Typography design is fundamental to creating a great logo. Unless you are a super brand who has spent years developing, honing, improving and marketing
their brand presence like the global brand Apple, most brands will need ‘typography’ within their logo.
Apple, because they’re so big have a brand mark that immediately tells their audience who they
are. When they first came to market, their advertising was centred around the word ‘Apple,’
which then led to the development and promotion of the iconic brand mark. Today, you only see
the mark in isolation, such is the strength of both the brand mark design, but the brand story behind it.
If you’re reading this and you’re about to embark on a new brand logo design for yourself promotion,
business or product then you will without a doubt, need typography within your logo design. But who
do you turn to to design your logo. How do you know who’s good and what should you invest?
Great logo designers spend hours choosing and customising a typeface and font, tinkering with kerning,
tracking and leading to make something unique and memorable. Note: A typeface and font are two different things.
The difference between a typeface and a font
A typeface is the design, family or set of fonts. A font, is a particular weight or glyph. For example,
we’ve all heard of Times or Time new Roman. Well, Times is the typeface. Time Regular, italic or bold
is the font selection.
So how do you know if your designer has created a great logo?
You’ll know if you have a great logo design because it will be unique and legible for any application,
print or web, small or large. It should leave you with a feeling of ‘completeness’ and not a feeling of,
“what if.” Importantly, you’ll know because it would have taken hours of time to create by a designer
who knows his/her craft and all for a considerably higher price than a curry and few pints of beer!
Has the designer taken the time to show you or discuss their initial ideas and explorations.
Have they just chosen a typeface and ran with it or have they customised and made it unique?
To understand if the brand mark is a unique solution, a bespoke design for your business,
try doing a Google image search with that design. Simply, create a jpg or png of the logo, drag
it into the Google search field and wait for the results. Does your logo appear? If it does, then
it’s either been copied, or, it’s been bought from a stock resource library such as Shutterstock.
Don’t get me wrong, there’s a need for some designers to purchase designs from these resources.
However, if you’re a business paying more than £100 for a logo and your logo is from Shutterstock,
then that would have cost around £5 and is certainly not unique. It’ll be a design that is most
likely used for businesses in many industry sectors, worse yet, it could be used by one of your
online competitors.
What do I mean by online competitors?
Well, you’ll know your competitors in the real world, even those that exist online. However,
with Google being such a vast resource of information, there will be online competitors that your
business will be competing for rankings with. These online competitors are who will show up when
your customers are searching for your products or services.
Do you know a great designer? Are you sure? Think again, look at their typography skills.
We all know someone, who knows someone, who can do something! Do you really want a friend-of-a-friend,
who is perhaps an artist, to create your business logo? Artists and logo designers are two differently
skilled people. Consider your business and your vision for it, hire a professional logo designer.
Tell me more about the cost of Logo Design?
Do you consider logo design to be a cost or an investment? Logo design is just a small part of
a brand identity, for which is a small part of a branding experience. Layers of management, risk factor and touch-points all
have a direct impact on the cost of a professional logo design. Are you a soletrador, small, medium, large or even a corporate business? Do you want to know how much
a logo design should cost your business? Yes, I have just the article for you: How much does a logo design cost?
WHAT INSPIRED ME TO WRITE THIS article?
I felt it necessary to create a short video that demonstrates an element of design that goes into creating a great logo or brand mark. The
reason being is that some of the logos I've seen over the years have left me feeling, let’s say, very frustrated.
We live in a saturated creative market which is compounded by people believing that they know how to design. It isn't their fault. Apps like those by
Adobe Creative Cloud,. what with their full suite of endless creative tools, have allowed
people to think that they can bypass years of training, practice and thus, experience, by jumping into design and selling their work for small fees.
Worse yet, there are now AI (Artificial Intelligent) online logo creation tools. Simply choose a few keywords that relate to you business
and boom, there appears a logo! Crazy right? Scary more like!
What this does is create a culture where people, business owners, feel as though they should get a ‘deal’ or ‘low-cost’
logo design for their business. When in-fact, the low-cost option will turn out to be the worst possible solution, their
business image is ruined by the poor design of one of their most valuable assets; their brand logo.