It’s easy to get carried away with logo design, but there are a few factors that need to be taken into account to ensure you get the most benefits from your logo. Some of the most popular and well known logos consist of a simple design, but are easily recognized and associated with a specific company.

So how do you set about designing a logo that conveys your message to the public and brands you as being the undisputable expert in your field or the best supplier of a particular product or service? The very first step should be to carefully examine your design to ensure it conveys the right message. Other things to consider are the colors, the size, and what sort of font are you using, is it clear and legible? Does everything blend well together? Each component of your logo should be examined as to how well it fits together as a whole. Get the opinion of friends, business associates, family and ask them what they think.

Selecting the right colors is critical, and plays a major role in catching your customers’ attention. A combination of poorly matched colors can be equally detrimental in turning customers’ away. Some businesses like to use the color scheme of their business premises or staff uniforms, but it comes down to what you think best represents your company. Many people tend to be visual; consequently their choices are often made about things that are visually appealing to them.
Spend some time to study existing corporate businesses you will notice certain trends are prevalent in their choice of colors and logos. For example banks and financial institutions lean towards dark blues and reds in an effort to convey a sense of security and reliability.

Once you decide on your color scheme you then need to consider the style of your logo, what does it convey to the viewer? Are you a conservative or exclusive business, maybe budget priced or young and trendy, try and put yourself in the mind of the customer when looking at your logo. Is the name of your company or business included in the logo design? In newer businesses this could help with branding, but companies like Nike don’t even have to put their name with their logo everyone automatically associates the logo with the company.

It’s important to consider the size and scale of your logo. Where will it be used? Will it have impact on billboards as well as on websites or stationary? These are factors that you need to be mindful of when developing your logo design.

In summary, having an effective and eye catching logo is a critical part of your business and can have a lot of influence on building your customer base. Take the time to evaluate each aspect of your logo and the final result could pay you dividends.

However, in a visual world like ours is more likely harder to succeed without an image to offer when it comes to launching a business or promoting any already established business, and it is also more difficult promote without a logo that makes people identify a company or associate it with the products or services offered.

For companies this is not a big deal thanks to a careful plan of each and every aspect developing a company and its marketing, but the smaller the company the more chances of demoting the importance of the logo, particularly from entrepreneurs or individuals who sometimes prefer to do their own advertising to save costs.

The exception makes the rule and sometimes a large company may forget to put attention on the logo design while envisioners do it, no matter if the logo is intended to be used only on their personal business cards when there is not a company yet to promote it.

Both companies and individuals may be seduced with the idea of getting a low cost design just to abide with the basic guidelines saying “if you have a business you need a image” but not being important at all for them, makes no difference get an amateur designer or do it by themselves.

However, amateur designs are easy to detect reducing the successful possibilities of making a business or independent profession look like they are unstable or not serious. Customers pay attention to logos even unconsciously and logos made “on the fly” with well-known clip art or notorious improvisation do not give customers enough confidence to create business with people behind an unprofessional image.

For small business and entrepreneurs the logo can make a significant difference in trying to find a niche or establish a solid presence if they already have one. Many people consider the use of free logos and stationary templates made professionally but being public domain or freeware make the business look like small low-budget companies or amateurs making their way.

If your business does not matter to you, it will not matter to your customer except to confirm your products and services are low quality even if they are the best. On the opposite side, paying for a professional logo design will not be worth it if you do not keep consistency by using a design for your business cards and another for your marketing material or stationary causing confusion among any potential customer.

A logo is made of a name, an image, a linear or geometric trace, if not a picture, but also readable. This means the use of fonts and selecting the right typeface for your brand is a must. Typefaces can become a logo by themselves as proof of this look at Google, Yahoo, Adidas, Coca-Cola and many other brands you identify more than for an image for the typeface.

When designing your likes, think of no more than two typefaces but one is best and choose the style according to the whole concept. If you are designing the logo for an antique shop, you probably will not choose a Futurama or Alien font as typeface but Old English or Rudelsberg, except if you do not have common sense.

Size of typeface does matters and it depends of the weight and shape of the font. Wide typefaces can be unsuitable for small logos and thin fonts will vanish in the middle of elaborated designs. Select a typeface; test its readability by shrinking the final image to the smallest possible usage. If legible then, go for it.

Logos are important, as they will become the identity of a person, a product, a group or a company. When the right logo comes up from the drawing board (physical or on-screen) it may become a lifetime identity card, so once finished you have designed what you think is your masterpiece, let it rest for awhile.

Many artists consider they can improve their work, add a personal touch or start from scratch after a few days when returning to their designs they find the masterpiece is not yet what they want as a final result and even find costly misspellings or misplacing.

Now review you overall work. If you want to create a portfolio and a reputation as professional designer, never ever use clip art. There are thousand of pre-made designs online or available through CD’s and they come either colorful or in black and white but they also expose you as an amateur designer.

If creation of original images is your pain you may always avoid graphics and limit your designs to lines, geometric forms or just typefaces, remember Google? Otherwise partner with a professional or get from him/her the single original graphics you need.

Many professional logo designers can take the product that you have created and fine tune it or improve on it to your satisfaction. The idea will be to get your image across so everyone that looks at your logo knows what it stands for.

Learning to use the correct colors to trigger the correct response can enhance your website and have your visitors becoming regular customers or guests to your website. All of this can be achieved with graphic design.

With just a little knowledge of how the different colors will affect your guests, you with the aid of a professional graphic design artist, can have your guests feeling excitement, relaxation, or content.

The three basic concepts for colors that can be used to your benefit with graphic design are active colors, passive colors, and neutral colors. Active colors are also warm colors and include yellow, orange and red. These types of colors enforce positive attitude, confidence and happiness. Reds make you feel warm, like a cozy fireplace whereas yellow or golden colors can bring out creativity. Passive colors are blues, greens and purples and these enforce contentment and restoration. The neutral colors are gray, beige, white, and taupe. These colors are usually used along with other colors to help bring about a transition.

Now, you know the basics, but what about moods. The different colors that you use for your graphic design can also bring about desirable moods for your visitors. The mood that you set on your website with graphic design can create a wonderful atmosphere that will bring about visitors becoming regular clients. If you wish to convey a mood that soothes and comforts then pink is your answer, yellow will give your guests increased energy and a cheerful mood, white shows purity and works with other colors to bring out life, black gives a mood of authority and discipline, orange increases the appetite and is also very cheery, red gives your guests the mood of being in power, purple creates mystery while comforting, and blue will relax your guests.

Using these tips along with lines, shapes and photos your graphic design will have your guests in the mood to buy, read, or converse in your forum in no time.

Simple always will be better the same for the novice than for the expert. Deciding on how the logo will look or how it will be used is the first step. Whether personal, for a product, service or corporate identity, the logo has to be unique including a name alone, and icon or both, but not an icon alone if people are unable to identify the name it represents.

If this will be your first experience designing a logo you probably may need to research for existent logos and samples for a better idea on how a logo is designed. Even if you have been working on them for a long time, research may stimulate your creativity and compare your designs against those of your competitors or people related to your industry branch, group or clan.

Make your work easier by designing in black and white. Most graphic programs allow you to do it by decreasing the resolution. This action is useful to focus your attention on shape, size and typeface and also experimenting with different colors just by filling in, always keeping the black and white copy, neat for faxing and photocopy.

Once working with the basic design make sure the name you are working with is clear withing the shape of the logo. Put yourself from the potential viewers perspective to find if it is readable enough and fix it as many times to meet your needs.

Logos must be made considering 3 different scenarios:

- Rich color. The logo designed using this criteria is for the sole use on web pages keeping in mind surfer’s screen color resolution.

- Black and white for faxing, emailing and photocopy; if it is true the can be sent in a gamma of colors, selecting just black and white make easier the sending and reduce costs.

- From 2 to up 4 or 6 colors; the less colors the most cost effective to print, but keep in mind the color you are seeing on your monitor not always will match the same tones once printed. A Pantone color swatch book is an expensive add on to make them match but useful if you are wanting to become a professional designer.

If you are selling products such as books, ebooks, gift items, or anything else that you can visual see then by adding a photo of the product will dramatically lead to more sells. A nice clean and appealing website can increase your sales like you would not believe. Just a small thing like an order button and a photo of the product will bring in more sales.

Think about it. You are wishing to buy an automobile online. You find one that sounds perfect by the description and the price is excellent and within your budget. But, you decide to keep searching; you find another website with a photo of the automobile and a description. It is priced just above your budget. More than likely you will purchase the one with a photo, because you can see what you are getting. The same goes with your customers.

Anyone can describe a book and they may get a few sales, but add a photo of the ebook cover or book and your sales are sure to increase over someone that does not use any type of graphic design.

The best way to get quality graphic designs for your website is of course hire a professional. But, if you really desire to create your own there are products out there that can help. But, I would not recommend creating your own. There is an art to creating graphic design that will be appealing and of the best quality. A person trained in graphic design can bring the feel of your company to the web pages.

You will find that trying to create the graphic design for your website is not as easy as it may look. You can not just add some photos and you’re done. You will want your entire website to flow with the same image throughout all the pages with the same header graphics, footer graphics and even background graphics. If all of this does not match up correctly your website will not look professional. Just adding graphic designs will not be enough to get sells if the design is not correct.

First before anything else, you need to understand the importance of design. Quality graphics are not just some no-sense forms pretending to be innovative designs. However, from these design masterpieces are born. Nevertheless, a logo design is not just a piece of artwork but must also convey to the audience a bit about your company or website.

Nowadays, graphic design is commonly used in all industries and standards of all disciplines including the representation of ancient cultures as renewed images making it easier to identify them by visual association.

Graphic design includes a series of developments such as stationery, flyers, brochures, posters, corporate and social literature, website design, invites wording , banners and lettering, cards and ecards, books and e-books cover, packaging, multimedia, presentations, branding and logo design

There are many others, but the above are the most common marketing tools that most individuals and companies use to promote their services and products or their public image, this is the reason why the graphic representing a concept should be consistent and professionally designed.

With all this in mind, now is time to analyze every aspect around designing original logos. Most professionals consider there are 6 basic elements of graphics and logo design including typography, shape, space, line, color and texture:

- Typography refers to the letters and arrangement of letters on a medium; typography is also referred as typeface of just fonts.

- Shape is the form of each element on a medium, based on its width and height.

- Space is just the area between the different elements on a medium.

- Line refers to the path or intangible path connecting 2 points.

- Color is the pigment applied to a surface of a given medium.

- And finally, texture refers to the visual effect of each element on the graphic composition.

Once the designer puts together all these individual elements, we can say he has built the block needed to develop any graphic design including logos of any kind understanding and mastering the basics while gaining skills and expertise because design is an art, not an science, and it requires also lots of creativity.