How Many Colors Should A Logo Have?
In the world of visual communication, colors are crucial and irreplaceable. They evoke emotions that can alter reactions among people. They can influence how customers perceive and interact with your brand.
Organizations use colors in their logos to convey specific messages to their loyal audience. They use fewer colors to ensure their loyal customers understand the messages their brands communicate. Let’s explore the statistics below to appreciate how top brands use colors:
- 95% of brands use one or two colors
- 33% of brands use the color blue
- 29% of brands use the color red
- 28% of brands use black or gray-scale colors
- 13% of brands use yellow or gold colors
- 05% of brands use over two colors
Whenever in doubt, allow the statistics above to guide you. You can also look at the top twenty iconic brands in the world for their color selection. Their brands are recognizable, memorable, versatile, and timeless because they have simple trademarks with fewer colors.
To ensure your logo remains minimalist with a simple message, use a maximum of two colors. Multiple colors in your logo will clutter your message and confuse people. Besides this elaboration, they would increase your printing cost.
What Do Logo Colors Mean?
From natural to artificial sources, colors are everywhere. The energies they radiate are not static because they have cultural, biological, and psychological influences. Below are some colors and their meanings:
Blue
The color blue aligns with the sky and water bodies. It conveys a sense of loyalty, reliability, and stability. It also resonates with security, tranquility, and intelligence. Various forms of blue are pale, sky, azure, and dark. Negatively, blue can represent depression, old–fashioned, and predictability.
Red
The color red aligns with fire and warfare. It conveys a sense of energy, passion, and love. It also resonates with authority, determination, and power. Some versions of red are maroon, crimson, and scarlet. Aggressive, rebellious, and violent are some negative connotations of red.
Green
The color green aligns with vegetation: It conveys a sense of health, harmony, and growth. Its negative connotations are indifferent, materialistic, and selfish. Its variations are pale, emerald, jade, lime, dark, aqua, and olive.
Yellow
The color yellow aligns with sunshine. It conveys a sense of honor, clarity, happiness, and hope. Negatively, it's associated with cowardice, deceit, and impatient. Some variations of yellow are lemon, citrine, golden, and dark.
Orange
The color orange also aligns with warmth and sunshine because of its mixture of red and yellow. It represents fascination, creativity, success, and enthusiasm. It can also cause negative moods like unsociable, insincere, and superficial. Peach, golden, amber, burnt, and dark are some variations of the color orange.
Brown
The color brown aligns with the earth. It symbolizes resilience, dependability, security, protection, and nature. It can also evoke negative emotions such as boring, stinginess, and lack of humor. Some key variations are light, tan, ivory, and beige.
White
Most people connect the color white to heaven. Its symbolism includes purity, virginity, innocence, humility, and spirituality. Some negative emotions of white are boring, empty, sterile, and unimaginative.
Black
Black is a neutral color that people associate with darkness: It communicates fear, mystery, power, authority, elegance, and sophistication. Its adverse effects include death, sadness, evil, intimidation, and rebellion.
Silver
The color silver is an embodiment of riches and wealth: The female energy balances white and black colors. It exudes calmness, soothing, dignity, glamour, modernness, and sleekness. In contrast, it conveys a feeling of loneliness, lifelessness, dullness, and indecisive.
Pink
A mixture of red and white resulted in the color pink. It’s a feminine color that represents nurturing, romance, sweetness, hope, and calm. It can also evoke negative moods like naivety, immaturity, and unrealistic expectations.
How do I Make my Logo Stand Out?
Research the competition
Reliable information is priceless in business. Therefore, before creating your logo, find out the demography of your ideal customers. Know their ages, gender, incomes, lifestyles, buying behaviors, education, etc. Next, explore the logo of your competitors by looking at the colors, fonts, and symbols. Equipped with this information, you can create a logo that your customers would love and outstanding enough to outwit your competitors.
Minimize your design elements
You want your brand to have a warm relationship with your customers. You can’t compromise on this aim, so reduce your design elements to the barest minimum. A logo with fewer design elements is clean, relevant, versatile, and timeless. Since it’s attractive, it will stick in the minds of people in no time.
Use relevant color scheme
Pick your color wisely by exploring the psychology of color. The hue you select should convey the feeling of your brand and also resonate with your loyal clients. It’s best to have a maximum of two colors to simplify your brand’s message. And don’t forget to align your color preference to the other graphic elements while ensuring the colors complement each other.
Use relevant font
You want your customers to identify your brand, and when necessary to defend it by name. You can’t let this laudable thought go wasted. Hence, choose the most appropriate font that is readable, scalable, and able to magnify your logo’s personality.
Use modest layout
To reach more clients and boost revenue, you need an aggressive marketing campaign. But a complicated logo layout would hinder this objective. Therefore, keep in mind the promotional mediums you will advertise your product and choose a corresponding format. Use a clean layout when in doubt to avoid limitations.
What Makes A Bad Logo?
It has the wrong typography
A lot goes into using a font—readability, emotions, and kerning. It’s easy to spot a logo with a wrong choice. A lousy logo has a font that is illegible—meaning people can't notice or read by looking at it. Second, a logo is terrible if its font choice does not evoke the actual brand's persona to the target audience.
It uses photos
Photos in a logo? That's the work of an amateur graphic designer and one of the most common design flaws. Photographers create photos from pixels; therefore, they lose their quality when resized to different measurements. In short, bad logos have photo images that aren't suitable for branding. Vector images are the most relevant to use on emblems.
It’s messy
A lousy logo has a cluttered design. It has multiple design elements that make it loud and confusing. With too many design elements, a terrible logo does not have a negative space to help customers recognize, remember, and interact with it. In effect, bad trademarks do not make use of the golden rule—less is more.
It isn’t versatile
Bad logos aren’t versatile—meaning they cannot scale on multiple channels because their layouts are intricate. An effective logo can scale on any promotional medium while maintaining its quality and readability. In contrast, a bad logo loses its attributes when resized to different dimensions.
What Are The Characteristics Of A Good Logo?
It’s highly simple
A logo is there to represent and convey vital company stories to customers. To help customers recognize, decode, and remember it, a logo should be modest. Customers are bombarded with many adverts on multiple mediums, so it pays to make a logo simple. Famous brands like Apple, Nike, and Coca-Cola have impactful and powerful trademarks because they are simple.
It’s highly relevant
Successful logos are appropriate to the industries and companies they represent. Thus, they convey the brand’s persona and philosophies to the actual target audience. Logos that are relevant use suitable colors, fonts, and symbols that resonate with the industry to communicate with customers.
It’s highly scalable
One essence of creating a logo is to have it represent a company on various promotional channels, and a good logo does it best. An effective logo has a clean layout (vector) that makes it to resize to any measurement, printed out on any surface, and used on any digital medium. An effective logo can fit business cards, letterheads, billboards, and merchandise without losing its sharpness.
What Makes A Good Logo?
What makes up a good logo is relative. A logo that appeals to Mr. B might not resonate well with Mr. A because of preference stemming from cultural upbringing. However, four out of five people will describe a logo as useful if it shares the following attributes:
It has a complementary color
A good logo uses a complementary color scheme to create an aesthetic vibe. For example, it can use a pastel-colored font on a dark background to bring the emblem to life.
It has readable typography
A good logo uses a readable font to convey its message seamlessly. This gives it a unique personality and creates a lasting impression on readers.
It’s minimalist in focus
"Less is more" is the foundation of a good logo. It has its graphic design elements in moderation. It’s so clean that a child can design from memory.
It’s unique
A good logo is distinctive. It uses graphic elements that are uncommon to outshine its rivals. The effect of this uniqueness makes it memorable and timeless among its audience.
It’s versatile
Versatility is a powerful feature that a good logo has. It boasts a vector layout that supports it across all promotional mediums and scales to any dimension.
How Do I Get Logo Ideas for My Logo?
There are several ways to garner ideas for your logo. To lubricate your mind with overflowing logo inspiration, explore the three sources below:
From established brands
Ever wonder why the big brands pay colossal sums of money to the graphic agency to have a simple logo to represent their brands? Well, because they work with the best brains who understand most issues about designs and trends. Exploring and paying attention to these established brands' logos will ignite your mind for novel ideas, and you will be on the right pedestal with your logo.
From your competitors
Most entrepreneurs have drawn inspiration from competitors' brands. It pays to focus on them because you're offering the same or similar products. Testing their logos will tell you the specific design elements that resonate well with customers in the industry. Because you know what works or isn't working from examining their logos, you can use the information to set up your logo above theirs.
From your family and friends
You need a professional graphic artist to execute your logo ideas; interestingly, logo inspirations can come from your least familiar sources. Engage with friends, relatives, colleagues, and even customers when you're looking for ideas. You’ll be amazed at the novel and weird thoughts that will flow from these close associates.
From Behance
With over ten million creative minds, Behance is another vital source to find inspiration. It’s a social media channel for creative works—artists and designers. On this platform, you’ll have access to a collection of logo designs from both amateur and professionals to light up your mind.
How Do I Come Up With A Unique Logo?
By conducting research
It would help if you had a timely design brief to create a unique logo. Via extensive research, you’ll discover pertinent information about your competitors and customers. Data about your customers will help you create a trademark that resonates with them. For your competitors, you can use their data to create an opposing emblem that outshines their brands. The research will also help you come up with your brand's philosophy.
By using colors to evoke emotions
There are ways to imbibe emotions into your logo. Since customers are emotional beings, they react to different colors in varying ways. So, you can explore the psychology of colors to create a unique logo. Most entrepreneurs in the food industry preferred red because it creates desire and increases appetite for food. Those in the banking and security industries rely on the blue to evoke trust, stability, and intelligence. To differ from competitors, you can use the tone versions of these colors to give your trademark a distinct vibe.
By adding hidden elements
Conventionally, a logo should convey an unmistakable message. However, you can make your logo the center of attraction if it carries subtle design elements that give it multiple meanings. A case in point is the iconic Apple trademark. For decades, people continue to render their opinions to its bite, amplifying its uniqueness and memorability.
By using custom font
Think about it, as humans; we get our uniqueness from our difference. You can create a unique personality for your brand using an awesome custom font. Just look at it, which companies share the same font as Coca Cola Company? This is the most guaranteed way to give your emblem a unique personality that distances it from competitors.
By keeping it simple
To create a unique and memorable logo, keep it simple. Simple logos have the power to infiltrate through the noise. Avoid too many design elements and use negative space to offer clarity to your logo. With this, your logo will become super appealing and unique.
Why You Should Browse A Logo Idea Before Making Your Logo
Almost every industry is competitive. To contest effectively, you need a powerful trademark that’s distinct, memorable, and timeless. However, without proper planning, these attributes will elude your logo design. You should know that the planning entails extensive research. The following are a few reasons you should browse logo ideas before hastening to create your visual asset:
To send a simple message
Before creating your visual trademark, it’s essential to test and simplify your company’s overall message. Here, try to focus on the goods or services you want to sell, your values, vision, and mission vis-à-vis that of your competitors. This vital information will help you craft a concise yet compelling message that your brand will represent. Browsing logo ideas will help you understand your competitors and the specific design elements that resonate with the industry. It will also positively influence your brand's personality.
Understand your target audience
Another crucial benefit of exploring logo ideas before creating your visual trademark is identifying your target audience. Before the main designing project, you’ll collate vital data about your customers—age, gender, lifestyle, education, buying behavior, income, and location, among others. Without this crucial data, it won't be easy to tailor a coherent message to resonate with them.
To avoid lawsuits
A logo is a legal visual identity representing and setting businesses of all sizes and budgets apart from each other. It’s a powerful marketing tool that needs your maximum attention and investment. Their respective owners have the copyright to prevent others from using. Note that copyright infringement is a crime. You will shelter any lawsuit against you if you conduct due diligence into other logo ideas before creating yours.
To outshine the competition
You'll have a bespoke and exceptional logo design if you exercise restraint to explore other logo designs before working independently. Exploring other logo ideas will flood your mind with lots of novel ideas that will benefit your brand. The patience of looking at other logos will help you analyze the design elements of multiple brands both in your industry and outside the industry by discovering their strengths and flaws. What can you do with these data? You'll use it to create a top-notch logo that's vividly attractive and unique.
To implement the best practices
For browsing the logo design ideas, you will discover the tools, resources, and best practices that graphic professionals used to create quality logos that become iconic. This will equip you with the vital branding tips you need to craft your excellent logo. For instance, one design tip is to prioritize vector graphic software in your logo creation. With this software, you’ll design a logo that can resize to any height without losing its quality. Minimalist is another essential tip you'll learn if you take the time to browse logo ideas before commencing your trademark.