Are You Stressing Your Logo to Death?

Are you stressing your logo to death?

This is a quick reminder that your logo doesn't need to tell the whole story of your brand. Owners do this constantly. Every service, every value, every bit of history, all crammed into one small mark, until the mark collapses under the weight.

Say you're a plumber. So the logo gets a wrench. And a pipe. And a house. And a water drop. And the phone number. And "family owned since 1998" curved around the bottom.

That's not a logo anymore. That's a flyer wearing a costume.

The fix isn't a bigger mark or smaller text. It's a decision. One idea the logo has to carry, chosen on purpose, and everything else gets handed to the places built for it: your tagline, your website, your story.

A logo has three jobs. That's it.

The three main points of a logo

1. Visual representation

Pretty self explanatory, but your logo is a graphic that encompasses an idea, a product, or a service. It stands for the business. It doesn't have to describe the business in detail.

A swoosh doesn't show a shoe. You know whose it is anyway. The mark stands for everything you've experienced with the brand, without drawing any of it.

2. Communication

That graphic should aim to trigger an emotional response from the viewer. Sometimes that's visual psychology, built into the shapes and colors from day one. And sometimes it's something your customers develop on their own over time, as they build experience with you.

Either way, the logo carries a feeling. It doesn't carry your brochure.

And the logo gets help. Your service, your space, your people, your reviews: they teach customers what the mark means over time. The logo's job is to be the thing all that meaning attaches to. A hook, not the whole closet.

3. Memorability

Your logo should be both unique and easy to recall. Customers do quick scans of the overall shape, the same way we're able to read full words when the letters are jumbled. Shape first, detail later, if ever.

That's why the extra detail usually hurts. It isn't being scanned. It isn't being remembered. It's just making the shape harder to catch.

Ask a regular customer to sketch your logo from memory on a napkin. What they draw, big shapes, one color, maybe a letter, is your actual logo. Everything they leave out was never registering in the first place.

Find the balance

Find a fine balance between detail and simplicity. Too much detail and nothing is memorable. Too little and nothing is yours. Simplicity is best is the deeper version of that argument, and the logo memory test will tell you honestly which side yours falls on.

Try the one sentence test. Describe your logo out loud, in one sentence, to someone who's never seen it. If you run out of breath, the logo is carrying too much. If your sentence could describe forty other businesses, it isn't carrying enough of you.

If you keep these three characteristics in mind when designing a logo, you'll set yourself up for future success. And when you're ready to build one that way, that's our logo design process in one sentence.

Not sure where your brand is leaking? Take the free brand audit quiz first, then talk to us if you want a hand fixing it.