Acquiring new customers is a major challenge for small business owners all across the world. The struggle is similar to all, but a handful of them recognize early on that good branding is essential in order to find new clients and make their business a popular name.
So what is the best method to make a business memorable, that is simply unforgettable and sticks into everyone’s mind who sees it? A good smart design for starters. You have to make fast and smart design decisions.
How do you build a memorable small business? Invest in smart design!
Ask any experienced graphic designer and they would surely say that great design begins with doing proper research, understanding the audience, and using some basic design hacks to help the enterprise success.
Any form of a graphic design representing a company is important to its marketing goals. Though experience comes handy while graphic designing, small business owners who do not have the budget to hire expensive professional designers can still get their way around following a standard set of design rules to aid their branding efforts.
So, let us study these basic design hacks used by talented graphic designers.
5 Design Hacks For A Small Business Logo
Hack #1 : Simple Design Wins, Everytime
Less than ten seconds is all you have to create an impression on a customer. A research found that it requires just 50 milliseconds for an individual to create an opinion, after looking at a brand for the first time.
Your logo has to be a simple design to connect instantly and attain user attention while conveying exactly what your business offers. The simpler the better. The number of elements in your design directly affects the ability of a user to process and recognize it effectively.
Famous author Antoine de Saint-Exupery once said quoting designers, that they know they have achieved perfection in their design, not when there’s nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to remove.
So keep your logo to a minimum number of elements, like graphic, shape, color and font. All these elements aligning together cohesively help effective processing of the logo by a potential customer. Also, it adds to the recall factor of the logo. In short, a simple design is all you need.
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Hack #2 : Good Logo Colors, All You Need
Psychology of color plays a paramount role in logo design process. You can find a great deal of articles, books and courses supporting this fact. Research has found that color plays a huge role in the response of a user to a logo, a product, or even the business itself.
Another study says that people usually decide about a product or person within 90 seconds of initial interaction with them. And what further adds to the study is that (62‐90)% of this decision solely relies on the colors they see or are exposed to.
So any graphic design that is related to your business, such as a logo design or a business card design must be thoroughly looked into. Sensible use of colors can help users in differentiating your product line from your competitors. It can also help to influence a customer’s mood or feelings towards your product. Focus on evoking positive emotions and its definitely going to aid your marketing efforts.
Like discussed above, color choice is imperative and can greatly contribute in making your logo memorable. Don’t give in to the temptation of picking lots of colors. Stick to a simple and bright color palette, choosing no more than two or three colors. It helps in making your logo look simple and not appear cluttered or difficult to process for a customer. Choose contrasting colors and they will surely help in producing an eye pleasing logo that will support your business branding.
You can check out Coolors for discovering amazing color palettes or getting inspirational color combinations for your business logo.
Hack #3 : Focus On Shape & Space Relationship
While designing your logo, focus on having a minimum number of design elements that complement each other. Designers should pay extreme attention to the lines in the logo. The choice of font, thickness of the lines, how cohesive all the design elements look together, all of this should be worked upon and not just the basic outline of the logo.
Shapes of design elements, choice of colors and the chosen font styles can all help to connect with a user subconsciously. The various logo design elements trigger a connect and the repeated exposure to the design keeps building the relationship. You can learn more about this in the featured logo design trends article.
For example, the choice of Oval and Circular shapes for logo design is one of the most used design practice. The round shapes do not have any points or corners. This helps in giving the logo an informal feel, which helps in connecting with the customer easily and conveys a feeling of warmth and security.
Rectangles and Squares communicate trust and a stable positioning. These appear more formal while signifying boldness and strength.
Triangles, on the other hand are used less commonly for outer lines of a logo. The reason for the same lies simply in the fact that we all use arrows to give direction ideas. Hence, triangles are generally seen within a logo as a smaller element or substituting for similar looking alphabets like V & A.
White space or simply put, empty space in a logo is a crucial component as well. It should be used wisely to form the overall look of the logo and the proportion of the various design elements.
Hack #4 : Pick A Unique Design
It can be quite tempting to decide on a logo design heavily motivated by other famous logos in the industry, but you should refrain from doing so. Though it can help your audience to remember your logo by making it similar to a more known famous design, but the long term effects would be damaging to your business as well as brand. You will fail to create a strong identity for your business, the primary reason you started out for.
Memorable designs are created by appreciating the fine line between the known and the unique. Should you still choose to go for a design closer to famous familiar designs, try for ways to make your design stand out and have an identity of its own. Play with color combinations, choose an eye-catching font, use hand drawn elements. All these would help make your small business logo unique and memorable. You can also use design crowdsourcing sites for sourcing your company logo, it will save you both time and money that you can reinvest in your business.
Hack #5 : Understand Your Audience
Creating designs that are memorable and stick with a customer demands that you just are constantly in sync with, who you are designing for. For making a memorable small business logo, the prime research lies on the target clientele that you are trying to appeal.
Any given company has its particular segment of people that it wants to target regularly. The research for business clients usually consists of finding the requirement or needs of the customers, planning a way to bridge this gap and then implementing a marketing campaign. In order to impress them with a solution to their needs and convert them into your happy loyal consumers. Conversions take time, sometimes a little longer than usual, but your logo is always the initial step.
General market research is suggested for companies of almost any size. A deeper research will enable you to go an extra mile and even anticipate how your customers may react to different ways in which your business could be presented and what exactly your clients want and expect. As covered above, shape and color psychology are the pillars on which market research is built.
When it comes to anything related to design, knowing what you would like to exactly convey to your audience is critical. Moreover, understanding the way to effectively convey the same is even more crucial.
Conclusion
Do proper market research, understand the thought process of your customers and then apply these five design hacks. This widely used logo design recipe has helped numerous businesses to create a perfect small business logo. To be completely sure about your business logo, you can develop multiple versions of your logo, seek feedback from friends & family, and then do proper tweaking to your finished logo design. You can expect the final logo design to be truly memorable and perfect for attracting new customers.
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