Every business needs a successful branding strategy and the key focal point is your logo.  So before racing out to engage a graphic artist to create your masterpiece, you should lavish significant time in understanding the good, bad and the ugly of logo design.

Your Logo is Your Face

When visitors happen across a website they haven’t seen before, one of the first things they notice is your logo – and that’s when they start to form an impression of your business. Branding experts know that logos can produce positive reactions (like recognition) and negative ones (like revulsion), but both are equally strong.

Here are 3 tips to getting it right…

1.  Keep Pictures Simple

If you do include an image in your logo, keep it to one, and keep it to simple shapes. You don’t want your logo to become ‘busy’.  Just allude to the message you want to portray, instead of pasting in a full-colour photograph of it.  In fact, if you want your logo to make an impact, keep it to as few colours as possible.

2.  Typography is Important

Don’t let anyone deceive you into thinking that the most important thing about a logo is how many little shapes and pictures it has. What draws the visitors’ eyes is the typography: the font on the words.

Unfortunately for logo design, there are a hundred or so fonts that come with Windows and Office, and they’ve become overwhelmingly common in amateur logos. To find less common fonts take a look at www.fonts.com  and www.typography.com for a start. You can identify any fonts you can scan using a service like WhatTheFont  (http://new.myfonts.com/WhatTheFont/) – it will take a look at the  letters and tell you which font you’ve found.

3.  Avoid Clichés

Finally, whatever you do, avoid the cliché logos that are so common on the web. To help you out, here’s a list of logo types to stay away from:

• Spirals – including spirals in logos has been done to death – no matter what variations you might be able to think of on it, they’ve been done. Spirals are nice, appealing shapes, but simply too common in logo design to consider.
• Animals – putting an animal (or a silhouette on an animal) into your logo might look cute, but the chances are that there are already plenty of people out there using your animal.
• Letters making faces – is becoming very common.  Resist the urge to draw a little curve under two Os to make a smiley face. Please.
• Letters making punctuation – like the faces, way too over-done.  Don’t do it.
• Swooshes – some say it’s now the most common logo device in the world. I’m sure you can think of something better.
  

The most important thing to remember about your logo is that it reflects who you are so keep it simple, stylish and professional.

© 2010 Tania Usher International
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 About The Author

Tania Usher is an internationally renowned marketing communication strategist, business coach, author, speaker and adventurer.  Her company Tania Usher International is dedicated to providing communication expertise and innovative solutions to accelerate results and positive transformation for entrepreneurs and businesses worldwide.  Tania aims to touch as many lives as possible with her authentic and ‘from the heart’ get NAKED approach to business where she strips back the hype to expose raw and uncut strategies for life, business and success.

Go now to http://www.taniausherinternational.com