Design a Logo For Your Site
by Jeff Colburn
There may come a time when you, or a client of yours, will want a company logo.
Logos are a good way to let people easily identify the products and services
offered by a company. As soon as someone sees it, they know whom they are
dealing with. Just think of the red "K" on a box of Kodak film, National
Geographic's yellow rectangle and the bulls eye for Target Stores. These logos
are instantly recognizable, and anyone seeing them identifies the company
without even seeing their name.
But designing a logo isn't easy. It's best to have a graphic designer, or
someone with graphic design experience, design a logo. You want to be able to
draw on their experience with design, color and composition to have a logo that
looks good. A well-designed logo will help a company, whereas a poorly designed
one will hurt a company's image.
That being said, if you want to design a logo yourself, there are several
programs you can use. The key thing is to use a program like Adobe Illustrator
that will let you create a logo as a vector graphic. A vector graphic can be
scaled to any size so that text remains easy to read and curves have smooth
edges no matter how big or small the graphic is. Remember that the logo may be
one inch square on a business card and ten feet tall on a sign or banner.
I just started using a logo for my company. Since I like the Celtic culture in
my background, I've decided to use green and Celtic knots as my logo. I'm now
using a green Celtic knot as a background for my business cards and some sticky
notes that I just had printed. I've also used this same knot on the letterhead
of my business stationary. I still have some tweaking to do with the exact color
of green I want and the knot that I want to use, but I'm very happy with this
first step, and people have made positive comments about the design.
There are also some websites that will let you design logos, that sell logo design
software, that have logo samples, or that give tips on logo design. These are:
Logo Lounge
Graphic Design USA
Cool Text
Business Logos
The Logo Factory
When designing a logo, there are a few things to keep in mind.
• The graphics should be simple and not busy or cluttered.
• Text, if used, should be short and easily read, no matter how small the logo.
• It's best to only have the company name, and maybe a two or three word tag line in the logo. It's also fine to have no text at all.
• The design should be easy to see and understand no matter how small or large the logo is.
• When used on a website, the logo's file size should be small so it will load quickly.
• The design should be unique so that it's never confused with someone else's logo.
• If possible, use only one color for the logo. Using too many colors can make the logo difficult for people to understand.
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