re instantly recognisable at a glance. A great way to test this is to blur or pixellate your logo and see if it still looks like your logo. It’s also good to think about how colourblind people see your logo when you’re thinking of colours. Let’s see if we can recognise these logos after they’ve been mushed up to a bunch of big pixels. . . .

This could literally be anything, right?

With this one, you can see that there’s a slanted letter N with blue in the middle, even if the whole logo is made completely illegible.

Is your website working against you?

Your logo is only one small piece of the puzzle here. Your website could also be letting you down. At the very least, keep your website up-to-date with the latest standards. Most people will form their first impressions of you from your online presence. Or it might be what they remember about you most. Make it count.

Being mobile-friendly is a MUST! Nobody likes to scroll sideways on a website anymore and everything should fit perfectly on any screen size. You could miss out on a lot of business opportunities as a direct result of an outdated or badly-designed website.

A great example of a company that has adapted its site over the years is Apple.

Here’s a screenshot of the Apple website in the ’90s . . .

and here’s what it looks like at the time of writing this article. . . .

Which one do you think people would rather visit & buy from today?

Don’t miss out this year!

Make this year count and get on top of your online presence.

Don’t know where to start? Get your free branding & marketing checkup now!