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3 Tips to Powerful Logos Based on Design Principles

Posted on by Rick E

A company logo is crucial in representing your brand. An excellently made logo will increase your brand recognition and help to make your business easily identifiable, representing your brand professionally and encapsulating its image.  For this reason, we’ve collected three points you need to remember in creating your brand’s logo:

1. Design Appropriate with Your Message

Your logo is a crucial customer touchpoint, and will form the initial impression people have about your brand before they even make a direct transaction. Choosing the right design means giving your logo your brand’s identity. For instance, are you aiming to be serious and formal? Or fun and approachable?

Tailor your logo to your message and mission without being too direct or obvious. You can include your company name in your logo, or just leave powerful icons that matter to your brand.

For example, Apple uses an apple as their brand logo. Attributed to graphic designer Rob Janoff, the Apple logo has undergone numerous changes through the years, but has remained consistent in one thing – the iconic apple. A feature on Janoff’s page shows his creative process in visualizing the company logo around the symbolic fruit it’s become known for.

Janoff’s original design, which was a rainbow-striped apple, meant to humanize the products, emphasize the product’s ability to show colored images, and make it more attractive to the eyes, especially to children. Similarly, use an appropriate design to achieve a distinct identity that sets you apart from the competition.

2. Simplicity is Key

Keep your design as simple as possible without being extremely clean and minimalistic all the time, since a design that’s too bare may also bore people. Having a very intricate logo tends to be confusing, and will be more difficult to reproduce on your products. By definition, a cluttered logo is one that has extraneous elements in its design.

Too many colors, characters, or embellishments that aren’t related to your company’s overall message are considered superfluous elements, and should be left out of your logo.

To get the right balance of character and minimalism, maximize your use of white space. White space, or negative space, is the absence of any objects or elements. You don’t have to saturate viewers with too much glamor to get your message across. Applying white space lets people’s eyes rest and focus on the most important parts of your logo. Leave the backdrop of your logo free of extra elements to help it stand out and grab attention effectively.

If you’re aiming for a powerful impact, an image that summarizes your business identity will suffice. For example, social media platform Twitter’s logo, credited to freelance designer Simon Oxley, features a blue bird. Its latest design is rounded, simple, and unembellished, but it manages to explain what Twitter stands for in a single image, which just goes to show that “show, not tell” applies to logo-making as well.

3. It Should Stick

Like a good tagline, your logo needs to be timeless and memorable. To attract and keep people’s attention, consider tapping into the psychology of shape and color. Different colors affect people in different ways, so knowing which ones to use can give your brand a leverage.

Some of the most common colors used, especially in the food industry, are red and yellow. These warm colors command attention because of their vibrancy. In the same way, shapes can stir certain ideas in your viewers. Those with soft edges, like circles or ovals, project positivity and unity. On the other hand, pointed shapes with more defined edges, like squares and triangles, portray stability and formality.

For a logo that doesn’t intend to use images, shape psychology can still come in handy with the fonts you use. Fonts with softer edges have the same effect as circular shapes, while sleeker, more angular fonts evoke similar reactions as sharp shapes.

Some logos also manipulate negative space to create a clever and striking design. The famous WWF logo designed by British conservationist and ornithologist, Sir Peter Scott, mixes white space and strokes of the color black to create an image of a panda. This play with space and color both effectively encapsulates the organization’s ideals, and serves as a visual treat.

In Conclusion: Logos Can Make or Break Your Brand

Logos need to be catchy and relevant to your business so people can easily associate them with your brand. Remember: find the right logo design by having it reflect your message, and use white space to draw attention to the main parts of your logo. Similarly, tap into shape and color psychology to be both noticeable and unforgettable.

Follow these simple design principles to help your logo stand out in the market.

References

Simon Oxley Idokungfoo for You Illustration. Accessed January 6, 2016. www.idokungfoo.com
“Sir Peter Scott.” WWF UK. Accessed January 6, 2016. www.wwf.org.uk/about_wwf/history/sir_peter_scott.cfm
“The Apple Logo Story.” Rob Janoff. Accessed December 11, 2015. www.robjanoff.com/the-apple-logo-story
“The Psychology of Logo Shapes: A Designer’s Guide.” Creative Bloq. Accessed December 11, 2015. www.creativebloq.com/logo-design/psychology-logo-shapes-8133918
“Twitter_logo_blue.png.” Twitter. Accessed December 11, 2015. https://g.twimg.com/Twitter_logo_blue.png
“WWF Logo – Design and History of WWF Logo.” Logo Design Blog. Accessed January 6, 2016. www.famouslogos.us/wwf-logo“WWF Logo.”
“WWF Logo.” Pixel Logo. Accessed December 11, 2015. www.pixellogo.com/sites/www.pixellogo.com/files/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/WWF-Logo.gif

Featured Image: “Basic Logos” by Armando Sotoca on flickr.com
www.flickr.com/photos/criterion/4693090982

Vibrant Visions: Mastering Color and Typography in Design

Posted on by Rick E

Design is a crucial part of all presentations. With visuals that stand out, you can leave a more memorable impression on your audience. People respond to visual stimuli a lot more, and great design can help your audience process and retain information. Aside from integrating pictures and illustrations into your slides, you can also experiment with color and typography.

DesignMantic came out with 2 infographics that can serve as a design crash course for those looking to improve their PowerPoint decks. In it, they outline some useful tips to guide your color and font choices.

Design Crash Course 1: The 10 Commandments of Color Theory

This infographic breaks down everything you need to know about color theory. Aside from helping you choose colors that match the mood of your presentation, it also offers tips and tricks on how to come up with a solid palette.

Courtesy of Designmantic.com; click on image for full view

Design Crash Course 2: The 10 Commandments of Typography

Typography turns the written word into a visual treat. For this infographic, DesignMantic breaks down everything you need to know about combining different fonts together. As you know, choosing the correct font type is crucial in PowerPoint design. Like color, it can contribute in setting the over-all mood of your presentation.

Courtesy of Designmantic.com; click on image for full view

Get more design tips and PowerPoint ideas by reading back on some of our previous blog posts. To create the best slides for your presentations, always keep your core message in mind. Allow the purpose of your presentation to guide the choices you make when it comes to color and font type. Your designs should elevate the core message of your presentation. It should to highlight the goals you want to achieve, instead of distracting the audience. In other words, presentation design is both aesthetic and functional.

If you need more help, don’t hesitate to contact us and consult with our PowerPoint design experts.

 

Featured Image: Cropped from DesignMantic infographic

Design 101: Basic Principles for Your PowerPoint Designs

Posted on by Rick E

We’ve talked plenty about the different ways you can improve your PowerPoint designs. For marketers, the best tip is to make sure your slides perfectly highlight your brand.

There’s also the case for turning PowerPoint designs into highly visual experiences. Make your data digestible through unique charts and graphs, or illustrate difficult concepts with images and illustrations.

Before you can apply these different tips and techniques, you need a solid foundation to know where to start. Your PowerPoint designs will improve if you can understand and rationalize why each detail you include is necessary. In order to do that, we’ll need to go back to the basics.

To learn more about the core principles of design, let’s look at some slides from the SlideGenius portfolio.

Contrast

Differences add interest to your designs. When you put two opposing elements together, you’re able to highlight one element over the other. This is called contrast and you see it in every instance of visual design. Just take this website for example. The white background contrasts with the dark color of the text, allowing you to see and read it properly.

To add contrast to your PowerPoint designs, you need to create noticeable differences between two or more elements.

In this slide, we highlighted the client’s logo by placing a dark, textured background:

powerpoint designs - contrast color

You can also go beyond using contrasting colors. Aside from the bright green circles that stand out against the filtered background picture, we also made use of contrast in the text sizes.

powerpoint designs - contrast text

In order to emphasize the statistic presented in this slide, “95%” is in a larger font size than the rest of the text.

Alignment

It’s important for your audience to see that the elements in your PowerPoint designs weren’t randomly put together. They need to see that each item was carefully placed together to create a connection and narrative. The principle of alignment can help you with that.

Using the grid lines as a guide, look at how the company logo was aligned perfectly with the background image:

powerpoint designs - alignment

Following the “road map” theme, our designers used an open road as a background image. The company logo was then aligned precisely in the middle of the road. The fact that the logo’s geometric design resembles a compass adds to the overall “roadmap” theme.

Proximity

When the word “proximity” comes to mind, we think of how things are close together or far apart. In design, the principle of proximity is all about grouping together similar elements to create one cohesive visual unit.

Learn how you can apply the proximity principle to your PowerPoint designs with these examples:

powerpoint designs - proximity 1

powerpoint designs - proximity 2

Take note of how our PowerPoint designers grouped the different elements in these slides to create balance and harmony.

Repetition

It’s also important to look at your PowerPoint designs as a whole and not just individual slides. The principle of repetition allows you to create a unified overall design using the same elements throughout your PowerPoint deck. Stick with using the same fonts and colors throughout your presentation so that your audience can easily see a definite structure and a clear progression.

Here’s a quick sample:

powerpoint designs - repetition 1

powerpoint designs - repetition 2

powerpoint designs - repetition 3

You can easily see that these slides come from the same PowerPoint presentation because it maintains a similar template and color scheme throughout. The color green remains dominant in all three slides.

You can start creating great PowerPoint designs by learning the basics. After some practice and experimentation, you’ll see that these principles will become second nature.

 

Featured Image: Carol VanHook via Flickr

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