Design Tips

Corporate identity is the masthead of your company, communicating your business strengths, values and customer service philosophy wherever it is experienced. It is the essence of consumer communication that will run through everything from basic stationery and product literature to media advertising and your complete presence online - it's the single mark that will distinguish you from the millions of companies worldwide.

When creating your logo there are a number of factors to consider in this 'fast paced' digital age.

1. Before putting pencil to paper or starting up a professional design package, The most important factor is understanding your business objectives! Take the time to fully understand your business aims, jot down some words that represent what your customers will come to expect from your company. Make notes on colours that summarize your outlook and reflect the your personal nature, or the nature of organisation. Do you want to stand out sharply against your competition, do you want to be more subtle, sophisticated? Always take the time to reflect back to your business plan and key words, is your colour palette representing your business? And remember its not just about finding a foundation that would please your eyes, but understand the process from a customer's point of view. By working through this stage you will begin to get a feel for the foundations of your brand, a foundation will start building on. You might find that creating a mood board filled with cuttings of competitor logos and popular brands will help stimulate creativity.

2. During the previous process you will have naturally become inclined to a certain colours and logo types on your mood board. You will have seen many styles of logo, some very simple, some very clever and some that you wish you had as your own! Use this inclination to let your creative process start thinking about shapes and concepts that might reflect your business in the form of a logo. Do you see shapes, or a typographical logo, something colourful, something intricate or something simple? Again make notes on jot shapes, try not to focus on one idea to much, or spend time refining an idea, just play with your intuition and let your natural creative process run its course.

3. Now is the time to start molding your ideas in to something more comprehensive but we have one more process before we launch our design package. Now is the time to take a critical look at your marketing budget and how you intend to promote your business. Are you planning to be an online business with very little use of printed literature? Or are you a bricks and mortar business and will need printed promotional literature? Its very likely that you will be somewhere in between. The reason you need to understand your marketing plan is so you can develop your logo in the correct format. If you are an online business then creating a full colour logo is not a problem, but having to reproduce a full colour logo on paper can become expensive on short print runs. Alternatively if you plan to use your logo extensively on printed literature, can you afford full colour printing? A printed logo must also work at various sizes, but also in single colour, 2 colour and full colour depending on the type of literature. Understanding your budget and marketing objectives will help you to refine the type logo you will require.

4. Using all the information and research that you have gathered, you can either choose to put this information in to a written format and present it to your graphic designer to be worked into a unique design, or if you are a proficient user of Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop, you can proceed to developing your concepts into a more tangible design.

5. Logos are not the final say in your branding! The application of the logo to printed literature and online marketing will really seal your corporate identity and brand style. For this you will need to approach a branding company as they are experienced in creating corporate brand strategies and making sure your business objectives are reflected in your marketing material.

Aftab Ali

Founder of Reach BCS - Brand Communication Solutions

aftab@reachbcs.com

http://www.ReachBCS.com

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