The Face of Your Business
How often do you recognize a car from its make, rather than the ever visual logo on the front grill?
A logo is a visual shortcut to a product or company.
A logo design establishes your identity.
Every time a potential customer visits your website, opens a newsletter or accepts your business card, they are seeing your logo, the logo you chose to represent your business. The market is flooded with logos. If you want to make a lasting impression on your target viewers, making the right decisions when it comes to visual brand identity is vital. You need to build a logo that defines your business and gives it an identifiable image.
Having just any logo is not enough to create a brand identity for you. Logos are the chief visual component of a company’s overall brand identity. A well-designed, thought-out logo can reach the buying public and communicate to them the worth of your company or product, while a substandard, poorly thought-out logo can imply unprofessionalism, turn off potential customers and destroy the image of your company.
Businesses often play it fast-and-loose with logos, paying insufficient attention to their proper size and positioning, and surrounding them with materials – including clipart – that compete with them visually.
A logo is the basic unit of a larger brand identity that includes company fonts, color and design guidelines, and the overall feeling of the company. Be consistent throughout your marketing channels. Consistency with logos, fonts, colors, icons and symbols help potential clients relate all the different messages they are seeing, and help people remember all the messages they are receiving are coming from the same source. Avoid re-creating different types of logos for specific purposes (e.g., letterhead, signage and business cards) or having similar-but-not-identical versions for print and online purposes.
The importance of a strong visual identity for a small business cannot be ignored. Consistent and effective visual communication is one of the easiest and most extensively used tools a business can use to communicate its values and identity to the consumer – without even saying a word.
