All Purpose Logo Design
I had a meeting last week with one of my favorite clients ‘Active Dental’. Active Dental is a relatively newish business for them, but I’ve been designing for them for other ventures for over four years now. There are other arms to the business also such as Active Smile for instance.
I was really pleased at our meeting to observe that the Active Dental logo I designed for them over a year ago has stood one of the ultimate tests of a quality design - can it be embroidered!??
Active Dental brought along several printed copies of the marketing materials I’ve been designing for them, which to my delight all looked great, and I got quite excited to see the greeting card I designed for dental surgeries …pic below.
Some of their corporate designs;
I think this is a great opportunity to remind you what constitutes a high quality logo design in terms of it’s practicability as a brand identity that can be applied by the business in a range of different ways.
These aren’t all essential, but they are certainly ideals:
- Can it be embroidered? 
- Will the design still work when it’s in black and white?
- Will it work when seen or printed really tiny, and when really big?
- Useable dimensions: now this is one of the most overlooked areas when it comes to design. If your logo is too tall compared to the width, or very short and wide, I guarantee it’s going to cause no end of problems when in use, there needs to be a good balance between the height and the width.
- Ensure the company name is readable; the font isn’t so odd that it renders the name impossible to read, or that any graphics obscure (or sit behind) the name and make it unreadable, or modification of the font is excessive and interferes with readability.
- It’s a good idea to check that any creation will work well on a dark background as well as on white.
Avoiding Complete Re-design
Those are just a few tips and by no means exhaustive, but by having those thoughts in mind when designing one should be one step closer towards avoiding a costly re-design of the brand identity in the near future.
By costs I don’t just mean the cost of the design service itself the second time around, but also the cost to the business if being forced to change a brand identity that it’s already built ‘brand equity’ in - i.e. customer loyalty and recognition of the brand image.
April 13th, 2009 at 10:40 pm
Awesome leaflet design, and thanks for the logo design tips. I recently carried out a logo design and realised just how much needs to be taken into consideration before finalising designs.
April 17th, 2009 at 11:12 am
Thanks very kind
Glad you found the tips useful, the more your design the more you find out the sheer extent of practicalities that need to be considered before you even think about being ‘creative’ for a brand identity.
When you are designing for a commercial business practicalities are just as important as the creativity of what you produce because the business literally needs to use your work to help sell their particular products/services in the way that they intend to market/sell them, and if it fails in that respect for them, it’s a bad design no matter how good it looks.
May 1st, 2009 at 7:54 am
These are some really good tips to take into account when designing logos. I was always told when designing logos that you need to make them stand out and represent the company as well as follow all these points that you have made and I am really liking your leaflet designs.
May 1st, 2009 at 8:52 am
Thanks Jamie.
If anyone has any extra tips, feel free to add them!