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The Perfect Logo Design

From a marketing point of view, your logo is your business's most prized possession. It's the face of your business, and it's often the most powerful communicator to prospective customers. If you're planning a new business, your first priority lies with achieving the perfect logo design. Here are some tips to get you started.

1. Make sure your logo design will stay legible. A strong logo design will continue communicating your brand, no matter if it's photocopied a hundred times, faxed through a low quality fax machine, reduced in size or displayed at a distance. Overcomplicated graphics in a logo design can turn into a big mess if rescaled to a smaller size, such as on a letterhead or website. Similarly, fancy typefaces can be unreadable at a distance or if greatly reduced in size. For these reasons, make sure all the logo design elements are well spaced and simple.

Using high contrast colours in the logo design is equally important, as light colours will vanish when photocopied, faxed or scanned. Even different colours of the same lightness - for example, dark red next to dark green - can be a problem when photocopied. To avoid mishap, make sure the important elements in your logo design contain a mixture of dark and light colours, and can easily translate to black and white.

2. Create a simple, user-friendly logo design. A simple logo design will not only ensure your logo's longevity through numerous photocopiers and fax transmissions, it also guarantees people will understand your logo design without thinking twice. Overcomplicating your logo design will simply destroy its communicative power. Pick out the key part of your logo - in most cases the business name - and make it larger, bolder or brighter than everything else. Avoid a logo design with too many elements, or overcomplicated graphics. Also, avoid side-ways or upside down writing - and anything that may demand extra effort to process. You want people to spot your logo and understand it, even in passing.

3. Make your logo design accessible to everyone When creating your logo design, consider some accepted accessibility standards. For example, inadvisable colour combinations like red and green will exclude people with a colour vision deficiency, which is roughly 10 per cent of the population.

Ensure your logo will also be legible to people with poor long-distance eyesight, by keeping text characters and elements well spaced and avoiding ambiguous typefaces. Research the graphics you intend to use, as you might not know what a symbol means in another culture. Lastly, avoid using graphic logos by themselves without a legible business name attached. Unless you're Nike, Kellogg, or have a multi-million marketing budget drilling your logo into people's heads, a graphic by itself will be forgotten within minutes.

For more handy design and printing tips, head to your nearest Kwik Kopy Centre.