[title_box title= »Company logo design: designing brand identities, logos and style guides »]
We design your company’s logo and brand identity to promote your image across all your marketing media. We use our creative talent and bespoke service to design a logo which promotes your know-how and expertise, to ensure your logo projects a strong, unique image: yours!
GRAPHIC DESIGN BOOK: Logo and Style Guide
We will design and revamp your logo. Your logo is a vehicle for your company’s image. Your logo is a graphic sign which ensures instant recognition of your company, products, services or events.
Our aim is to give your logo a strong identity which makes you stand out from your competitors.
By listening to your needs and following our step by step process, we use our expertise to offer solutions for your logo design and promote a strong identity: yours!
Once your logo has been designed it will be included in your style guide. A style guide is used to set out rules on how a logo should be used in order to build a company’s brand identity (or that of its products).
The style guide is used by anybody who may need to use the company’s logo. We will give you the style guide, to be used by yourself or your partners, along with the source files for the logo to be used on websites, stationery, promotional goods, etc. In a way, the style guide is the instructions on how to use the logo.
It ensures consistent design across everything you need to create.
This is how we design your logo:
Stage 1: THE BRIEF
We will meet to discuss what you want, your requirements and to get to know your company. The aim and the image you want your logo to convey (is it for a national or international audience? Do you have subsidiaries?). Your company’s strengths and which adjectives convey them best. We will use this initial analysis to draw up specifications together for your logo design.
Stage 2: ENVIRONMENT ANALYSIS
We’ll research your business sector; the economic climate, your competitors and partners, and what they’re doing. The aim of this benchmarking is to pinpoint the image your business sector has, to make you stand out and create a strong identity: yours!
Stage 3: ROUGH SKETCHES
We’ll produce a series of rough sketches of ideas for your logo. This stage will help us choose which direction we want to take. We let our imagination run wild and come up with a selection of sketches. Then we look over the selection, rule out some options and keep the ideas we think are most suitable for your logo.
Stage 4: CHOOSING THE TYPEFACE
There are lots of things to think about when designing a logo, and the typeface is an important one. The typeface of your logo has to match your company’s mindset. The font style can affect how easy your logo is to read, and its look and feel.
The font we use can affect how well each letter reflects your company. The typeface dictates the emotional response and the atmosphere your logo inspires.
It’s our job to find the typeface which best conveys your company’s branding so that you can attract your target audience!
We use the Vox-ATypI classification for typefaces. It was invented by Maximilien Vox in 1954, and adopted in 1962 by the Association Typographique Internationale (ATypI).
I – Classicals: Humanist, Garald and Transitional
The Humanist, Garald and Transitional group contains classical or historical typefaces.
II – Moderns: Didone, Mechanistic and Linear
The Didone, Mechanistic and Linear group contains modern typefaces invented after the Industrial Revolution at the end of the 19th century. The arrival of machinery resulted in these simple, functional typefaces.
III – Calligraphics: Glyphic, Script, Graphic, Blackletter
The Glyphic, Script, Graphic, Blackletter group are typefaces inspired by calligraphy.
IV – Non-Latin or Exotics
The Non-Latins include heterogeneous typefaces.
Stage 5: CHOOSING THE COLOURS
The colours need to fit the typeface and design. It’s a proven fact that colours influence our reactions; Newton studied this with his colour wheel, then Goethe with his Theory of Colours.
Choosing the colours of your logo goes hand in hand with the design; colours dictate subconscious behaviour in men and women. They provoke reactions and emotions. We will choose the logo colours with you depending the type of your business. They have to reflect your expertise so that the logo ‘matches’ your sector, brand or event.
Colour choices vary across the world and amongst different cultures or religions. It’s important to take these things into account to avoid harming your image. We will help you throughout the design process for your logo.
A few examples of what colours mean*:
Red: Red is one of the three primary colours used in additive colour. A sign of energy or urgency, it is stimulating but contradictory. Love or anger, courage or danger, ardour or prohibition; this colour affects emotions and conveys heat and energy.
Green: If any colour is big right now, it has to be green. A symbol of nature, plants and health, anybody trying to show how environmentally friendly they are willingly uses it across their website to give it a ‘green feel’. Green is also calming and refreshing and used to reflect luck and hope.
Blue: Blue has traditionally been the colour for boys – and pink for girls. Blue is the colour of uniforms, and a sign of authority. It’s also the colour chosen for the European Union flag and the official colour for recycling (blue bins are used for recycling newspapers).
Yellow: Sunshine and happiness, yellow is a joyful, stimulating colour which creates movement and has a celebratory feel about it. Being the colour of welcome and social contact, bright yellow is perfect for promoting events or adding punch to campaigns.
Black: A mix of all colours, black isn’t a colour as such, but complements all other shades very well. It projects strong values which are deeply set in Western thinking. Black can be negative in some contexts as it is associated with mourning, fear and sadness. On the other hand, it can also enhance the design of a website by adding an elegant, stylish, upmarket touch.
White: From an optical point of view, white doesn’t exist as a colour because it is produced from the combination of wavelengths of all the colours. Pure, balanced, neutral, white conveys positive values in the Western world. In particular it is associated with weddings, virginity and religion.
*Taken from the trinity advise.com website.
Stage 6: CHOOSING THE GRAPHICS (THE SHAPE OF THE LOGO)
Whether it’s square, round or curved, with a picture, mascot or symbol, your logo should be simple, uncomplicated and make sense with regard to your business and your company’s values.
We use our creative flair to design a straightforward logo. It is this simplicity which will make your logo easy to remember and recognise. Your logo has to be associated with your brand, service or product at first glance.
Stage 7: PRESENTATION OF OUR GROUNDWORK
Once we’ve been given your brief, got our creative juices flowing and done the groundwork, we’ll produce a contact sheet with some draft designs so that you can choose the colours, fonts and shapes that suit you best.
The work and discussions that go into our offers are critical to what we do: this will be your logo and will convey your image for several years to come, so we need your views and opinions so that we can finalise the best logo possible.
Listening and talking to you will help us to finalise your logo.
Stage 8: THE LOGO STYLE GUIDE
Once the logo has been finalised we’ll produce a style guide for it. This means explaining how it should be used on various supports (brochures, posters, websites, PowerPoint presentations, promotional objects, vehicle wraps, etc.). These details are part of creating your brand identity so that it is instantly recognisable.