Why you should invest in a professional logo design

It’s often tempting to cut corners and attempt to design a logo yourself. Perhaps you have an idea of what you want or you know the basics of a design programme.

Maybe you are a small business with a lack of budget. So why choose to spend it on a seemingly simple task as designing a logo?

Let’s explore some of the pitfalls of DIY logo design and the benefits of hiring a professional.

Common pitfalls

Many self-designed logos often fall into the same traps;

• Poor typography choices. Your choice of font can say a lot about your company. Choosing the wrong font can drastically affect the tone of your logo.
• Too fussy or too intricate a design. It can be tempting to throw too many elements or multiple ideas into the design. This results in an un-cohesive mess.
• Designing for your own tastes rather than your potential customer. It’s often easy to forget that your logo needs to appeal to your customer base rather than your own tastes.
• Using clip art. If you don’t have any artistic abilities or access to any design tools it can be tempting to use clip art for the base of your logo design. Clip art is extremely low resolution and looks highly unprofessional.
• Plagiarism. It’s easy to incorporate an icon from a well-known brand into your own logo but this practice breaks copyright laws and is illegal.

Legibility

Your logo needs to be legible at all sizes. From a phone screen to external signage, there could be many applications for your logo. If the design is too complex or the linework is too thin it simply won’t be legible at a small size.

A common mistake amateurs make when designing a logo is to create it with photographic elements or in a raster programme such as GIMP or even Microsoft Paint. If the logo is scaled up from its original size a dramatic loss in quality will occur leaving the image pixilated.

Vector logos however, can be scaled up (and down) to any size without any loss of quality. The tiny file size of vector logos also makes them perfect for use on websites where page speed is a factor.

Many clients come to us with only a small rasterised version of their logo meaning that it needs to be re-drawn from scratch for use on large scale projects. This would not be necessary with a vector logo.

Off the shelf logos

Many companies exist on the web that allow you to pick from a selection of pre-designed icons combined with text of your choice. Off the shelf logos advertised from as little as £17.99 from companies such as Logojoy, Tailor Brands and Canva seem like an amazing bargain. However, these logos may have been downloaded hundreds, if not thousands of times, meaning that there are potentially many businesses on the web using exactly the same branding.

The benefits of hiring a professional designer

Hiring a professional designer can help you avoid these potential minefields.

• Makes your company look professional. This can help build trust from your customer base
• Benefit from many years of experience choosing the right fonts and colours etc for each project. Fonts and colours can subconsciously convey many emotions. For example: Serif fonts can convey trustworthiness, luxury and seriousness. The colour red can evoke feelings of energy, passion and action.
• Bespoke design. Hiring a professional designer will make sure your logo is unique and free from plagiarism while making your company recognisable and memorable.
• A professional designer will also be able to revamp your existing logo without losing the look of the original design. Periodically modernising logos by changing font, colours and simplifying icons is vital for keeping your brand image up to date.

Designed properly, your new logo can be a real investment to your business. It can give you a tone of voice help you be instantly recognisable and gain you new clients in a sea of other businesses.

Our professional logo design service starts from as little as £250 + vat and we can also revamp your existing logo. Get in touch today for us to help with your new logo.