With the increasing availability of powerful graphics tools, color schemers, and logo generators, even those of us who are artistically challenged can create a professional looking logo design. But there is more to consider than simply whether the logo looks good on your website.
These days your logo needs to be adaptable to a variety of uses throughout social media. It should look sharp and noticeable in many different forms including a Twitter icon, Facebook thumbnail, and Flickr buddy icon.
Whatever your level of design experience, here are some tips to help you make your creation the most usable and effective for online marketing:
Watch Your Aspect Ratio
Most marketing folks will tell you that your logo design shouldn’t be too short and wide or too tall and skinny because it isn’t pleasing to the eye. The social web gives you another reason to keep your width and height in harmony.
Most social media sites put your logo into icons and thumbnails that are square (or close to it). While your logo design doesn’t need to be a perfect square, it should conform to one nicely with little fuss. If you have ever watched a widescreen movie on a boxy 4:3 television, you will understand that the further from a square an image is, the more it will have to be reduced, clipped, or compressed in order to fit into one. In whatever icon or thumbnail your logo is used, you’d like it to be as large as possible – using as much of the available real estate as you can.
Detach Text & Graphics
Because you can’t foresee all the ways you might use your logo design in the future, you want it to be versatile. You may need to rearrange or use only a portion of your logo if it doesn’t fit well into a particular size and shape. For some very small icons, it is usually impossible to include your entire logo. As a result, many companies use a single letter or graphical element from their logo for social media purposes. If your text and graphics are tightly intertwined, it will be difficult to divide your logo design into separate pieces.
Keep It Simple
Avoid thin lines, too many words, and overly detailed graphical elements in your design. Anything too intricate may not be recognizable when the image is resized. If you’re a real estate broker that would like to include an image of a house in your logo, don’t try to include the front door, windows, and the family sitting around the dining room table. Simple geometric shapes will communicate your idea more efficiently. So don’t spend time browsing clip art galleries; they generally aren’t helpful for logo design.
You also want to limit the number of colors and shades that you use. If your logo is too noisy, it can get lost in the backdrop of a busy social media webpage. An uncomplicated logo with two or three colors will stand out better. Not to mention it will be easier and more economical to put it on stuff in the real world – like t-shirts and golf balls.
You can have fun with gradients, shadows, and your favorite Photoshop filters when designing your website, but when it comes to your logo, stick with the principle “less is more”.
Be Consistent
It strengthens your brand when people see the same image everywhere for your business or organization, so try not to have too many different forms in use. Many successful brands create one simplified variation of their logo design that they use for every social media outlet. For example, Woot! uses only the exclamation point as its all-purpose social media icon … including everything from its large 200px Facebook image to its tiny 16px favicon.
This strategy is smart also because you can’t always control how your image will be used by social media sites. They generally allow you to upload one image that is automatically cropped and resized for different uses. Facebook is nice enough to let you specify how your thumbnail is captured from your main image, but Twitter simply resizes your original image to, at last count, as many as 4 different versions. You want a logo that is likely to look the same no matter how it is altered.
Don’t Try To Tell A Story
Take a look around and you’ll notice that many great logos are simply made up of the business name (or abbreviation) in a unique font and color, with sometimes an adjacent graphical element. Don’t obsess over trying to communicate everything about what you do through your logo. While you want the style to be appropriate and complementary to your business, your logo doesn’t have to explicitly tell people what it is.
Your logo doesn’t need a house if you’re a real estate broker or a book if you’re a bookstore. Even if your name doesn’t clearly convey the type of business you are (i.e. “Bill’s Photography”), your marketing activities and messages will associate your logo with your brand in peoples’ minds. Besides, people typically won’t see your logo in isolation without any context. Once you free yourself of the burden of trying to say too much with your logo, you are more likely to create one that is cleaner and more effective.
Take It For A Spin
You want to avoid having to change your logo once it is well established. So you should feel comfortable that it can be easily utilized for any purpose. Be sure to sample your logo in a range of different sizes, but also try it out in all the various social media venues that you may join.
You don’t have to create a profile to test your logo in each site. Simply copy and paste a sample icon from the site into your graphics program, then transform your logo to the same size to see how it will look. Although most of the major sites represent you as a square (geometrically, not personally), there are many, such as shopping comparison sites, that use very specific dimensions. It’s worth taking the time to make sure your logo will work easily everywhere that you want to be.
Conclusion
A good logo design won’t necessarily adhere strictly to all of these guidelines or fit perfectly into every situation. But by taking social media usage into consideration when designing your logo, you’re more likely to create one that will be easy to deploy and have a distinctive online presence.
How well do social media sites handle your logos and images? How do you make sure they look the way you would like?
em>Got Tech Questions? Ask Them on MakeUseOf Answers!
Related posts
- (8)How To Create A Logo Using Custom Shapes In Photoshop
- (7)Create Cool Name Designs With CoolText
- (11)5 Sites To Spread The Love For Google Doodle Pictures
- (6)3 Cool Ways To Check Out An Archive of Google’s Doodles
- (27)YouTube.com – Online Video Sharing Site
See the article here:
6 Tips For A Social Media Friendly Logo Design
This should be the first thing you do. Even though you have all the info needed in your head, putting it on paper will give many advances and definitely be worth the extra work. Not only will you that way be «forced» to think through important issues and possible challenges before they occur, but it can also be a lot easier for you to get the needed help from potential business partners or investors when you have a good business plan to show them.
Do you already have a website or blog? – great! But to maximize its value to you it’s very important to update it regularly. If new clients visit your site and see that you haven’t updated the content for a very long time, that might just be the reason for them to choose someone else instead. Updating regularly will require an hour of your time every now and then but can pay back multiple times rewarding you with new clients.
Giving something extra to the visitors on your website always is a good thing. If you work as a designer you can for example consider putting up some free textures or buttons. This will give your site more visitors and potentially more clients for you. Or how about offering every visitor a percentage off on their first order with you? Again, this could be the extra thing needed to stand out to new clients.
Social media is where many relationships are made these days. No matter which country you live in, using social media can connect you to potential clients and partners all over the world. Twitter is a must, and you should consider Facebook and also forums related to your business. If you are a designer consider having a look at deviantArt and YouTube aswell. In several of these media you can advertise for your own business as long as you make sure to not spam it too much.
Even though your business may go really well, there can and probably will come a bad month or two every now and then. Being a freelancer is being vulnerable to changes in the market. My advice would be to save up a little bit of your income each month, save it in an own savings account so that you have it as a safety buffer for when times get rough. You sure wont regret doing that. It would be a shame if a couple of small bills would ruin everything for you in a bad month.
If you have decided to work from lets say 8am to 4pm every day, then do so. If you have errands to run, private mail accounts to check, private phone calls to make and so on, these will quickly eat of your much-needed work time. Make a promise to yourself to only do this when you are not supposed to work, as in before or after work or during your lunch break. It may not seem that much to you, but I’ve seen several great freelancers getting their days completely messed up because they were not good enough at managing their time properly.
Just as important as actually working when you are at work, is starting when you should and stopping when you should. You may have to prepare yourself for working extra hours every now and then to keep your business alive, but it is very important that you have free time too. You need to recover and get your mind filled with other things or you will get burned out and ruin things for yourself. The more hours you work at once, the less productive you get. So remember to follow your own rules on when to start and stop the day at work.
And by breathing I mean that you need to take care of yourself. You may be freelancing using a computer or two, a camera or other tools, – but the most important tool will always be yourself. And just like any other tool you will be in need of some defragging and polishing yourself. Remember to continue to spend time on your hobbies, friends and family even if you have a busy work schedule.
If you have a home based office it’s important to get some fresh air. Book some of your meetings somewhere else, meet business partners for lunch, or spend an hour or two working from a library or coffee shop with your laptop if you can. The change of scenery may boost your energy level/creativity and give you a lot back.
I love taking notes. Or the more accurate term is I need to always take notes. Ideas, to dos, reminders and other noteworthy items always pop up out of the blue and evaporate as fast as they came.
