Going Loco for Logos: How to Create the Perfect Website Icon
A logo serves as the centerpiece for an entire brand or company. Coming up with your own unique website icon or logo is an especially challenging and important responsibility, then. There will (hopefully) be many eyes on it for years to come.
The success or shortcomings of a branding plan may rely on the implementation of a solid logo. You should look at the logo ultimately as another chance to flavor your brand with personality and style.
In this quick article, we’ll give you a few insider tips on building your company’s perfect website icon to take your business to new heights!
Tips to Building a Timeless Website Icon or Logo
Famous logos and website icons, such as Nike, McDonald’s and Apple are iconic and recognizable across many generations. For example, some children have learned to recognize McDonald’s golden arches before their own name.
There’s a lot of pressure on business owners to create logos that are beloved and can stand the test of time. With that in mind, let’s dive into some methods for creating that perfect logo or website icon for your business:
Start With a Functional Design
Besides being clean and sleek as the times require, your design should function well for your product or service. A brand like MailChimp can get away with a logo of a chimp in a mailman’s uniform. It makes sense for Twitter to have a tweeting bird.
Your logo should function well with your product, service, or company name.
Don’t be fooled into thinking this is a rule that can’t be broken, though. Some companies choose logos that represent an idea behind the company rather than a literal representation, and it works well for them.
Take Walmart’s logo, which has transformed from a five-pointed star to a sunburst or “spark.” The star initially represented patriotism, appealing to American demographics, but they needed something more diverse.
The spark was introduced (along with a new color palette) to appeal to an international demographic.
Apart from a clean and sleek design, your logo should serve a function to your brand and company at the end of the day.
Listen to Your Market
Before you can market to an audience–or even come up with your logo–it’s a good idea to understand who all this marketing is meant for. Knowing your target audience will help you fine-tune your marketing tactics for the largest return.
Companies can narrow their market down by things like age range, income range, shopping habits or location. The more specific you can get, the more efficient your design and marketing can be.
What is the audience interested in, what do they wear, what social media sites do they follow? Find out what conversations they’re having and consider what solutions you bring to their problems.
It’s possible to pick up on visual cues and brand trends that grab the attention of your target audience elsewhere. By paying attention to the competition, you can learn what’s working to obtain customers in your market without doing any work.
Consider Potential Colors While Considering Budget
When creating a web icon or logo, everything from the sharpness of edges to the colors used has to be carefully considered. Colors inspire their own meanings that may resonate with some people or turn away others.
Color preference can be dependent on the demographic, and certain groups may judge color from unique life experiences. This is why it’s crucial to boil down your audience as best you can.
From there, you can start hunting down color trends and preferences within your market, noting competitors and even unrelated businesses.
A hint from the professionals: don’t choose more than three colors for your logo design. The reason is that when it’s printed onto merchandise, stationery, and elsewhere, more colors drives the cost up, and they tend to meld together.
Make the Logo Scalable
A logo has to look good in large and small formats. Consider if you’re logo is printed on the side of a truck or even a shirt or hoodie; are the details discernable on graphics that large?
Consider also that the logo will appear in much smaller forms. Examples include on the side of a writing pen, somewhere on the website or HTML bar, or on stationery. Do the shapes, angles, and colors still read true even at that size?
You have to consider all the places a logo will appear and determine if your early designs are too complicated or unscalable. Maybe the color loses its intensity as it shrinks. Maybe red and blue, two signature colors, meld into purple in the end.
You don’t want to wait until you see the logo in person to realize your mistakes. At that point, your logo will hopefully already be in circulation and grabbing viewers’ interests.
When in Doubt, Choose a Logo Maker
If creating a logo is stumping your creative minds, then the next best option is to turn to the help of a logo maker. This can mean relying on the services of a known graphic designer or using web applications to come up with icon drafts.
The latter option provides you with 100% of creative control, and applications come with unique benefits that make creating logos easy.
Here, you can browse through hundreds (if not thousands) of logo ideas that you can tweak to fit your company needs. Experiment with color and size all within web applications to see quality results before you finalize your order.
You’ll just have to be careful not to use copyrighted or trademarked designs. Click to learn more about what the legalities behind logo copyrights look like.
More Design Help from the Professionals
Designing a logo or website icon isn’t easy work, and it’ll take more creative energy to pull off than you probably thought. Stick to these tips if you’re having trouble and be patient. The payoff will be worth it!
Looking for other design help from the professionals?
Check out the photoshop tutorials and other design insight from The Photoshop Lady to positively transform the look and feel of your business!
