In the previous post (Click here to read to Part 1) we looked at brand personality, how to identify your target market, what products you sell (and what you REALLY sell) and my hairstyle in the mid 90s.
Now that deeper stuff is out of the way, its time to get creative!
Step 4: Choose your fonts and colours
Once you have your brand personality and target market identified, you can start to choose colours and fonts that appeal to them. Generally speaking, you are picking colours and fonts based on your answers to these questions.
Is your business planned and considered with an older audience? Perhaps blues, blacks and greys with a serif font style works best for you. Do you have younger target marketing and want to be seen as youthful and spontaneous? Perhaps brighter colours and more modern san-serif fonts work best for you.
For more information on font choices, see our post here.
Step 5: Choose your logo style
When you have a clear direction of your brand’s personality, fonts and colours you need to examine your logo’s style.
Modern or retro? Elegant or abstract? Like the steps before, the decisions here are based on your answers to the questions in the previous steps. If your target market is retirees and you are selling financial advice, modern and gritty won’t work for you.
Make sure you look back on the data in the previous steps to ensure your styles align with your target market, brand personality, colours and font choices. Remember, it isn’t about what appeals to you. Its about what appeals to your audience.
Step 6: Choose your wants and don’t wants
Should your logo contain a symbol like Apple or Nike? Or just text-based like David Jones or Coles.
If you do choose a symbol (most do), it does not have to be a literal description of your business. If you are a painter, you don’t have to have a brush. If you are a handyman, you don’t need to have a hammer. Do Nike have a pair of shoes? Does McDonalds have a burger? Does BMW have a car?
To stand out from your competition, go for something slightly abstact, but with meaning connected to your business and offering. Use the clues in the ‘deeper’ answers to Step 1 & 2 to uncover some hidden inspiration. The added benefit here is that if your products change over time, your logo will still reflect who you are.
Step 7: Design your logo
It took seven steps before we even put pencil to paper! If your logo designer is worth their weight in gold, they will ask similar questions to the above when they do a logo meeting with you. Better still… take the answers to the above 6 steps with you and blow their little designer minds!
Be very aware of cheaper online logo design offerings. Fifty bucks for unlimited designs and revisions might seem like a bargain, but you get what you pay for. Nine times out of ten, these are simply stock images with your name plonked underneath. Not only do they not reflect you or your customers, these images can be bought by anyone so you might find any number of companies using the same logo or icon.