Marketers are often at pains to say how a brand is much more than a logo. And it’s true: from brand development to content marketing, design language to tone of voice, a brand is a multitude of elements that define who you are and presents you at your best to your target audience.
But also, as a visual summary of your proposition and personality, a brand is your logo. It’s everything your brand means — and promises — summed up in an icon that has to fit in a 10mm square on a website tab.
Which makes them tricky to get right, as they need to articulate your brand’s identity, work across a plethora of marketing channels and be distinctive from competitors.
But despite their challenges — or maybe because of them — designers love creating logos. They’re the equivalent of straplines for copywriters: a distillation of the brand in its purest visual form.
‘The Predator Claw’: Revealing Predator Nutrition’s animal instinct
We’ve crafted a few logos in our time (see Mark Whiteley, Feed Me Seymour, Hopkins Homes), and they’re always exercises in concept and iteration. You hunt for a big idea based on brand and audience insight, then iterate and refine until you strike gold.
Our logo design process for Predator Nutrition was no different. But rather than explain it in too many words, we’ve shown (some of) our workings out when we re-energised this sports nutrition brand.
You can see the final result, along with the WIP work that got us to it, below.
For context, our brief was to modernise the logo while maintaining the brand’s animalistic feel to appeal to its knowledgeable and serious audience.
Lessons in logo development
Hopefully you like the end result, and can understand from the brief and feedback how we got there. But whether it’s Predator or any other client, there are a few rules in how to create a logo that always leaves a mark:
Understand the Brand
Creative should always stem from strategy. Before a designer puts pen to iPad, they need to know the brand’s:
- mission and vision
- brand values
- brand personality
- target audience.
This isn’t about a designer creating what they think looks cool. The work should be a natural extension of the strategy that’s lead to this point, and in particular be built with the audience in mind. Try coming up with three adjectives that sum what the audience wants to see from the brand, and make sure the logo encapsulates them.
Keep it simple. But not samey.
The cleaner and more simple the logo, the easier it is to remember. The Nike swoosh, the McDonald’s golden arches, the Adidas three stripes: they could all be drawn by a child, which makes them effective and impactful.
Simple, however, shouldn’t mean without character. Too many brands, particularly in tech and fashion, are going from character and craft to basic simplicity. In a bid to be trusted, they’ve erased the joy, heritage or memorability that makes them who they are.
Make it scalable and stackable
Your logo might look great on your website, but what does it look like on social, as a favicon or a 12-foot billboard?
‘Versatility is one of the most important elements in logo design,’ says our design director, Rich Boyle. ‘Logos have to reflect all kinds of things: business goals, the need of the audience, the brand’s personality. A designer has to capture all that, then make sure it looks amazing across any asset and size, while incorporating the logo’s pictoral and brand name.’
Beware the lawyers
Last but definitely not least, be careful of copyright infringement. Your logo can’t appear too similar to others within your sector, so to a trademark check through WIPO to make sure all your hard work isn’t undone because someone else beat you to it.
In fact, our Predator logo risked falling foul of Monster (with whom our client works closely) as a three-clawed icon, so we added a fourth.
So that’s our logo design process — what about yours?
Sometimes you have a brand and you just need a logo. Sometimes, you need both. Fortunately, we can help with either.
Hopefully the above has proven we know what we’re talking about when it comes to the logo design process — and with branding in general. So if you need your brand to leave more of a mark, let us know.