What makes a logo design great

So many logo designs seem great during the concept phases, but fall short when released into the wild. Here is our advice on how to avoid common pitfalls and create an amazing logo design:

Start with a deep dive into font selection

The most memorable and impactful logo designs are often a carefully selected font face with a few subtle design elements. Thriving off of simple, elegant branding, these logos usually translate well across multiple mediums including website designs, business cards, and video bookends. Logos that make use of complex designs and font faces can be trickier to translate from one medium to the next, which can dilute your branding as you swap out various alternate logos on a per-medium basis.

For our logo designs, we typically browse hundreds of possible fonts before making a selection, and our selection process involves multiple stages and discussions into the typography and the meanings behind it. Typography isn’t something that the average person knows a whole lot about, but the impact of typography is felt by everyone. A good designer will know how to elicit an expected emotional response from customers through the font faces selected in your logo design.

And please….don’t use Comic Sans.

A good logo looks great in black and white

Another common pitfall that amateur designers fall into is creating a logo design that looks really great on a black or white background because it is full of rich, vibrant colors. Don’t get us wrong – rich and vibrant colors in a logo design can be very impactful! However, you won’t always have the opportunity to present your logo on a black or white background, and the colors in the logo may be all that is making it work.

Anytime you receive a logo design from a media company or design studio, ask for a version in black with a white background, and potentially inverted in white with a black background. This will allow you to focus on the form and composition used in the logo design rather than getting distracted by vibrant complimentary colors.

Don’t use more than two fonts (ideally, only use one)

Nothing looks tackier than a design that uses too many fonts. You will usually only want to use one primary font in a logo design with a potential second font used for subtext. Too many fonts seems like a new designer is celebrating their discovery of all of the font faces on their computer, and it appears tacky not only to other designers, but customers as well. Keep your logo design looking clean, professional, and minimalist with 1-2 fonts.

Follow branding and file guidelines

Well established brands generally generate a branding guidelines document to help all of the members of the company stick to consistent logo usage guidelines. This usually involves things like keeping the brand colors the exact same (no subtle shifting of red towards pink just because it looks cool), using a consistent amount of padding around the logo so it doesn’t appear cramped, using crisp images, and keeping the logo aspect ratio intact.

At Missoula Media Company, we can help you build a branding guidelines document to help keep things consistent across your various teams and platforms. It is a far more effective and affordable expense to incur versus having to re-edit tons of videos, re-print business cards, and limp through years of diluted brand impact.

Hire a solid logo design company to create a top-notch logo design

The best route to go is to hire the right media company to create a logo design that will serve your brand well for years to come. At Missoula Media Company, we have designed logos for dozens of successful brands in a wide variety of industries, and honestly, it is one of our favorite types of projects to spearhead. We can work with your existing marketing team, or we can BE your marketing team and deliver a full branding package including a logo design, website design, business cards, and more.

At the end of the day, launching a business is hard…we know! Your best chance at achieving your goals will be to assign important efforts like logo designs to teams that specialize in that area.

It all comes down to this: hire the best people for each job. That’s a business 101 tenant that applies directly to branding and logo design. After all, just because we can all play a game of H.O.R.S.E, it doesn’t mean that it wouldn’t be better to have Ja Morant on your basketball team.