Computer Net Daily

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 each have their own peculiar 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 corporarate 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 a new logo 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 there is text in the logo and you want to use it in large format. Bearing this in mind, it is inadvisable to use photographs in a logo. If you don’t have access to a vector based program then make the design as large as you can!

Stick to one or two fonts in your logo. Using too many fonts can make a logo look cluttered and unprofessional. Make sure that any text used in a logo is clear and legible, or don’t use text at all.

You may need to use your logo for a variety of purposes and in different ways. Remember that what looks good on A4 print materials doesn’t mean it will be so wonderful after it’s been blown up to fit exhibition graphics or a billboard. Whatever you create should work well from the smallest to the largest of applications.

You might need the logo to work on black or white backgrounds or dark or light coloured backgrounds so the logo should work equally well as a stand-alone element or in a coloured box. Allow for the fact that your logo may need to be used in mono or 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 you possibly can. There is nothing wrong with using aspects from other logo designs that you find appealing, but when it comes to it being original is what will get your logo noticed.

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