Logo Design Mistakes You Should Avoid At All Costs

As there’s no better place to start than the beginning itself, your logo creation begins right at the initial researching phase for your brand. Unfortunately, many brands make a mistake there itself. Instead of taking the time to assess and align the brand’s values, mission, and vision (which in turn they can communicate visually through the logo), they jump headfirst into the creative designing process. This way, your logo can easily fall short of representing your more exceptional qualities.

Before you give away your brand, take inventory of what all it’s got. As your logo packs all your finer qualities together creatively and coherently, it can serve as the marquee that single-handedly stands for all that your brand wishes to inspire in its audience.

Every brand aspires to have a fresh and unforgettable logo, but not everyone can accomplish it. Often succumbing to overused clichés and common perceptions, they fail to make their mark with logos that appear dull than special.

To avoid getting caught in the clutches of cliches, let your brainstorming sessions freely entertain out-of-the-box ideas than simply sticking to safe visual truisms. But be careful that those imaginative ideas aren’t overly complicated, abstract, or inaccessible. Seemingly sophisticated visual concepts can risk feeling just as uninspiring as overdrawn ones.

New design trends emerge all the time. Although exciting, inspirational, and eye-catching, they can’t be blindly trusted to ensure that your logo remains timeless. Although they can be effective in the present, they might not be enduring in the future. That’s why you can’t rely on these seasonal trends to communicate your vision and values while ensuring your brand’s longevity and relevancy.

To play safe, study and embody proven trends that also allow you to tell your story, and fall in step with your values and vision. When times call for a change, you can always opt to rebrand your logo from some of the top website design companies.

Your logo, being one of the most important elements of branding, allows you to tell your story through hoardings, business cards, and every other big or small marketing space. The temptation then, can often be to go for a logo that sticks out like no other. But for the sake of making it eye-catching, you might be forgetting that a logo primarily needs to be simple.

A simple logo communicates your message coherently and is also easy to distinguish. Add too many complications, and your logo can resemble a maze of half-formed ideas that will daze and confuse your audience. Many brands like Kraft made this mistake and paid dearly to compensate for their complicated designs and had to revert to the old one to stay in their customers’ good graces.

Johannes Itten rightly quotes – Color is life. For a world without color is dead and lifeless. Colors evoke emotions, enliven mood, and embellish just about everything. So why shouldn’t they do the same with the colors in your logo? According to color psychology, colors pack meaning and power that directly affect your customers’ feelings. Yet many brands take it too far or fall short with their color scheme.

For instance, Nasa’s sleek and modern logo with red acronyms got accoladed for its stylish design. Yet, it failed to convey the scientific and global message communicated by the famous meatball logo. Do your colors correctly, and you can avoid making the same mistakes by picking the wrong palette that sends the wrong message.

Creating raster logos with Adobe Photoshop is easy. But replicating them on multiple platforms in different sizes can cost you big time. As raster images consist of pixels, it’s challenging to enlarge them, resulting in a messed up design. A professional designer makes it a point to create logos in vector format. This way, it can be produced in any size without ruining the image. To save yourself from the trouble that follows raster images, you can easily create a vector image using Adobe Illustrator.

Getting your typography right is another top tip to nail the right logo. With the right typeface, your logo can communicate itself both visually and verbally. As it goes with colors, there’s a psychology behind the font type you use in your logo as well. While serif and slab-serif fonts are associated with formal, bold, and established brands, decorative fonts add personality and uniqueness to your logo. To articulate your brand’s personality thoroughly, you can let your typography do the talking instead of relying solely on a logomark.

The creative process alone can take days, weeks, or months as we wait for inspiration to strike. Seeking help from design trends and competitor logos is understandable if you incorporate some of their design elements. But some take it a notch too far when they copy the whole design and claim it as their own. This action can result in controversies or defamation, as in the case of many brands’ logos like Starbucks and Starpreya. To avoid such a mess, stick to researching other brand logos for inspiration purposes alone.

Logo designing is an interesting and imperative part of the branding process. From brainstorming to researching, and playing with colors and fonts, every effort you put into the logo designing process can contribute to a perfect logo. And never forget that even your failures can teach you some lessons. So don’t hold back from experimenting and exploring while steering well clear of these common logo design mistakes.