Keep Your Logo Simple

So, how do you keep your logo simple?

There are a few easy steps to creating a clear, simple logo that communicates your message to your audience instead of confusing it.

1. Keep the brand story that you're telling with your logo simple and don't try to say too much.

Your logo should tell the story of your business's brand. Your business's story is made up of four parts:

• Your business's personality
• The type of services or products you offer (either by talking about what you do, or better yet, showing your customers the need you can fill or the problem you can solve)
• What makes you different from your competition
• Who you can best help

When you sit down to create your business's story, you'll probably find that you have a lot to say about these four story parts. And the details will probably be complex and involved.

So, the next step in creating a logo is to take your story and scale it back to one, or possibly two, main ideas that you want the viewer—your potential client—to see in your logo.

This simplified story is the key to making sure that your logo will be able to be designed in a simple way. If you're trying to tell a complicated story, then your logo design will probably need to be complicated to communicate everything. But if your story is simple, then your logo can be simple as well.

2. Keep the design of your logo simple—don't include too many details in the icon.

A logo that contains a lot of visual elements may turn out to be too complicated to allow viewers to assimilate all of the information at once. Keep the number of shapes, lines and other design elements at a minimum to make the logo as clear and clean as possible.

Limiting the number of elements and keeping them all at the same relative level of detail to each another makes it likely that you'll end up with a logo that's also scalable. If you include too many design details, it's more likely that when you scale the logo down, some design elements will be too small to see or distinguish from one another or even to print well. Simplifying the design of your logo can help to ensure that it will be scalable.

3. Keep the icon and the name of your company separate.

If you layer your company's name on top of the icon in your logo, then your company's name can be harder to read. And if you have text on top of the icon, it will be harder to see the icon, much less grasp what it means. Separating these two elements from one another will make them both easier to read and understand.

Just following these three simple recommendations can help you to create a logo that keeps it simple—and helps you to communicate with your clients instead of confusing them.

The 5 Jobs of your Logo's Color Palette

Picking colors for your logo can be difficult. Just how do you go about choosing appropriate colors? Everyone has favorite colors, and many people also have colors they hate. But, whether or not you personally like a color actually has little to do with its appropriateness for your business's brand.

You should make your choices based on the colors that will best perform the color palette's jobs.

What are those jobs?

The color palette's jobs include:

• Telling your brand's story through color psychology
• Laying the color palette foundation for your Visual Vocabulary
• Giving your logo elements light and dark contrast
• Having enough colors to be interesting but not so many that printing's too expensive
• Complementing each other and creating visual appeal

Let's go into more detail on each of these jobs.

Telling your brand's story through color psychology:
Colors all have different psychological meanings. And each color can have several meanings, depending on the context in which it is used. For example, red is a "hot" color that can also display urgency, signal "stop," and demonstrate love and passion. So, depending on the messages that are communicated by the other elements of your logo, such as the icon, font and other colors, it may be possible to interpret the meaning of each color in the palette in different ways.

Laying the color foundation for your Visual Vocabulary:
Many small businesses think they need to put every color they want to use on their marketing materials in the logo itself, and they wind up with a logo that looks like a crazy rainbow. In fact, you just need to include your main brand colors in your logo. Your main brand colors are usually the one, two or three that best represent your company. You can then augment your logo's color palette with additional colors from your Visual Vocabulary when you design your marketing materials to get more of a full-spectrum impact.

Giving your logo elements light and dark contrast:
Your logo will be made up of several elements—the parts of the icon and your company name. Making sure that those elements have different color values, meaning that some colors are light and some are dark, will do a couple of things for you. First, it will give your logo a feeling of liveliness—and that will make the logo more eye-catching. Second, it will help to distinguish the different elements from one another—both by giving them more variation and different basic values. This has the added advantage of helping color blind viewers who see your logo to see it more clearly.

Having enough colors to be interesting but not so many that printing's too expensive:
Whether or not this is actually an issue for you depends on whether you're planning to print your materials on a traditional press or digitally. If you're printing on a traditional press, the printer will charge more for the job the more colors in your piece, so you want to use just two or three colors. (One color is often not enough to provide visual interest.) Using more than three colors in your logo often makes printing quite expensive. If you're printing digitally, then the number of colors shouldn't be as much of a concern, because digital printing uses a full range of colors.

Complementing each other and creating visual appeal
You don't want to choose colors for your logo that don't look good next to each other. If you've chosen colors based on their psychological meanings only, or if you've concentrated too much on level of contrast and overlooked whether or not they coordinate with each other, then you can wind up with clashing colors. Also, placing colors next to each other can change their visual appearance. For example, if you put aqua next to sky blue, then the aqua will look bluer. If you place the same aqua next to a green, then it will appear greener. So, choose colors that complement each other and that make each look more appealing.

The 4 Jobs of Your Logo Font

he font's job is to be legible and scalable, to make your business name look good, and to strengthen your entire brand story. Let's break these elements down one at a time.

1. To be legible

Your business name should be able to be read easily, quickly, and clearly.

Make sure the letters are spaced far enough apart, so that they don't bleed together visually or when printed.

Make sure that the letter shapes are distinguishable from one another—that your lower case "I" doesn't look like an "L," for example.

Also ensure that you can read it at a glance. Most people won't pore over your logo. They'll just skim it. You want to make sure that the font that you choose is not difficult to read. This becomes even more important when your logo is featured on a sign, vehicle, or billboard—where your viewers will be passing it at a fast pace.

Example:

At smaller sizes, the space between the dot and line in this lower case "I" might blur—which could make it look like a lower case "L".

2. To be scalable

Your logo should be able to blow up to billboard size and scale down to postage stamp size and be readable across all of these different options. Make sure that legibility doesn't suffer when size changes. Scaling up usually isn't an issue, but scaling down can be a real problem on ornate or heavily stylized fonts.

3. To make your business name look good

Choose a font that includes good letter shapes for all the letters in your business name. For example, some lower case Gs look pretty funky — so if your business name includes a G, you may want to stay away from fonts that include strange Gs like the one on the right.

Examples:

Also, if you have a long business name, consider using a lighter font so that your business name doesn't dominate the entire logo — you want the font to balance with the icon. The following example shows what happens to a logo when fonts are in versus out of balance, as in the example on the right:

You might also want to vary the font so that the most important words in the name stand out, giving the logo more visual interest. This can be as simple as changing color, size, or weight/boldness of the font or using 2 fonts together for more variety. Here are some examples of those techniques:

4. To support your brand definition

This is your font's last job, and it can be done in different ways in your logo, depending on how much of your brand story is told by your logo icon.

If you've told most of your story with the icon, then all the font needs to do is support that.

Examples:

This logo icon is clean and modern looking, because the personality of the business is cutting-edge. When paired with a modern, bold font, the logo's meaning is reinforced. If the design had used a traditional serif font, it would contradict the icon, as on the right.

In the next logo, both the icon and font say "strong" and "well built." But, if we switch the font to a lighter version with a bit of a tilt, the logo suddenly looks much less stable and ready to topple over.

If there's still a bit of your story to be told, then a contrasting logo font can help reveal the rest of your brand. This creative consultant wanted to show that she could be both highly creative and artistic as well as business savvy. The font brought an otherwise eclectic logo back down to earth. If she'd chosen an artsy font —as on the right—her seriousness about her business (and her clients' businesses) would not have been communicated as clearly.

If you choose your logo font carefully to perform these 4 jobs for your business, then it will be more than just a pretty face—it will help your logo to be more effective.

The 6 Jobs of Your Logo's Icon

Many entrepreneurs think that the icon for their logo should be a picture that appeals to them personally. They go into the logo design process looking to create an icon with personal symbolic meaning, because they think that the icon's job is to appeal to them personally as well as to look interesting.

This is a case of the icon's job description not being well written. In a perfect world, entrepreneurs love their logo icons—and personally identify with their meaning. But, that's the logo icon's last, and least important, job. First, it must do several more important jobs for your company.

What could be more important than appealing to the person running the business?

After all, if you love your logo, there's a good chance other people will see it and like it as well—and you want your logo to get compliments, right?

Wrong. At least, partially wrong. The logo icon's main job is to tell your brand story through the visual meaning of the symbols it uses.

Your logo's icon is a drawing or piece of art composed of symbols that have visual meaning. This visual meaning is called symbology, and it can help your logo to communicate with your customer.

There are two major types of symbols: abstract and representational. Abstract symbols are drawings that don't necessarily look like a thing or object. They can be basic shapes such as circles, squares, triangles—even dodecahedrons—and swooshes. Representational symbols look like a thing, object, animal, or person.

An abstract symbol of a circle can be used to symbolize trust, completeness, or to highlight another foreground element. A representational symbol of a leaf can be used to represent nature, growth, health, or eco-friendliness. You can even layer these elements one on top of another—a leaf on a circular background, perhaps—to give your logo icon more visual meaning.

How do you decide which symbolic message your logo should send?

There's a good chance that your company wouldn't be best served by a logo that consists of a circle or leaf, but then, how do you decide what your logo should look like?

The message your icon communicates should tell the most important part of your business's brand definition story. Your brand definition consists of who you are, what you do, what makes you different from your competition, and who you work best with. Usually, when you put your thoughts about these 4 elements down on paper, you find that you have some simple but compelling ideas about these areas of your business. And one or two are truly interesting from your customers' point of view.

Those thoughts are the foundation for what you want your logo to say. Just which symbols communicate your story is hard to say without knowing it, but once you have defined your brand and know which portions of it are really compelling for your customers, you can do some symbolic research (and there are plenty of books and websites about symbols) or hire a designer to translate that definition into symbols for you.

You said that the icon has several other jobs. What else does it have to do?

Your logo's icon has a handful of other jobs. It has to be:

• Memorable — it should stick in your customers' minds. Your logo icon will become the face of your business, so you want to make sure it is easy to remember.
• Unique — so that your logo doesn't look like any of your competitors' logos. You don't want to get confused with them—or sued for copyright infringement.
• Scalable — so that you can blow it up to the size of a billboard or shrink it down to the size of a postage stamp. This will enable you to use it across all of your marketing materials, regardless of size.
• Timeless — so that it doesn't wind up looking dated or "cheesy" in a couple of years. This will ensure that you don't have to redesign it just as your customers are getting to know and recognize it.
• Appealing — so that your customers like it and are pleased when they see it, and so that you can tolerate (notice, I didn't say "love") looking at it for years to come.

If your logo icon can accomplish these 6 jobs—in this order of importance—you'll have a design that will work well for your company and help you connect with your customers.

The Three-Part Harmony in Your Logo

What does singing together have to do with your logo?

Just as a harmonized song is made up of a set of three notes, every small business's logo should be made up of three pieces of art: the icon, the font, and the color palette.

These three pieces all work together, singing the same basic song, to tell your business's story. In your logo, each of them gives you an opportunity to build in meaning and symbolism.

And together they allow your logo to sing a richer song than if it had just one or two of the elements—for example, a text-only logo, without an icon, or a symbol-only logo without the text component.

If the different elements in your logo sing together, you'll have a logo that really drives your point home to your audience instead of being off-key and clashing.

A bit more about the notes these elements can sing for you

The first "note" is the icon—the picture in the logo. The elements of your logo's icon will all be symbols that have visual meaning. There are both abstract symbols, like basic shapes and swooshes, and representational symbols, which look like something. For example, an abstract symbol of a circle can be used to symbolize trust or completeness or to highlight another foreground element. A representational symbol of a leaf can be used to represent nature, growth, health, or eco-friendliness. The icon you choose should not only be meaningful but also memorable and unique.

The second note is the font, or fonts, that your business name appears in. Each font has a different personality. There are businesslike fonts, fonts that look educational, fonts that are funny, and others that are clean and modern. Your font also has the added job of being legible, both at large sizes and when your logo is very small. You don't want viewers to struggle to make sense of your business name, so use a highly legible font that makes your name readable at a glance.

The third note is the color palette. Colors all have different psychological meanings. And each color can have several meanings, depending on context. For example, red is a "hot" color that can also show urgency, signal "stop," and express love and passion. So, depending on the types of messages communicated by the other elements in your logo, your color palette may be interpreted in different ways.

You just need to make sure that these three pieces of art in your logo sing together in harmony instead of being off-key.

How to make sure your logo will sing on key and not fall flat

• Make sure that the three pieces of art are all singing the same basic song. Figure out the basic message your brand needs to sing—and then create an icon, choose a font, and apply a color palette that all reinforce that message.
• Consider giving the three elements different notes to sing. Even if the three elements in your logo are singing the same song, they can sing different notes, like a chord. In other words, they can all communicate your message in a slightly different way.
• One element may stand out and take a solo with the other elements singing backup. One element may even be singing a different part of your message—another melody—which can make your logo more subtle and complex. Whether the elements in your logo have a solo or sing backup, your message will be determined by the complexity of your brand's story.
• None of these elements is meant to carry the entire song by itself. All the elements in your logo are meant to appear together. The logo icon won't appear by itself without the font or color, and the color palette won't stand on its own. So, keep in mind that they're all telling parts of your business's story, but none of them has to tell the entire story alone.

Articles on Small Business Branding, Logo Design, Graphic Design and Web Design

I've been writing articles on Brand Design and all its' components—logos, marketing material design, websites, Visual Vocabulary, color and more—for the last several years. The articles are all archived here.

These will give you a basic idea of how to start work on developing your brand, or if you're looking to work with a designer, then these have a good amount of insight into my philosophy and how I think about design for small businesses.

Why You Need To Get An Email Newsletter Service

n email newsletter is one of the most convenient and easy ways to keep in touch with your clients and prospects. So you've made the decision to design an email newsletter to use as your follow up tool in your brand design toolkit? The next decision is how to manage the newsletter from a technical perspective.

Let's look at the technical aspects of managing your email newsletter. You want your email newsletter to be easy to manage — it should involve as little time and effort as possible on your part. You also want your recipients to get the newsletter without it landing in their spam folder. And you want your newsletter to be compliant with spamming laws, like the CAN-SPAM act.

While it's tempting to send out your newsletter using your normal email software program, it's not the best choice. Your regular email program doesn't offer the necessary features — that's the job of an email newsletter service.

* Manages the sending: If you try to send your email newsletter from your own email account, you'll run into a couple of problems. First of all most email programs only allow a certain number of emails to be sent out in a single batch. So if you have you a large list you'll have to send it out several times. Second, many spam filters consider a large recipient list one of the sure signs of spam. If you want your clients and prospects to receive your email, you'd have to keep your lists tiny. Lastly, you can't embed images into your emails with email clients like Outlook — they'll come through at the other end as attachments. If you want to create a beautiful branded email, a service is the way to go.
* Manages your list for you: Imagine trying to administer your own email newsletter list. One day you get emails from 5 different people asking to be added to your list. The next day another 10. So you go into your master list and cut and paste all of their names into the list. Then a couple of people ask to be removed from your list. You open your list up and search through it for their email addresses to remove them. When it comes time to send your newsletter you have to make sure that you've manually added or removed everyone who has requested to get on or off your list — what a lot of work!

An email service manages all of these details for you. You get a simple subscribe/unsubscribe form, right on your website. And each newsletter has an "Unsubscribe" link included at the bottom — which is required in the US by CAN-SPAM laws. It's a good idea to be CAN-SPAM compliant overseas too. You can even create multiple lists to further manage your follow-up.
* Sends your email out to each recipient individually: Instead of sending out your email to your entire recipient list at once, an email program will individually send each email. This doesn't mean that you have to configure the service to send out a million individual emails. You just tell it to send to your list and it takes care of packaging up and sending each individual email behind the scenes.
* Enable you to send out your own newsletter: Many newsletter services offer easy built-in editors. The service allows you to instantly edit your newsletter text, insert new feature images, and add links. Instead of paying a designer or coder to put your newsletter together and manage the sending each month, signing up with a service will put some easy-to-use tools in your hands.
* Offer advance scheduling: Say you're headed out on vacation just when you typically send out your email newsletter. You don't want to have to lug around your computer and find an Internet connection just to send it out. But you also don't want to be inconsistent and send it out late. Newsletter services offer advance scheduling — you can set up your newsletter to be sent out days, weeks or even months in advance. And it will automatically go out on the day and time you specify. This is great not only for vacations, but for hectic workweeks and making the overall process simpler.
* They're not very expensive: For example, Email Brain offers a package for small businesses that allows you to send out up to 2000 emails in a month for $10. That's a small price to pay for all of the help they provide.

Using an email newsletter service will make your newsletter follow up campaign easier. It will make it easier to manage, more likely to be received by your prospects and customers (instead of winding up in their spam folder) and compliant with all the local laws. It's a low-cost way to make your newsletter campaign more effective.

Some common newsletter services include:

* For HTML and Text-only newsletters: I recommend Aweber (www.aweber.com). You may also choose to look into Constant Contact (www.constantcontact.com) or icontact (www.icontact.com)





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