Recently I was asked what made a good logo. I have a definite philosophy about logo design, and it seems that a lot of the web doesn’t agree.

I have found that a good logo has three main elements: a graphic, the name of your site, and a slogan. If you have these three key points in a logo you achieve several things.

First, and foremost, you provide a logo that sets the foundation for the rest of your website. I always try to have a design project start by having the logo designed first. By beginning with the logo you can see on a small scale the web canvass you have for the overall site.

The second thing that is achieved with a good logo focuses more on a marketing strategy.

1. The graphic within the logo design provides a symbol that can be used throughout the site layout.
2. Your name in the logo provides branding so to make it easier for your visitors to remember your name and hopefully return.
3. The logo slogan tells your visitors what your site is about. In my opinion your slogan is the most important. There’s nothing I hate more than not being able to figure out what a site is about.

With all this said, there is nothing better than real life logos to illustrate my point. Below are logos that follow these rules (Perfect), logos that followed some of the rules (Almost), and logos that defy all the rules (Bad). ~Paul W.

PERFECT

Clever way of integrating the graphic to create an “O” for the company name.

This site uses their domain name as their slogan.

You wouldn’t think that their slogan is that good but “Web Design Company” gets 40948 searches a day.

ALMOST

The funny thing is that when I snagged Alec’s logo he had just posted: Can a Logo Be Too Simple?

Is the navigation their slogan?

As stated in an earlier post, the client on this logo asked me to add a majority of the content to their site, and even after sifting through their mountains of content I had no idea what they were trying to achieve with their website.

BAD

In my opinion this was the worst logo I could find. It told me absolutely nothing about the site.

This logo is proof that you can follow all the rules and still not be a good logo.

This logo seems to me to be more a work of art than a logo.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 23rd, 2008 at 11:34 pm and is filed under Web Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.