An Ultimate Guide to Designing a Unique Logo for Your Business
Your business does not just need a logo. It needs a very unique one. Designing a unique logo for your business needs you to know everything about the brand you are designing for.
Get the Basics of Designing a Unique Logo
To design a truly unique logo, you don’t just need to be good, you need to be perfect. Still, even perfectionists need to brush up on the basics at times. So, a perfect way to start is to reacquaint yourself with the basic elements of a logo. Perhaps you are so far into your career as a designer that you have made your own ruleset. Perhaps you need a bit of change to create something unique and memorable for your business?
The visual component of a logo is important, but there is quite a lot more to it. The brand is central to what the logo is going to be, and the design of the logo itself needs to simultaneously be an effective representation and endorsement of the brand. It needs to appeal to customers, be simple and memorable, fit with a catchy slogan, and be synonymous with the brand and business as a whole.
After the basics, though, there are a few ways to get yourself right in the thick of it and learn how you can be designing a unique logo for your business in no time.
Your Customers and General Audience Come First
When it comes to designing a unique logo, you might think your brand comes first, or the business, or the name. However, the most important factor in any of these elements are the customers themselves.
Customers define the market. They are the reason businesses succeed and fail—at times. They influence how a company conducts business, how they operate, what they offer, what products they manufacture, etc. Almost every aspect of the customer is what brands are based on. The target audience decides the tone, the product, the quality, the price, and most importantly, the marketing.
That is why in designing a unique logo, you first need to consider your customers. If your customers are well-off people, you won’t have ads that depict an every-day lifestyle. You want lavish and luxurious; a marketing campaign that signifies and relates to the audience it is catering to. You won’t see Rolls Royce advertising itself like anyone can have it.
The more you know about your customer, the better you can tailor the business—and the logo—in their favor.
Don’t Think Your Competition Can Be Ignored
Competition is almost always a good thing, even if you are one of the businesses that is facing competition. For one, it can be a great way for you to consider what is being done right and what is being done wrong. Your competition went through the same process of market research, analysis, conceptualizing, testing, and more when designing a unique logo.
It is important to note that just because an idea is already out there doesn’t mean it does not have anything else to give or use. For one, checking out your competition can give you an idea of what the market demand and supply is like. Second, it can also give you an idea of what kind of logos the competition is sporting. Instead of being a creative limitation, you can truly make something unique by standing out from the opposition.
Be a bit more subtle with it. Maybe your entire competition is name-based brands. Companies such as Google, have their logos as their name, yet are still simple and recognizable. Here, you have an opportunity to make it different. DuckDuckGo is a very recognizable search engine name, and has a Unique Value Proposition (UVP) to boot, making it stand out amongst a competitor that has more than 90% of the search engine market share.
Analyze the Product or Service You Offer
In designing a unique logo, the logos are often based off the products or services in a simple manner. While that can be effective, it can be difficult for a business that is looking to stand out from the competition. Sometimes, part of designing a unique logo can be to do something simple, but here, a real product analysis can reveal elements you might not have considered otherwise.
This can be especially true in light of your brand identity. Perhaps your product offers some intrinsic value instead of just a practical use or application. Maybe base off your new unique logo on the value instead of the product. The same can be done with benefits that a product offers, or the brand identity it creates.
Through a robust product analysis, you can get some questions, such as:
- What makes your product different?
- What makes the solution the product brings make your customers feel?
- What does the price make them feel?
- What value does this product bring? (Not monetary)
A key point here is to focus more on feelings. Designing a unique logo is to use the visual elements for the logo rather than create the logo for the visual element itself. What the customers see should reflect how they feel instead of being blue just for the sake of being blue.
You Can Target Specific Demographics or Psychographics
The demographic is more related to groups in terms of social and population structure. Psychographics are related to psychology and a customer’s way of thinking. Targeting based on demographics is good, but targeting based on psychographics can help you capitalize on the product analysis you did for designing a unique logo where you look at how the customer felt rather than identified as.
Supplying for a specific lifestyle and for a certain type of feeling can evoke stronger brand solidarity and loyalty than targeting based on demographics. A specific logo can do exactly that.
For example, neon-colored lights are often geared towards the feeling of nostalgia because it heavily represents the 70s and 80s synth-rock era where electronica was the hot-topic of the decade. The key-point here is that the feeling is targeted in designing a unique logo, not a specific group of people.
Use Visual Identification in Designing a Unique Logo
Green is for eco-friendliness. Brown is for earth-focused and natural items. Red and pink are for romance and loving gifts. Blue is for health and fitness. Purple and gold are for luxury and panache. Yellow is for happiness and joy. Symmetrical shapes display order, while asymmetrical shapes display a less curated and a more open-ended approach to things.
These small and subtle visual elements can help you identify your business when you are deigning a unique logo. You need to be able to visually represent your brand while also telling everything about it in just that one logo. Use all the elements of design to create that visual identification and truly make your logo unique.
Don’t Be Afraid to Try Something Different
Sometimes, creating and designing a unique logo is truly about the uniqueness and never-done-before type of somethings. Business owners tend to generally avoid risks when considering their business venture, and even tiny changes such as pivoting in their logo design can have very different outcomes.
However, that does not mean that it only has to be a bad thing. In fact, doing something completely different can be a very good thing, too.
There are plenty of resources on the internet to get some inspiration for things truly unique. Look on Pinterest for some inspiration. Scour non-competitors on Instagram and Google—when things go desperate. See different sectors of different industries. You could be designing a logo for a company that sells lawnmowers and take some logo design inspirations and ideas from a fashion brand instead.
The takeaway here is that experimentation is always something that yields risk. But as the saying goes, that with high risk, comes high reward.
Never Forget To Make a Memorable Logo
Of course, you can’t just have a sort of calculation for how memorable a logo should be, but the reason for bringing this up is to reiterate a point that was made earlier; is that when it comes to designing a unique logo, keep things simple.
The whole point of a logo is to be seen and remembered, and a logo will only be memorable if it is simple enough to remember. Especially in this day and age, we tend to focus more on brands we can remember and recall rather than remember a complicated logo or name.
Simplicity does not mean mediocrity. The Google logo—an example already shared in this blog—is as simply as they come. Yet it works.
The Apple logo is simple as they come. Yet it works.
These is a lesson to be learned from these, isn’t there?
