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One of the most difficult parts of designing a new website or starting a new business is creating a great logo. A great logo presents an image for your business which can mean success or failure with a client. In this article, I’m going to break down the tips and hints I think are necessary to design a great logo and build an image which will work well for your business. To achieve this goal, I’m going to use a couple different logos and break them down into the elements which make them successful.

We’re going to focus on building a logo for a business, but the same techniques can be used to build a logo for a website, a campaign, or a new project.

Business Information

When you start out to create your logo, you need to know some information about your business. For this article, I’m going to explore creating a logo for Explore Startups, a website which provides free business ideas, free business plans, and entrepreneurship articles on how to start your own business.

1. Business/Product/Service Name: ExploreStartups.com

2. Business Slogan: Find Your New Business

3. Feelings Conveyed: Seeking out your new business, adventure, starting out, professional

4. Contemporary / Traditional / Elegant: Contemporary

5. Color Scheme: Dark Red & Dark Green, Blues

6. Preferred Fonts: None preferred, use any

7. Additional Information: Should convey trust as ecommerce launch pending

This gives a good idea of design elements we might want to incorporate into the logo design.

Elements of a Great Logo

When designing a high-quality logo, you need to keep basic rules in mind such as a clean design, bold and memorable, easy to read, communicates your business clearly, and works well in black and white.

Clean Design

Above all else, a clean design is a requirement for creating a great logo. Let’s look at a couple corporate logos and their evolution over the years:

Over the years, Walmart has decluttered their logo and now has a simpler, cleaner look to the logo as a part of their move to attract younger buyers to the stores. As you can see, a cleaner and simpler look is better in logo design.

Delta has also seen changes from the company’s original logo:

It has cleaned it up quite a bit from 1928, when the company was a crop dusting firm.

As you can see, as you create a simpler and cleaner look, the logo looks more professional.

Bold and Memorable

The second foundational element of a great logo is that it is bold and memorable.

You might be thinking, “ok, Jeremy just said the logo should be clean, and now he wants us to make the logo bold." The two are not mutually exclusive. You can have a very simple logo which is very bold and memorable.

The BMW Logo

BMW has an internationally recognized logo for an internationally respected brand. It is very simple – uses circles and pies and the famous three letters, but is bold and memorable – you won’t soon forget the BMW logo.

If you’ve been to London, you won’t soon forget the bold logo for the underground. It not only explains clearly what it is for, but is easy to pick out from blocks away.

You want your logo to be memorable and bold, in addition to conveying a clear and simple message.

Easy to Read

One of the quickest ways to ruin your business image is to design a logo which is not easy to read. Ease of use is fundamental to great logos and designing one with an illegible font is a brand killer.

I know they intended to be creative with it, but the two logo designs presented here for the 2012 Olympics in London are just awful. If it takes too long for someone to think about what the logo means, it’s not a good design. But hey, they’re memorable. Just not in a good way.

Communicates Your Business Clearly

Your logo should clearly communicate what your business is. A few global organizations can get away for an unclear logo design because of sheer branding and exposure, but most firms or websites should clearly communicate their business to the consumer.

One marketing team that didn’t get the memo is Verizon. If you were to look at the logo for Verizon, what would you say their industry is? What products or services do they sell? Is it a local company, a regional company, or a global company?

Contrast the Verizon logo with the AT&T logo. I can’t tell what either company does solely based on the logo, but the AT&T logo tells me something – it wants to or is a global company. It is a very clean and simple design with the font which is clear and legible. The font is bold with a 3D effect on the globe.

The Verizon logo is busy with the checkmark (or is that a corner of a turned box) and the Z that goes on forever.

Works Well in Black and White

The last foundational element for a great logo is whether or not it works well in black and white. Why is this important?

As you build out your marketing collateral, you are sure to find situations where black and white will be a necessity – such as a fax cover sheet or when things are photocopied. Creating a logo which looks good in black and white should be a requirement.

The AT&T logo shown here is on a store door in black and white and works quite well.

Make sure you are able to create a black and white logo and that it is clear, legible, and still communicates you brand message.

Designing a Great Logo

There is some perspective in whether or not a logo is great, but following the foundational steps can help you create a logo which is both awesome and functional.

As we set down to design the Explore Startups logo, we wanted to keep these steps in mind and create a logo which was both simple and bold. It needed to convey a new start for someone – Explore Startups is a website to help people start a business. It also needed to convey an adventure – starting out down a new path.

First, we start out with the conceptual drawings and ideas. These are simple black and white concept drawings to explore the ideas our logo should convey. This may not necessary result in a final logo – and frequently doesn’t even resemble the final logo. The idea here is throw out concepts which can lead down the path to a great logo.

With all of these elements in mind, we started out with a simple concept:

We want someone to be an explorer, so this could represent the visitor as he explores different business ideas.

ExploreStartups. The guy or gal needs to explore something. We took the concept a step further and sent her on a mission to find a new business idea:

So, what about the name, ExploreStartups? How will this fit into the logo. What if we have the guy explore from the other direction and mark him with an “e”?

Sometimes an idea works, and sometime it just leads to a new idea. We are going to scrap the little man, but the inspiration to set out in exploration has been set.

As we contemplated the idea of the site, we thought about setting out to find a business which takes us into the future. What about setting out on a path for a new day?

Starting out with the sunrise for the new day, we added a path to reflect our journey:

You can see, we added some color. We went through several iterations of color for the sunrise and ground, to finally settle on a blue sky:

The blue not only fits our color scheme, but also communicates a better message with our blue skies ahead.

Now that we have a graphic for the logo, we need to focus on the text.

We started out with a simple Arial and bolded Explore. We felt like the words should be as big as the graphic above, so we changed to Arial Black as the font:

There, a logo we can be happy with. A subsequent redesign of the website required a new format of the logo as it fit better horizontally. This change also produced what we consider a bolder look to the logo:

Here’s how the Explore Startups logo fits into one of the business idea pages on ExploreStartups.com:

As you can see in the design of the website, the bold colors really help the site stand out. The red from the word EXPLORE is used in the buttons and search bar. Additionally, the green makes the headings really stand out.

As you set out to design your logo, remember the key points we discussed in this article: keep it simple, bold and memorable, easy to read, communicates your product or service clearly, and works well in b&w.