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We have brands and ads all around us but regardless of how many there are, only a few have brand power, even fewer enjoy the iconic brand status. A handful of brands can be recognized globally and have become integrated into the pop culture. All of these brands can be recognized through their logos and brand colors. So how was it that these brands achieved their iconic status and is it possible for emerging brands to obtain the same illustrious position?

All marketers would love to be in the same standing as these brands but it’s highly unlikely that new brands will ever come close to it. To get to that level of recognition, these brands have had to consistently deliver to their market over many decades which is how they have garnered so much loyalty. Even though it will take newer brands some time to become iconic, there are pointers that they can take from the big shots in the market.

Can be spotted with just the logo

A swoosh anywhere will instantly remind you of Nike, the same way McDonald’s gold arches can be recognized from a mile away. The visual cues that have been associated with these brands is what makes them so identifiable so easily. These simplistic but impactful visual cues is what gives many of these iconic brands an advantage over others. There are other sporting goods’ brands who are also successful but none of their logos will have the same recognition that Nike’s swoosh has.

Brands that are considered iconic have a top-of-mind awareness which is why having a simple and easily identifiable logo is such an advantage. Brands that have top-of-awareness are more likely to be considered for purchase as opposed to those that aren’t as familiar.

It should be noted that a customer’s buying behavior is affected by visual cues but there are other factors that are also involved such as the functional benefits and the emotions induced by the brand.

Cultural impact

Iconic brands become part of a culture which is why their branding requires them to stay up-to-date with popular culture and reflect the happenings of society.
In the book, How Brands Become Icons, Professor Douglas Holt of Oxford University narrows down 3 principles that make brands iconic.

• Iconic brands react to what is going on in the society

PepsiCo attempted to do this recently with its advert representing the Black Lives Matter movement but failed to do so miserably when people decided that the ad was insensitive and tone-deaf.
Iconic brands are known to respond to current events to maintain relevancy and to exceed beyond their functional benefits. These type of marketing efforts is what lets people make positive associations with the brand

• Iconic brands have personality

Iconic brands have personality traits just like humans. These traits are reflected in the types of products they sell, the type of celebrities they sign as endorsers, the events they sponsor and the brand’s symbols. Marlborough, for the longest time, was represented by a macho man from the Western frontier. Old Spice, on the other hand, opted for a different approach and became known for its unconventional, humorous ads.

• Personality becomes more important than functional benefits

With time, the brands no longer just represent the functional benefits, they embody the characteristics that have become associated with time. Volvo is known primarily for its safety and Rolex reflects luxury and success.
New brands will have to create marketing campaigns that depict certain personality traits that distinguish them from others and make them more identifiable.

Since the advent of conventional businesses, Logos have been there. Just like a human body has to have a face otherwise it looks odd, a business without a logo had always seemed incomplete. Irrespective of the size or scale of the business, the business had to have a logo, even if it meant to place the name of the business on a signboard outside. Logos were visual representations of a brand’s actual existence. They brought a brand to life and were an integral part of a firm’s brand identity,

But fast forward to 2017, things in the business world have changed rapidly and this transformation has brought numerous disruptions within the industry, especially in the sphere of branding and logos. Logos mean much more now than just branding collaterals as people have now developed an even deeper, more intricate relationship with them.

The world has moved on to the online realm and now people prefer to use their smartphones as the premier way of communicating with the world, even with businesses. And on these very smartphones, a brand’s logo is the now the brand itself.

Take out your smartphone right now and you’ll notice hundreds of symbols that your window to the services you need. From Twitter to Facebook to Snapchat to even Amazon, their logos are what you need to first dab on, if you want to go any further into using the services that these businesses offer. In the 21^st century world, every single customer who needs to use a certain service on a smartphone cannot bypass seeing or interacting a logo.

These actual physical interactions with the brand’s logos by audiences have raised the stakes for logos higher than they have been in history and the importance continues to grow exponentially.

Conventional branding strategies used to treat logos as something that they needed to have for the purpose of making the audience look at them as a visual personification or a face of the brand and for that purpose logos used to be placed everywhere from company notepads to billboards and even on promo products, but things stand completely changed now.

Let’s explain the “Immense power” of this phenomenon further:

When a logo didn’t have a certain degree of physical interactions involved, their effect on the user was far less. The logos of today, which you can click, dap, tap and pinch on, amplify the usefulness that a user finds in that logo being there.

There is a difference between Facebook’s logo being placed on a billboard, which you can just look at and Facebook’s logo that you can actually tap and enter into Facebook itself.

The unprecedented number of users that online businesses have amassed in recent years and the mind-boggling financial valuations that they have amassed, have been contributed in large part to the power of these logos being part of the user’s overall experience in a certain interaction with that very business, and that’s where the importance of having a good quality and tastefully designed logo has increased.

With consumers carrying hundreds of brand icons within their pockets each day, businesses and marketers need to ponder over the power that a good quality logo now begets.

These new, interactive, Logos make sure that there is a certain “Face” for the brand that could pop up in the consumer’s mind when a brand is mentioned or they could be reminded of the brand after seeing a logo, all for one purpose, i.e. to get the consumer to click on the logo to enter the business. Logos have become essential for 21^st-century businesses as they are now intertwined with them. A bad logo would never see your app is downloaded from the app store, no matter how great your services are. If you want success for your business, you now need a great logo that people love, so that it can become synonymous with the business you do and bring in customers.

Snapchat’s logo is Snapchat itself. It’s how Snapchat users remember Snapchat and the best part is that this phenomenon is also quite infectious and sticky. As your brand becomes famous through your logo, more and more people start recognizing it, which leads to greater number of consumers coming in each day.

And this logo phenomenon now transcends firms who solely exist online. Even the businesses that exist just physically need to look out for grabbing more consumers through the vast outreaching power of the online world by having unique brand identifiers like a great logo, and if they don’t do so, don’t expect to see them around in the next couple of years.

To achieve success in the current, highly volatile business environment, you need to be aware of the latest trends and mindsets that prevail within the population that you intend to target, just like how logos stand transformed and now mean so much more to business and consumers, and then apply your own unique approaches to successfully utilize these very trends and mindsets to the eventual success of your business.

Nearly every brand in the world has the same purpose i.e. of increasing brand recognition and recall and every other marketing and branding tool was geared to specifically works as a means to an end towards that very purpose, but, in this fast-paced world, nothing is static, not even this age-old branding purpose kit.

The internet took the world by storm but Google came forward like Noah’s flood, encapsulating everything in its path. The iconic search box became the place where we went whenever we wanted to know about anything. Everything became “Googleable” and a search frenzy started. Marketers saw an opportunity in this mind blowing phenomenon and this gave birth to the SEO era. Optimizing your brand for keywords and putting and pulling as many reference links to your side as possible was seen as the top priority for brands across every industry, but all of that is in for a very big change as we move ahead into the new era of Search Revolution, powered by Google.

Google Lens, a pioneering technology, has been launched as a feature of Google Assistant for Android and iOS phones, and this very technology will be the heartbeat of the next big revolution in Search.

Just imagine that if you could install Google directly on to your own retinas and whatever you see, you could get any type of information on it, but that’s not just imagination, that’s actually happened with Google Lens. This new feature will allow you to point your smartphone’s camera at anything and Voila! Google comes up with the answers. Point your phone at the restaurant in front of you and Google instantaneously comes up with the reviews, point it at an animal and Google will return with much more information regarding the creature than you’ll ever need. That’s Google Lens for you, an extension of your own human instinct, carried on forward from your childhood. Remember the time when you were young and you used to ask “What’s that?” and a reply came, Google lens will work on the same lines, but this time you’ll be surer of the answers you get.

But will this new innovation bring a drastic turnaround in the field of branding? Yes, it certainly will, but nowhere will it be as important as in the domain of logos.

Logos define your business and portray your brand’s image and vision to the onlooker, but that conventional purpose for a logo will undergo a big upheaval with the introduction of technologies like Google Lens. Yes, Google Lens allows you to get information on something by just pointing your smartphone’s camera at it, but what will make you ponder your camera to that specific point or in simpler terms, how to get the user to search more about the brand? The answer is, through your Logos.

Logos used to have a lesser role in the branding domain as compared to its peers but from now onwards, it’s your logo that will make people know more about your brand and the importance of getting a good enough logo for your brand will acquire a new meaning.

A brilliant logo will make people want to know more about it and their smartphones will help them in a blink with this task, but mediocre logos will definitely be ignored. Brands with badly designed logos and with this that are not that aesthetically pleasing, will definitely miss a major chunk of interest that could have come their way, had they had a better logo.

This might sound quite a far-fetched scenario or to seem it might not even seem plausible, but technology has a funny way of surprising us. Who would have that the world will go gaga over an app, that automatically deletes your pictures and videos after 24 hours aka Snapchat? Was there anyone who could have predicted that of all products and industries in the world, an internet search engine would become the most valuable firm in the world? Xerox didn’t see the rise of the printers and lost out, while Kodak met the same fate when it too became delusional and didn’t think much of the imminent smartphone revolution in its tow. Preparing won’t leave you worse but not doing enough has the chances of making your brand’s ship sink and never re-emerge again. Getting a new logo for your brand might sound like something inconsequential for this type of a reason, but for the foresight, anyone thinking on these lines will stand a significantly less chance of growing forward in the upcoming era.

Firms often spend a huge amount of time and financial resources on getting their branding strategies right, to serve just one purpose and that is to initiate and sustain consumer interest. But the world has been changing drastically for the past couple of years. Smartphones and social media have infiltrated our lives as we look forward towards a future that might feature driverless cars and robots that could learn to think and act on their own. What worked two decades or even five years ago, just doesn’t make the cut now. Old strategies need to be replaced with newer ones that are more in line with the world we inhabit today.

One of the most significant places, where we can see this change in attitudes is the domain of branding. The Millennial Generation doesn’t like conventional forms of branding, as signified by a recent research by Goldman Sachs. In the research it has been found that Millennials would buy clothes without the brand’s logo more easily. And that’s not it, these Millennials would rather spend their money on vacations and food than go to pay an extra premium for a certain brand’s name, according to Morgan Stanley.

For brands, this is a very complex scenario, because they are now in constant danger of suffering a logo burnout, which means that their target markets would stop buying their product if the logo of the brand is aggressively used. Nowadays, brands just cannot put their logos everywhere as Louis Vuitton found out after its trademark handbags, which featured the brand’s logo went unpopular. To avoid facing a similar logo burnout for your brand, make sure you are taking the following steps under consideration:

Logos are now to be restrictively used as branding propositions:

If we say, that the Millennials don’t like their clothes infiltrated with logos and how they won’t pay a premium for a brand’s name, that doesn’t mean that logos are any less important. They still are of high value in establishing your brand’s identity and help your target market understand your vision. But, having said that, logos should now be used restrictively and not everywhere. Your brand is not to be overexposed by placing your logo everywhere like on promo products, your own products etc.

You need to make sure that your logo stays true to the concept of exclusivity and is only used whenever a brand mention is necessary. Even if you are going to file your logo on a product, make sure that it’s not too prominent and the person who is wearing or using it, is looking like a human billboard. Being simple, yet elegant is the name of the game.

Minimalism:

Millennials simply don’t like confusing stuff with too much fluff and details. Keeping things simple and minimal is what attracts the attention of Millennials today. Many brands understood that and they adopted their logos to fit the bill of minimalistic design in their logos. Some famous examples are the new logos of Google and Starbucks.

Google’s Logo

Starbuck’s Logo

Even newer firms like Snapchat and Google’s own self-driving car unit named Waymo, have very simplistic logos that are instantly recognizable. With single color schemes mashed with gradients, these logos have become hugely popular.

(Autonomous Car with Waymo’s Logo)

Designing for the Platform:

In old days, logos were supposed to just pictorial representations of the brand with no practical purpose, other than helping the brand to get its name recognized. Now things have progressed beyond that stage and people are interacting with logos in real time. Apps on Mobiles have an icon, which most of the time is the logo itself and the user has to click on it to go through to the app.

The mobile screen’s real estate is quite restrictive and the icon appears quite small, so brands need to make sure that their logos are easily recognizable and attractive enough to warrant a click by the user. Designing for the platform will allow you to leverage your logo more than you could do otherwise.

As more and more businesses transcend from brick and mortar to the digital space, we will witness a surge in how logos will be used in a more integrated manner and play their part in augmenting the user experience.

Logos have always been at the heart of our initial branding endeavors and they hold a special significance when it comes to providing a certain unique identity to a brand, but as time changes, we need to make sure that even if our love for logos has not changed, the way we use them, matches how consumers perceive them to help in delivering the purpose of generating as much brand engagement as possible with an effective impact.

Logos are definitely a brand’s first engagement asset and they serve to personify the value, mission and the vision of the brand to the consumer. There has been a lot of talk on the importance of having a good logo designed, the types of colors that can or cannot be used, how to choose a good logo designer and more, but knowing how to leverage your logo to get maximum engagement is as important as having a logo itself in the first place.

Most brands focus entirely on getting their logos made, but the placement is where the logo will reveal its real magic and bring back intensive brand engagement, only if done right. Logos need not be placed aimlessly, anywhere you want them to be, rather, they need to be placed strategically on items that will definitely bring in a lot of cohesive brand engagement. The basic requirement for choosing these carriers or points of interaction is that they need to have maximum chances of exposure with potential consumers and can initiate the stickiness factor. Here are some great items on which you can start out to promote your new logo and garner maximum consumer attention:

Business/Meeting Cards:

Our human eye is just capable of focusing on a very small area due to the conglomeration of receptors in the middle of the retina. This small area is called the fovea. You can have someone’s attention but engagement only begins when the fovea starts moving and nowhere better to make this happen than business cards. When business cards are exchanged and the person you gave it to, gives it a fleeting glance, a logo, with its intricate and colorful design will definitely stand out amongst all the textual information that accompanies it. The fovea stops here and this ensures that the onlooker does hover at least for five to ten seconds on it, which is enough time to create a sense of familiarity.

Promo Items:

The appeal of promo items is timeless and now, with the introduction of even better and more comprehensive array of promo products, there is no dearth of options for brands to choose a suitable platform to promote their business and the best way to do that is by placing your logo on the promo item.

Options like company shirts, pens, mugs, USB pen drives, power banks and much more are available as promo items on which you can place your logo. The main USP of promo items are their usefulness to the receiver and whenever they use your promo item, they are sure to view your logo. No other platform can give you such endearing, multiple views of your logo like promo items. The allure of promo items is great and no one likes to refuse a free, utility item. You can even mass order them and send them out to potential customers or even cover a full range of company’s employee base, allowing you to reach out to a massive audience on a very small financial budget and attain maximum brand visibility.

Social Media:

One of the most important engagement platforms out there, social media has billions of people which translate into billions of engagement opportunities and immense exposure if optimized in the perfect way.

There are a lot of ways to initiate engagement on social due like sharing posts, videos and now you can even go for the ultra-successful “Stories” option on platforms like Snapchat, Instagram & WhatsApp. Your logo placed in between theses engagement hooks, will definitely make the quality of this engagement better and make sure that the visitor on your social media handles, gets to know your brand more. You can even make your logos part of the whole experience, instead of just using them in their pictorial restraint, by using them as a CTA to redirect users to your website from social media.

Logos need not just be there because every brand has them and you don’t need to just place them in a conventional way on the board outside your office, on the top of your office memos or in your email’s signature, just because everyone’s doing exactly the same thing with their logos. It’s important that you ensure that your logo is being pushed as your high priority marketing collateral and is a core part of your branding strategy at each stage, but if your logo isn’t working too great in these capacities, make sure that you go for a logo revamp or a get a new logo made for your brand to continue reaping the maximum engagement benefits that your logo can provide.

To design an amazing logo, there are a few skills which are absolutely necessary, these are: design abilities, creative thinking, and expert application. Whereas new designers with ability can create and deliver usable designs, it takes time to fully master the craft.

Logo design is an important part of taking care of a company’s branding yet it’s not an isolated element but an aspect that must go with all other design materials. These design materials today range from designing a brand’s office supplies to their aesthetics on social media, yet the brand mark or the logo rests as the focal point of most branding efforts. Thus making sure that your logo is impeccable remains of utmost importance. These 5 expert tips insightfully present the case points necessary to master a logo design.

1) Know the competition
Before you start designing anything it’s vital that you conduct a thorough research of your target market. Ask your clients about their competition before you get started and then take it forward from there. Compare the logos that their competitors have and their value in the market. This practice will help you understand the branding styles that are popular in the target market. That information can be very useful in figuring out what kind of visual associations are considered reliable and relatable by the people. However, don’t forget the most recognizable logos in the world are ones which don’t fit in the trends and appear out of the box.

2) Strategize with the right questions
A branding project starts off with asking questions, the answers to which lead a team to then deploy the right strategy. It’s important to implore deeply into these six important queries which Michael Johnson points out in his book “Branding-In Five and a Half Steps”.  These are; what’s the reason that we are here? What do we do and how? How are we different? For whom are we here? What is of most value to us? What is our persona?

3) A flexible process
Formulating a strategy does not mean that it’s written in stone. Instead, it’s a back and forth process because there will be many ideas which seem great in theory but are not suitable to carry out in practice. Similarly, there can be design aspects and visual solutions that happen in the design phase that can help evolve and fine tune the strategy.

4) Revere the client’s heritage
Whether your client wants to upgrade their existing branding for a more modern look or they want to entirely revamp their identity, as a designer your job is to be aware of their heritage and conceptualize according to it. A client’s previous logo may have illustrated their heritage smoothly in which case the potential of that design should not be rejected. Designers should keep their ego aside and not directly dismiss the evolution of their client’s identity.

5) A logo is just one ingredient
Today, it’s very important for designers to remember that a logo isn’t necessarily the first point of contact that a customer has with a brand and neither it’s the most visible aspect of the identity always. Thanks to social media, people now interact with a variety of contact points. This is extremely significant to remember as you must design a logo that can harmoniously interact with other elements of the identity experience, like the voice tone and packaging.

These principles command that a logo must be flexible and versatile without being so trendy that it goes out of style fast. The best logo should advertise the heritage, identity, and voice of the brand while following a practically applicable strategy. Lastly, it should uplift the brand image higher especially against competitors while also agreeably going with all the other design elements that a brand would need.

Memorable logo design, memorable logo, how to design a memorable logo. You might have read these words in brochures, design blogs, logo design websites and targeted ad pop-ups if you had a logo designed recently or are intending on getting one designed for your firm right now. But why is the word “Memorable” so emphasized whenever someone is mentioning anything related to a logo? Why do marketers and firm owners get excited by the use of this word with logos? In this post, you will know the exact meaning of this word in the context of marketing and promotion, and why is it so apt to use this word to describe a logo’s quality to the buyer.

Marketing, in the simplest of terms, is to promote your product or service through the use of an agent, so that it reaches the maximum amount of people, which in turn can increase your sales. However, this is not as easy as it sounds. For this whole process to go forward and end in a sales closure, the promotion has to be bang on and for that, it has to be capable of having a certain effect on the onlooker. This promotion needs to be able to make the onlooker stop, read or watch it, remember what is being conveyed, then move towards making an action on it. While good design elements like a fancy 3d design, an engaging color palette or even unique fonts can certainly help the onlooker to stop and read, remembering the ad or the promotion is the most difficult part and these design elements cannot do this alone.

The third stage of the promotion engagement process i.e. remembering what is being said is what logo design firms mean when they mention the word memorable alongside the word logo. The logo can be as vibrant, fancy or erratic as possible, but if it’s not memorable enough, the whole point of getting a logo in the first place becomes redundant.

A lot has been said about how logos are representative of a company’s values and how they are the first tools of the impression that an onlooker encounters. What everyone fails to recognize is the fact that although it is the first impression of a brand on the onlooker or viewer, it has to do more than just look pretty. The logo has to be “Memorable” enough that the person who sees it remembers not only its design, but what is being conveyed through the design, and then takes action. Which means that it further interacts with the firm or the brand.

When logos are talked about, the biggest emphasis is placed on the use of the right colors to showcase what industry the business belongs to, what kind of fonts are being used and other things about the design of the logo. But when these design elements fail to create a meaningful message, the whole purpose of the logo is lost on the onlooker.

The importance of getting a memorable logo designed for your brand has only increased in recent times. Hundreds of thousands of websites, millions of pages of magazines filled with advertising collaterals, bright neon billboards outside brand shops and restaurants, everywhere the onlooker happens to take his view to, there is a piece of information waiting to secure its attention. In such a scenario, making your logo memorable enough is immensely important, otherwise, no matter how good or creative the design of the logo is, it will end up hazed in the advertising clutter that exists everywhere today.

Having a memorable logo adds to its stickiness factor, signifying that more and more people that look at it, will definitely stand a high chance of moving on to the next step and interact with logo’s brand, in real time. It’s important that you consider this factor very seriously when getting a logo designed for your brand and hire an experienced logo design firm while also give your inputs at each stage of the design process. The agency you bring on board will ensure that your logo is not just a fancy piece of design that is placed inconspicuously along with your brand’s name but is a real time working brand agent that is able to spur on onlookers to take action and bring in sales.

Each particular area, town, city, country, region has its own religious, moral, ethical and humanistic cultural values that the people residing in those areas respect and observe. These cultural values have been developed and passed down over generations and disrespecting them either intentionally or unintentionally can turn out to be disastrous for any brand.

And the brand asset in which you should show the most care regarding this issue is logo design as it’s the most impressionable marketing tool for any brand and your introduction to a new group of people. Any mistake here and you are risking your investments. Too many brands have done this and have seen their business closed even before they started and no matter how many apologies or rebranded launches they try, the audience fails to accept them.

To avoid meeting a similar fate for your brand, the foremost thing you need to do is research extensively about these very cultural values and try to end up on the right side of the perception with your logo design. A right perception will definitely strike the chord with the audiences and has the power to transform your brand into an overnight success.

When trying to do so, you would need to make sure that you do two things during the research phase. First, you need to hire an expert logo designer or an expert logo design firm, one that has had a lot of industry experience to know and understand how to avoid these disastrous conundrums with designs. Secondly, you would need to make sure that the most sensitive logo design aspects that can hold some sort of cultural insinuations or relations are researched for thoroughly to avoid anything that could send the wrong message.

Here is a list of design aspects of a logo that you need to take care of the most:

Colors:

In many cultures around the world, certain colors are regarded as symbolic representations of various emotions and feelings.  What a certain color means in one area might be entirely different to what it means in another area altogether, even if these two areas lay in close proximity to each other. One of the biggest examples of this cultural divide of colors are the colors white and black. While black is regarded as the color of mourning in the west, people from the east regard white as representing the same thing.  In the west, brides wear the white color, but in the east, it is mostly adorned by widows.

White cannot be used to represent something funky or upbeat in the east, while green is a very sensitive religious color in most Islamic countries. When trying to choose a color template for your logo design, make sure that you have studied the culture well and know how it uses and regards certain colors to make sure your logo turns out to be a success.

Symbolism:

Just like in colors, certain symbolic gestures like the thumbs up sign or the full hand sign can certainly have different connotations in different parts of the world and they are even more sensitive than colors when it comes to know about a certain culture.  Just as no two languages can sound alike, cultural symbolism of a particular area is also unique, so make sure that you communicate what to avoid incorporating in the logo design. This factor is important for firms who want to grow internationally, where they have to cater to and respect the cultural beliefs of a large number of diverse people.

Design:

The codes of moral and cultural decency vary highly with each region and that’s where you need to take care during the logo design process. Even small things like the font that you might use, or a picture that might come off as suggestive, can turn out to be a huge turn off for the people you would want to target and influence. Expert logo designers know how to avoid these design mishaps but it’s best that a brand takes part in the design process at each stage to make sure the end results turn out to be great.

It is important to think about every aspect of the logo design before you make it the face of your brand. Always consult your logo designers, especially with ideas that you believe would work well within a certain culture, and work your way to make the design distinctive and beautiful. The importance of research is indispensable during the logo design process to avoid bad publicity for your brand. Make sure that you are not just choosing a logo design that you like, but the one that can connect to the maximum number of people through ingenuity, creativity and mutual respect for the cultural values they hold in a high regard without creating any misperception.

When a brand wants to get a logo designed for itself, the foremost priority it places on is its uniqueness, but with so many industries that feature hundreds of thousands of similar companies also wanting to do the same, avoiding clichés becomes an immensely difficult problem to overcome. The advent of the digital world has made it easier for all designers to access all sorts of images and ideas, which mean that any image you can think of, has definitely been used by others in making their own logos. This very scarcity of ideas has made designing a unique logo, one of the biggest challenges in the logo design sphere.

But as a brand, you definitely would want something that stands out and is original, so it’s important that you share your ideas with the designer and collaborate with him/her to get you closer to the kind of results you are expecting.

Here are great tips and considerations from our side that will definitely make it easier for you to do that and stay away from clichés while getting your logo designed:

Understanding Why Clichés Happen

Every logo needs to represent the industry of work and nearly every industry has an undeclared symbol to represent that it’s being represented there. Ever seen that homes are always featured in logos for the real estate industry or how food is always featured so prominently in logos from the restaurant industry? They are there because these elements are essential in making the audience recognize the industry that logo belongs to.

Now when the audience knows your industry, it has to know your area of specialization within that industry. This positioning happens in tandem with the industry specific images we have. For e.g. a police badge in a logo will definitely help you identify that this business belongs to the law enforcement or security industry, but adding a sea wave inside that badge as a design element makes it easier to understand that this firm specializes in providing coastal security. Here is the logo that will help you understand this concept:

When you get this difference through with, you need something that sets you apart from your competitors, so if everyone has the wave within the badge, no client in the world would be able to tell them apart. You would need to make your logo differentiable enough from the competition that also has similar elements within their logos which now brings into play the other design elements like vibrancy, color schemes, edge-o-graphy, typography and the mood. These design elements can help you in the unique positioning of your logo that the audience doesn’t confuse with similar firms that easily.

Coming to back to what makes clichés happen, as the design process moves forward, you have little room to wiggle away from the conventionals or have limited tools of choice to help keep your logo an original. There is a fine line between being offbeat and being clichéd and you can find yourself on the wrong side at any time if you fail to understand how less you need to depend on the resources and how much more depends on inherent creativity of your designer and your own self to make the logo more memorable and unique.

How to Avoid this Problem?

Clichéd signifies common and common stems from the ease and low focus on creativity. Sans Sherif is one of the most overused fonts just because it’s easier to read and comprehend than others, making it useful but still a clichéd design element, that is at best, avoided.

Even if you are using something conventional like a plane, in your logo for the aviation industry, make sure that there is something done to that plane that represents your uniqueness.

For e.g. something like a cowboy hat or Bullhorns in a logo signifies something that is from the good old Wild West or is related to it in some manner, in this logo made by us, we have combined these two peripheries to make the audience see a Cowboy hat placed on top of bull horns and also see a bull ready to rage forward. The hat functions both ways, as a hat and as the upper view of a bull’s face as seen from the rider’s perspective. This simple, yet effective logo will make this business stand out amongst similar competitors and still stay true to its other purposes.

So the next time you are gearing up to get either an entirely new logo for your brand or are getting a redesign done, make sure that you jazz the seemingly clichéd elements a bit by infusing creativity. No brand should end up with a run of the mill logo, but for that, you would need a unique vision, a great logo design firm who has the experience of catering to different perspectives successfully and the desire to get the best for your brand every single time.