One fine day, you woke up and decided to have a logo designed for your newly started business. You went out of your bed, searched for logo design companies online and extracted some top ranking links from Google’s search engine. You called them up one by one and finalized one logo design company for your logo and felt relaxed. Your job is not done here!

Hiring a logo design company is not enough. You need to do your homework before asking your logo designer to design a logo for you otherwise all your money and your designer’s time and efforts would go wasted in the end.

Logo creation is a delicate process; therefore, you need to make it easier for your logo designer by clarifying few facets before asking him to start your project.

Write down a detailed Creative Brief:

You as a business owner, must know what exactly you require in your logo because your logo designer is only the creator of the image, you should be the one to guide him what your logo should look like. Prepare a creative brief and clarify the following points to your logo designer to avoid disagreement in the end.

Make my logo Simple

Always ask your designer to come up with a simple logo as it is a proven fact that simple things are easier to recall. The more complex your logo is the less people would remember it. So, before starting your logo design project, you need to clearly communicate this to your logo designer to create a simple yet impactful logo for your company.

Pick up a list of successful logos to date, you will see that the best ones are the simplest yet creative logo designs. Adidas is a good example one can come up with when defining simplicity.

Define the Essence of your business

Ask your designer to grasp the essence of your business. It doesn’t always mean that you specifically portray what your company does, but it should be portraying which industry you are in and the nature of your business. If you require a hospital logo, probably it would be of serious nature and a cartoon design would certainly not fit in. While it is sometimes appropriate to depict what your company does, but it’s always considered better to create a design that can be taken over as a ‘Brand identity’.

Vector-based Software

This is an important matter, because at times it happens, that logo designers try and take shortcuts when they receive bundles of orders from everywhere. Here your job is to clearly mention, that you need a logo created by vector-based applications, just in case your logo designer is an amateur. Usually, designers use Adobe Illustrator for logo creation. Remember, prevention is always better than cure, so a reminder to your designer won’t harm you anyway!

Never use Clipart

Warn your logo designer beforehand not to pick clipart images to design your logo. Clipart designs are already being taken by so many people that if your logo is based on any of the clipart images, there are 99% probabilities that your logo would not be unique.

So, don’t let your designer create a clipart logo, or download a design from any template sites, because anything created out of these sources would not be original at all.

Define the right Size

Tell your logo designer, what size your logo should be. We are all aware of the fact that size matters. It gets even critically important, when designing a logo. You need to tell your designer to create a beautiful logo which would be simple enough to retain its visual impact when resized, either smaller or bigger than its usual size. Remember, your logo is a waste if it isn’t the right size. It has to be so well designed, that it could be used in a number of ways.

Balanced height and width

You need to pre-define your designer that your logo design should be proportionate. Your designer must know the right height and width for your logo. Your logo should be balanced from all the sides so it won’t look bad when displayed on your website or printed on your business cards, letterhead or any other marketing collateral. So your logo designer should be told about this aspect as well.

Don’t mix artwork with words

If you want your logo to be a combination of both image and text, ask your designer to put both the elements in a clean way. At times, it so happens, that the designer intertwines the elements which results in an awful logo. Don’t let your logo designer commit this mistake. Ask your designer to picture them together, but don’t let them overlap. Though, there isn’t any hard and fast rule for this but it is observed that this practice makes a logo simple and easy to remember. See how ‘Dunkin Donuts’ has managed to have distinct elements in its logo.

Do mention the Colors

It is said that design is the primary element of any logo, which is true to some extent but one can’t ignore the significance of colors as well. Once you’ve defined the look and feel for your image, you further need to come up with the colors for it. However, why colors are not given prime importance is the fact that they can always be changed or edited later. Ask your designer to play with minimum colors as this would reduce your reproduction cost in future. Moreover, there are some colors which cannot be converted neatly on some media. So, think wisely while choosing colors for your logo.

Once you’ve mentioned these points in your creative brief, I’m sure you would end up in a perfect logo for your business instead of an argument. Comment on it, if you think I have skipped out anything which is a must tell to your logo designer.

A small bio:

This is guest post from Hasan Shirazi of Logoinn, custom logo design service provider based in UK.

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