Does your logo design stand out from the crowded marketplace or does it blend in with your competitors’ logos? Your brand identity is unique, and your logo design should be unique, too. Creating a logo that gets noticed plays an important role in the success of your business, so don’t go any further in the logo design process until you read the tips below to make sure your brand won’t get lost in the clutter consumers face every day.
1. View all of the colors used in your competitors’ logos in a single place.
What colors are your competitors’ using in their logos and brand identity? Don’t worry about their logo designs at this point. Instead, focus on the colors. Put all of your competitors’ logos together in a single page and see which colors are overused, which pop out at you, and which seem out of place.
When you’re creating your logo, use colors that seem to fit into the industry (unless you want to make a really bold statement and go completely against the grain) without simply copying the color palettes of your competitors.
2. View a wide variety of logos and look at the proportions of those logos.
Logos that stand out from the crowd are ones that scale well at any size. Most logos are horizontal with an icon on the left and the brand or company name to the right of the icon. However, when you’re creating a logo, you should consider how your logo’s proportions compare to your competitors’ logos.
The logos that stand out typically include an icon and text that are proportionate to one another. They scale well together, so both elements are legible at all sizes. It’s a good idea to make a logo that’s horizontal and a logo that’s vertical (usually with the icon above the brand or business name), too. This gives you the most options to ensure your logo looks great in any size and any medium.
3. View your logo design alongside of your competitors’ logos.
Once you’ve created a logo mock-up, place it alongside of your competitors’ logos. For example, copy all of the logos into a single page in a Word document and scale them all to be the same height. You can do the same thing a second time and scale all of the logos to be the same width.
Next, look at all of the logos on the page, and evaluate your logo’s “wow” factor against all of the others it has to compete against. Is it the first logo you notice? Ask friends, family, employees, customers, and peers for their opinions, too. Depending on what you learn from this test, you might end up tweaking or completely redesigning your logo, but that extra time and effort will be worth it when you launch an amazing new logo design and brand identity.
