Having an online identity is one of the effective ways of future-proofing your business, and one of the surest ways of ensuring a strong web presence is by creating an effective web-ready logo to incorporate into your web design. The logo ought to represent and reflect everything that your business or brand is all about. While it might not have a numerical ROI, it is essential to your business.
The downside to logo design is that it is still a highly-underrated business practice and despite the strides made in the graphics industry, most businesses still believe that logos have to be on the top left corner of their website. To be stand out from among the competitors, your logo ought to convey purpose, meaning, and the spirit of your business while at the same time inspiring customer loyalty, trust, admiration, and recognition.
No matter your position in the company, these seven steps will help you create an effective web-ready logo. Read on to the end and find out how you can set yourself above the rest by creating an effective web-ready logo. the logo will revamp your website design and ensure your business ranks high on search engines.
Step 1 – Answer the What, Who, Where, and Why Questions
As with any business practice, you will need to provide answers to basic questions that will help you in the design process. The questions to consider include:
- Who are you?
- Where is your business located?
- What are you selling?
- Why are you in business?
- Who are your customers?
When you have answers to these questions, you will have a deeper understanding of your brand and identity. They will be precedence to the design process and the biggest challenge will come in getting all the information into the logo’s design that will communicate to your existing and potential customers about your band.
For most people, they struggle with the option as to whether they should add an image of their products, or the company name, reflect the businesses missions among other aspects. However, when you are armed with the answers to the questions above, break the information down in a manner that your users will understand the purpose and essence of your business.
After this, you will need to list, and decide on the keywords that are best suited to your business niche. After doing all this, you can now start thinking about creating a logical visual logo for your site.
Step 2 – Capture Your Unique Brand Personality
The personality of your brand refers to the spirit that your product or service gives to the users. However, the marketing professionals define it as the way you position your business in the industry and be different from the competition. Your unique brand personality embodies your unique selling proposition (USP) and your purpose combined with your style statement.
You will find a lot of online sources trying to push you to adopt logo design trends, but you need to be unique to your brand’s personality to get a unique web-ready logo. With that said, your niche will also determine the outcome of your logo, that is, if it will be animated and colourful, or professional and serious-looking. The take away from this step is that your logo ought to be unique to your brand, yet appropriate to your niche.
Step 3 – Choose Your Colours Wisely
If you intend to only use the logo on digital platforms, then you have a wide range of colour choices for the logo, however, if you intend to print it for offline use, then your colour options become significantly reduced.
It is recommended that you restrict yourself typo only three colours on your logo to make it suitable for both online and offline use. When you are unsure of the colours you should use for your logo, you can use the Pantone colour system thanks to its broad application.
However, if you intend to use your logo for restricted purposes, that is only for online use, then you can use the RGB or the CMYK and you can learn how to tell the difference between the two and when to use them here.
It is also better to consider how the logo looks in black and white. This is because the web-ready logos of the modern times need to be appealing with or without colour. Another thing to consider is that your choice of colours should go beyond looking pretty. It is essential that you understand what each colour will make the customer feel, and you can get the meaning of colours from this article.
Step 4 – Consider Your Formatting And Size Options
For a web-ready logo, your logo needs to be designed as a vector; this allows it to be re-sized to suit the different areas of application and increase its versatility. This makes the logo versatile in that it will not get blurry when printed as a web logo, a letterhead, or even on a billboard. If you do not design the logo yourself, ensure that the designer provides you with the original EPS/AI file of the logo as this allows you to resize and format the logo as you wish.
The EPS/AI file should also give you the freedom to work with varying backgrounds. Typography is another important aspect, and the rule of thumb is that you ought not to use more than two typefaces. If you need to make a variation on the different aspects of the logo, you can adjust the weight of the typeface, and you can achieve a distinction of words within the same typeface.
Step 5 – Use Original Artwork
Many brands are cutting corners to save money on logo design, and it ends up hurting their brand especially when they use copied artworks. The danger here is that you will get a bad quality replica of an existing logo design. It will open the floodgates for prosecution especially if the artwork is copyrighted.
Original artwork will also bring out your brand as unique and trustworthy. You do not want potential customers to be in limbo as to which company is the original. You will also escape litigation and huge sums of money spent ion legal fees.
Step 6 – Keep It Simple
Your logo ought to have the right amount of details with elaborate artwork that brings depths, but it should also be simple. Adding too much detail to your logo will be a waste of time and resources since most of the detail will be lost when you reduce or expand the size of the logo, and it will look off and heavy.
A simple logo will also be easy to recognise, and it will be easy for your audience to remember. A perfect example is the Nike or Dodge logo. Keeping it stupid simple, will help your customers to instantly identify your brand without having to rack their brains on which business the logo represents.
Step 7 – Ask For Feedback
Before you publish your logo, it is best to get a second and a third opinion by taking it through A/B testing. Irrespective as to whether you are the designer or the client, you will be emotionally invested in the logo, and you will need a different point of view to ensure that the logo meets the intended goal.
Essentially, you ought to show the logo to other designers and a few of your clientele to get unbiased feedback. Your friends and family as much as they are outsiders in the design process, their views will hardly be of value mainly because they will try to pump up your ego.
These are actionable seven steps to creating an effective web-ready logo. Your logo needs to be creative, timeless, simple, unique, to ensure that it is memorable. Following through the steps will not be a walk in the park, and you might be forced to make changes to your goal until you get a logo that is the right fit.
In the next financial year, be sure to set aside some funds for logo design and always review the effectiveness of your logo until you find the one that best fits your business and the niche. This will ensure that your customers can tell you apart from the competitors. Our team can help your website perform even better by redesigning it and carrying out comprehensive SEO. Contact us today for more details about our digital marketing services in Singapore.
