Five common logo design mistakes you should avoid

So maybe you’ve decided to DIY your brand identity, and that included creating your own logo design. Have you ever wondered how should your logo look? And what are the best practices when designing a logo. In today’s blog post I’ll be sharing the five most common logo mistakes, specially when it comes to entrepreneurs DIYing their logo. Now DIY has been getting a lot of bad rep! But instead of telling business owners to just invest in a brand designer. Instead I’m revealing five logo design mistakes you can avoid at all costs. Stop making silly logo design mistakes that make your brand look unprofessional. After this blog post you’ll want DIY your logo from scratch to a high standard and be able to shut out that inner voice that keeps questioning if your doing it right! But if your a bit behind on scheduling all your social media posts why not work on your business as well as learning how to improve it on the podcast – episode 009 on >>Apple Podcast<< or >>Spotify<<

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Thank you, Olivia x

Logo Fundimentals

Time 00:37

Firstly, there are actually seven variations of different types of logos, you can have monogram, word mark, pictorial, abstract mark, mascot, emblem, combination mark. A logo mark is a symbol of identification, but it’s also much more than that. I know a logo is not your brand but it is still so very important and should be considered very carefully. Your logo can actually really help covey your brand story and help you connect to your ideal audience. It should be designed to make a good first impression with your people and help invite them in to interact with your brand. It’s used as a way for your ideal audience to remember you better as well, to distinguish you a part from others. Let’s get straight into the five common logo mistakes I see when business owners have DIY it.

The Brand Name FoPars!

Time 01:33

Before you start to even think about designing your logo you need to do your research. A brand word or name should be heavily researched before you definitely decide to use it. Many of you listening are probably using your name which you should also make sure is the best options for your brand. So the first thing to think about before choosing a brand name is evaluating it. Is it easy to remember, the spelling isn’t to difficult the length of it is to long.

Then with research make sure that the brand name you want to use hasn’t already been trademarked, otherwise you legal cannot use it. You should also research that if the name or wording you want to use doesn’t have any bad connotation to it. You don’t want someone to search your brand name and it’s linked or associated with anything negative. There this content influencer I watch on Youtube she called Cathrin Manning, but originally she branded herself as the Content Bug, and she even does video why she should of done more research. Because when you type bug into Google’s search engine it’s considered a negative think linked to software and having a bug in your system. So make sure your being extra carefully when choosing your brand name.

Complex & Busy Logo Designs

Time 03:10

Now moving onto the design so if you’ve been designing or thinking about including a logo mark with your logo text within your design there are few rules you should bare in mind here. The main common mistake I see is using too many disconnected elements. Trying to include too much within your logo can actually hurt your brand. When you add 4 separate elements it starts to look busy and fragmented it can make it less memorable in your ideal customers mind.

Logos should be simple but distinctive and show personality. It’s going to be hard to balance that, specially if you’re not a designer. But by squeezing too much into it can also make it difficult and confusing for your customers to know where they should be focusing on and actually can find it a bit irritating. I’m not saying you have to have a very minimal logo just text or just a mark of course you can include both but it should be done right.

Firstly your logo elements should look as a whole and all belong together. When I say this I mean your logo typeface you’ve picked should compliment the icons, symbols or illustration you have decided to include. The logo should have a seamless flow and air about it, I don’t mean you have to connect everything together with a line like dot to dot, you can and should have breathing space between elements but it can’t look disjointed.

Using overly generic symbols and icons

Time 04:41

We’ve completed two logo mistakes, moving on to number three and personally I find this mistake my most annoying design pet-peeves, when I see businesses include generic and obvious marks or symbols within their logo. For example, a photographer including a camera icon, a wedding cake decorator including a cake illustration or a makeup artist including a make up brush. So why do people jump to this? It usually comes from a place of fear your worried if you don’t include it people wont understand what it is that your offering. But really these generic marks are shooting you in the foot!

A generic camera logo symbol doesn’t really show your brand personality or tell us more than what you offer. Your logo is a time to show your brand unique qualities and help you distinguish yourself from others within your field. A generic logo makes your brand look generic. Every photographer uses a camera, it’s the tool they all use but it’s really the idea you, your personality, how you coach your clients behind the camera how you make them feel comfortable so that you can draw out the best results from them to get a great photo.
Obviously we still want people to understand what it is that you are offering. Specially if your using your name people wont know what it is that you do so you do need to make it clear. The best way to do this is through a short and sweet tagline that clearly explains what you do, for example you can add simple the word photographer or preferably go more niche like wedding photographer or family photographer or brand photographer. This is straight to the point, a definitive statement we don’t need a camera icon to tell us your photographer we know what you use!

Selecting an inappropriate font & bad font pairing

Time 06:51

The fourth common logo mistake is firstly choosing an inappropriate font for your logo and brand. It’s curial you choose a font that matches your brand personality and purpose. Inappropriate font selection can happen for many reasons firstly it hard choose fonts, because to the untrained eye a number of fonts can look fairly similar. But you need to at the close details and remember there are font categories, we have serif which is usually the more traditional typeface, we have the san serif the more modern and contemporary options we also have script the feminism and hand written more natural etc. Font help include a feeling, it can visual inject emotion and character, remember “it’s not what you say it’s how you say it”. So make sure you choose a font that represent your brand well. You also need to be aware of the spacing between letters which is called kerning and the alignment.

Too little space between letter can make it harder to read to far a part can also do the same so you need to play around with the space of your characters to get the right place of breathing space. More issues can arise when we see a logo with two fonts, and this usually is do to bad font pairing. The rule of thumb is sticking to a maximum of two fonts anymore it loots messy, also remember that your fonts shouldn’t be in a ring trying to competition in a battle for attention, one should be more dominate and the other less so. This may seem obvious but I want to reiterate that the dominate font you do pick should be highlight the most important part of the logo your companies name, the second font can be used to inform your audience what it is you do and offer and who you do it for. It’s all about creating a balance and harmony so if your dominate font is very elaborate and detailed, your secondary font should be far more simple allow your fonts compliment each other nicely with through differences.

Over Kill On Colours

Time 09:07

Moving on to the last common logo mistake, that is colour. Firstly before we even think about colour your logo should work in black and white first. If it doesn’t work in black and white then colour can’t fix a poorly designed logo. The thing with colour is it is so influential and fundamentally linked to our emotions. Colour actually helps us navigate around in our everyday environment and life without us even realising it. We use colour to identity signals, such as traffic lights green go, amber wait and red stop. Colour is so powerful it can actually affect our moods and feelings. Important all colours already has a lot of predisposed meanings.

So its important that your selecting the right colour for your brand personality. It overly important to use a colour that is a part of your brand identity and not a random new colour. If our logo is in a completely different colour to anything else you publish that will seem confusing to your audience, your logo is a representation of your brand therefore should align and match your brand identity colour palette too. Remember to fall back on your brand strategy, haven’t got a brand strategy in place? Go listen to >>episode 003 << How to build you brand strategy in 5 steps. Should also be mindful of pairing colours and looking at the saturation and values. Also make sure your not trying to use your whole brand colour palate within your logo, more that 2 colour is a bit over. Over kill on colours will actually make your brand character and personality unclear and harder to resonate with your ideal audience.

The Logo Mistakes Clean Up

Time 11:11

That my words of wisdom today ladies and gentlemen, today we’ve gone through the five most common logo mistakes within specially DIY logos. You now know to research your brand name, not to over kill it on detail and create focus point, stay away from generic symbols and icons, how not to choose the right fonts for your brand logo and the power of colours. You’ve now got the handy dandy blueprint and advice in design the perfect logo design without making any amateur mistakes! If you have made any of these mistakes make sure you update you start implement these tips to improve and up-level your DIY logo. I hope to start seeing some awesome DIY logos from you all and get in touch with me. If you are not in the slightest design savvy or have any interest in DIY your logo and would rather purchase a pre-made logo design, >>The Brand Shop<< will be opening soon with logo template for you to choose from, with brand new bespoke fonts design by yours truly.