6 Logo Design Principles that will Make your Design a Hit

Design is art with a definite purpose.

Visually, designs are aimed to convey a certain message that the respective brand carries. Everything works with some principles, same goes to the design, and the designer must follow it in order to create a balanced composition that utters out a message to the targeted audience.

Agree! You have heard that design is all about creativity and if you are a newbie in the field, you may be so excited to go wild and blend different typefaces and colors, thinking that you are creating something fresh. Eventually, you will end up with a design that is cluttered, unfinished, or well, just an unpleasant visual.

Graphic design, like other fields, sticks stringently to the rules that do not visibly affect the design, yet create a balance and stability in the design. And, without balance, your design is weak and ineffective.

Here we are discussing six basic principles of logo designing that will help you make your next project successful.

1. Emphasis

If you are creating the logo for a bakery. You should ask yourself: what should it conveys, who is the targeted audience, what is the business’s specialty? Create an outline in your mind, structure the information, and create a logo that fits with all the information you have gathered. If it is a typographic logo, put emphasis on the font you use. Remember the color theory and use color combinations judiciously to make the logo pop. If you create a logo randomly without having a clear idea of what message you have to deliver, it will be hard for your design to succeed.

2. Balance and Alignment

Remember that all the elements you use in your design have a certain weight. Be it colors, size, or texture, they all have weight. This goes same as when you decorate a room; you won’t put all your furniture in a single corner of a room. Without balance, your design cannot grab the attention of your targeted audience.

Symmetrical logo design creates balance as they carry equally weighted elements placed on both sides of a center line. Conversely, the asymmetrical design uses opposite weights for creating a composition that may not be uniform but still, has stability.

3. Color Contrast

Contrast can make your design “pop.” It contributes a lot in making you design stick in the memory. Contrast creates difference and space between elements in your design. The background needs to be extremely different from the color of elements, so they work pleasantly together and are legible at the same time.

When your logo is based on type, understanding contrast is extremely important because it means the size and weight of your type compliments each other. Have you noticed that some designs only feature 1 to 2 typefaces? The reason is that contrast can be effectively attained with two strong fonts. Most of the logos are based on a single font; this gives more equilibrium to the design.

4. Vector format

Designing applications known for creating vector designs, like Adobe Illustrator, create visuals based on mathematical equations, while when it comes to the raster based applications, like Adobe Photoshop, you have to establish your design on the underlying pixels. When you have to scale a logo without compromising or affecting the quality of the visual in any way, keep it in the vector format.

5. Versatility

This is one of the most important principles that all designers– providing logo design services—should know. This principle implies that your logo should look impressive in all sizes. Therefore, even when a logo design is cut down to print it on some stationary pieces or it is increased to fill size for billboards, the colors, shapes, fonts should be equally impressive. Same goes when used in black and white.

6. Rebrand with care

A logo should be designed without considering trends much. This makes them timeless and relevant for the years to come. Once in a while, a brand needs a logo redesign. When revamping a logo, dwell over the history and established forms of the original design, particularly when considering brands such as Metallica, with a diehard fan following to consider who may have the previous logo design tattooed on their arm!

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