Thoughts on Logo Design

This is meant to be a practical post about logo design. Two we reviewed the first draft of logo options for the two new startup ideas we’re working on this summer. After some time debating options, I realized there are some fairly strong opinions I have about logos:

• Legibility – the word needs to be easily readable. It also needs to lead people to write your company’s name in the way that you want it to be written. For instance, if your logo is all lowercase lettering, then people will write your name in all lowercase when they refer to it. Other options are to do all caps same size, do all caps with the first letter slightly bigger than the rest, or do first letter capital with the rest lower case.
• Background – avoid logos that require a background in order to work. Your logo is going to be put all over the place and you will not be able to control the background. You don’t want to have to plop a purple square down everywhere you want to put your logo, just because you want white lettering.
• Font – For B2B companies, the font should be professional and blocky lettering with right-angles. For B2C companies, the font should be more relaxed and flowing. One of our new startup ideas is B2B and one is B2C, so we are playing with different fonts.
• Symbol Size – I like the symbol size to be modest. I don’t want it to dwarf the company name.
• Symbol Position – I don’t like the symbol above or below the lettering. I like it to the left of the lettering. With our old AccelerEyes logo, the symbol was above the lettering and that was often inconvenient. With ArrayFire, we avoided that problem.
• Symbol Abstraction – I like some abstraction in the symbol, but I like it to be obvious to non artsy types. I don’t want to have a gazillion interpretations about what it could be. It is not modern art. Ideally it resonates with what you’re about.
• Colors – I do not like a lot of colors in a logo. Other than blue or white, I think 2 colors are probably enough. I might get overruled on this point though.

What other guidelines do you have on logo design?