As you walk down the streets or browse the internet, looking at some of those timeless logos reminds you of the company and its products. A website logo carries the brand identity of the company and serves as the portrayal of the characteristics of business done by them. Hence, it is important the logo is designed well and is of very high quality. With so many web designing companies cropping up, the basic essence of logo designing is getting diluted and people are opting for designs which may be good but will not turn out to be iconic in the test of time.
Here are the five characteristics that make a website logo really stand out of the crowd and make its own identity in the market.
It has to be simple.
Think of any of the famous website logos and try to remember if there is a single logo which has a complicated design. You will not find even one. Simple logos are ideal for catching the attention of people and making them remember it. In addition to this, simple logos are easy to reproduce and easy to maintain as well. Simple logos are remembered well by people as they do not have to put a lot of stress on their eyes and brains to register the logo in their mind. Simple logos are pleasing to the eyes and easy to remember as well.
Be it sportswear manufacturing website or website of an e-commerce giant, all the logos are kept simple, just because they want people to remember their logo and associate the logo with the brand easily.
Here’s an example of a simple website logo that says a lot with only a simple design:
It has to be distinct.
In the competitive market out there, every company tries to beat its competition by all means. To be able to carve out that niche for them, a logo needs to be distinctive enough and should not be anywhere close to the logos of competitors’ websites. This does not mean that the logo has to be too jazzy or too complex. Simple designs can also be distinctive in nature.
A distinct logo carries some feature which not only makes it unique but also finds its place in the memory cells of customers for years and even decades. Usually, it is a single feature that makes the logo distinct. It could be the addition of an image or a shape, it could be the way the colors get used, or it could be the negative printing of the logo, whatever it is, it will be one and it will make the logo stand out among the crowd.
It has to be scalable and versatile.
This is one of the most important characteristics of good website logos which many people tend to overlook. A logo can find itself on a huge billboard as well as a thumbnail on the browser’s address bar. So it has to be scalable in nature. This means that irrespective of the size or dimension of the logo, it would not lose its primary features and maintain all details. In other words, irrespective of being scaled up or down, the logo would still maintain its originality and continue to look equally good and impressive. Consider a logo which has an image of an animal in it. If the logo gets scaled down, the imagery of the animal would get distorted and the overall logo would lose its charm. Such a logo is never a scalable one.
Also, a high-quality website logo might get printed on a number of mediums. It should be able to retain its power on every medium, and that is when it would be called a versatile logo.
It has to be relevant
Some logos get to the point, and make no mistake about what their service and what the company is all about. For example, look at this coupon website. Any ambiguity about what it is?:
Obvious, isn’t it! In your effort to design a simple, distinctive and scalable logo, you cannot forget the basic purpose of the logo itself. The logo is supposed to remind people about the company that it represents and the products that are sold by the company. This means that logo has to have relevance to the type of service or product that is being sold by the company. It should speak about what you do and not any other abstract thing under the sun.
Using pink color for websites promoting aids awareness may be fine, but using the same pink color for a website of a martial arts school may not be a very nice idea. Likewise, using feminine calligraphy to design logos for services or products meant for men may not be accepted too well by the people. Same goes with images. Logo for a surfing website cannot have the image of a lion on it.
It has to be endurable
A good quality logo has to last the test of time. It will become endurable only when trendy elements are not used to design the logo. As already mentioned, a logo is the face of the business or website. Do you change your face every now and then? Certainly not! Similarly is for a logo. A logo once designed, should be there for the time the business exists. It might get refined or updated slightly, but on the whole, the logo has to remain the same.
Have you ever seen Mercedes coming out of that famous three-pointed star logo in all these years of their existence? Have you seen Walt Disney, Starbucks or Heinz change their logos drastically? While these brands have updated their logo to give them the contemporary look, but they have not changed the whole logo or the basic features of it ever.
With all these characteristics, a sixth characteristic automatically gets associated with a website logo. – It becomes memorable for time immemorial. It is true that not all ageless logos have each of these five characteristics that you just read about. However, if you check out the most popular logos in the world of internet, you would find them possessing most of these characteristics, if not all. By learning about these characteristics and deploying them, web designers would know that they are on the right track for designing a website logo which will be liked by people, remembered by them and will remain in existence for decades and decades to come.