How to create a logo that moves your niche market

But many companies still skimp on developing this key identity piece.

Ideally, your company logo enhances potential customers and partners’ crucial first impression of your business.

A good logo can build loyalty between your business and your customers, establish a brand identity, and provide the professional look of an established enterprise.

Consider Allstate’s “good hands” logo. It immediately generates a warm feeling for the company, symbolising care and trust.

With a little thought and creativity, your logo can quickly and graphically express many positive attributes of your business, too.

Logo Types. There are basically three kinds of logos.

Font-based logos consist primarily of a type treatment.

The logos of IBM, Microsoft and Sony, for instance, use type treatments with a twist that makes them distinctive.

Then there are logos that literally illustrate what a company does, such as when a house-painting company uses an illustration of a brush in its logo.

And finally, there are abstract graphic symbols, such as Nike’s swoosh-that become linked to a company’s brand.

“Such a symbol is meaningless until your company can communicate to consumers what its underlying associations are,” says Americus Reed II, a marketing professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, who’s conducted research on the triggers that lead consumers to identify with and become loyal to a brand.

But building that mental bridge takes time and money.

The Nike swoosh has no inherent meaning outside of what’s been created over the years through savvy marketing efforts that have transformed the logo into an “identity cue” for an athletic lifestyle.

Growing businesses can rarely afford the millions of dollars and years of effort required to create these associations, so a logo that clearly illustrates what your company stands for or does may be a better choice.

Even a type treatment of your firm’s name may be too generic, says logo designer Gary Priester, principal of gwpriester.com.

Priester believes customers should be able to tell what you do just by looking at your logo.

Getting Started. Before you begin sketching, first articulate the message you want your logo to convey.

Try writing a one-sentence image and mission statement to help focus your efforts.

Stay true to this statement while creating your logo.

But that may not be enough to get you started. Here are some additional tactics and considerations that will help you create an appropriate company logo:

Look at the logos of other businesses in your industry. Do your competitors use solid, conservative images, or flashy graphics and type? Think about how you want to differentiate your logo from those of your competition.

Focus on your message. Decide what you want to communicate about your company. Does it have a distinct, personality-serious or light-hearted? What makes it unique in relation to your competition? What’s the nature of your current target audience?

These elements should play an important role in the overall design or redesign.

Make it clean and functional. Your logo should work as well on a business card as on the side of a truck.

A good logo should be scalable, easy to reproduce, memorable and distinctive. Icons are better than photographs, which may be indecipherable if enlarged or reduced significantly. And be sure to create a logo that can be reproduced in black and white so that it can be faxed, photocopied or used in a black-and-white ad as effectively as in colour.

Your business name will affect your logo design. If your business name is “D.C. Jewellers,” you may wish to use a classy, serif font to accent the letters (especially if your name features initials).

For a company called “Lightning Bolt Printing,” the logo might feature some creative implementation of-you guessed it-a lightning bolt.

Use your logo to illustrate your business’s key benefit.

The best logos make an immediate statement with a picture or illustration, not words.

The “Lightning Bolt Printing” logo, for example, may need to convey the business benefit of “ultra-fast, guaranteed printing services.”

The lightning bolt image could be manipulated to suggest speed and assurance.

Don’t use clip art. However tempting it may be, clip art can be copied too easily.

Not only will original art make a more impressive statement about your company, but it’ll set your business apart from others.

Avoid trendy looks. If you’re redesigning your old logo, you run the risk of confusing customers-or worse, alienating them.

One option is to make gradual logo changes.

According to Priester, Quaker Oats modified the Quaker man on its package over a 10-year period to avoid undermining customer confidence.

But don’t plan to make multiple logo changes.

Instead, choose a logo that will stay current for 10 to 20 years, perhaps longer. That’s the mark of a good design.

In fact, when Priester designs a logo, he expects never to see that client again.

www.entrepreneur.com