A logo is an often overlooked, but critical part of a business or organization’s correspondence, advertisement and overall presence. Your logo is a snapshot of what your business is, and leaves a strong first impression on a customer. So what differentiates a good logo from a bad logo? Can a logo be too complicated? What colors should you use? Here are a couple rules of thumb to hold to as we design a quick mock-up for a fictional aerospace component manufacturer, we’ll call this fictional company Koeing.

Keep it Functional

You want your logo’s form to be completely tailored to be functional. Let’s not delve into marketing strategy for the time being, and simply think practicality. It’s no secret that standardization is important to a business, and a business’s logo is no exception. When you or your designer is creating your to-be logo, make sure that the logo will remain transferable to any medium. As you expand (or if your already at that point) you may want to place your logo on various pieces of merchandise (shirts, hats, mugs, etc). A simple logo will be easy for vendors to reproduce on virtually anything, research major corporation’s and you’ll see they all keep things minimalistic.

For this reason, our example logo will be a vector image. Vector images are images designed to be scalable to any size without distorting, so they are a very practical and worthwhile investment to a business. Most images you probably work with are Bitmap, so when you try expanding them they grow jagged edges like the example below.

Bitmap vs Vector

Choose a Color Palette

Don’t  use too many colors. Establish a color palette for your business, and stick to it. A color palette is a few colors chosen to be representative of your business in any situation. COLOURlovers is a great resource if you need some help (www.colourlovers.com).

For this example we’ll go with the “Anti Swiss” palette taken from the COLOURlovers webpage. I chose this palette because it carries standard greys for overall design, but two contrasting colors (blue/orange) which can be used for emphasis (featured products, news flashes, etc) if the company were to create a webpage or newsletter.

color palette

Get a Message Across

Your logo should carry either a direct or subliminal message as to what services you provide. Typography can be used exclusively as your logo design, but I still typically recommend going with some type of accent to give it some originality. Since this fictional client is in the aerospace industry, we’ll want to reflect that in our logo. Concept sketches are typically a first step, then a black/white mockup is made. Here’s a quickie I drew up using standard Arial font:

mockup logo

Once the overall concept is set in stone, it’s time to incorporate the color scheme, and make any further revisions.

Final Logo

Although not the most attractive logo in the world, it gets the point across. Your logo needs to work in both color, and black & white. Our newly created logo will work fine in either situation since it’s fairly minimalistic. Although a simple overview, I hope you’ve been able to take something away from reading this!

Tools used: Adobe Illustrator CS3