Common Logo Design Blunders That Will Sabotage Your Logo's Success

For those with no experience, logo design seems easy. Many of the most popular brands in the world, including Amazon, McDonald's, and Nike, sport artwork that appears simple. Yet, designing a logo that distinguishes itself from others while commanding attention and inspiring trust is actually a remarkable feat. Designers often spend days, even weeks, changing and refining a single design. Making a mistake that ends up in the final product can pose a long-term cost to the company for which the logo was designed.

The goal of this article is to highlight a few blunders that even experienced designers make while working on their clients' logos. By familiarizing yourself with them, you'll be less likely to commit the same mistakes.

It's tempting to want to add as many elements to your design as possible to fully capture all of the features that make your company unique. But doing so pushes your artwork into dangerous territory. Each additional element dilutes the potency of the others. By the time you (or your designer) have squeezed everything in, your logo may appear overly complex.

This leads to another problem. When an intricate design is printed in small scale, its details are difficult to distinguish. To a casual observer - or worse, your customers - your artwork might appear as a jumbled mess of lines. At that point, the logo is ineffective.

Raster images are those that are based on pixels. Each pixel is essentially a colored square that contributes to the overall image. The problem is, artwork that is designed using a raster format cannot be reproduced in larger sizes without sacrificing resolution. The image becomes pixelated; it appears blurry or fuzzy.

The solution to this problem is to have your logo designed in vector format. Here, images are based on mathematical formulas where specific coordinates are used to define points and curves. A vector-based logo can be reproduced in any size without losing clarity. This can be important if you decide to resize for advertising purposes, like poster printing or bumper stickers.

As a side note, raster graphics are useful when reproduced in electronic media, such as on a website. For this reason, have your logo designed in both formats.

This is a common problem since many people believe it is completely acceptable to "borrow" elements from others' logos. A swoosh here, a geometric icon there, along with a host of other trendy symbols, are stolen and integrated into artwork without a second thought. This causes a few problems. First, it's more difficult to hide this type of chicanery than most people realize. Once it is discovered, word spreads quickly.

Second, the company for whom the "borrowed" design elements are used becomes exposed to copyright issues. At the very least, they are forced to abandon the artwork, which is troublesome if they have spent years building their brand behind it.

Third, as word spreads online about the stolen logo design, reports of the offense are archived. Searches for the company's name will likely return accounts of the misconduct long after the situation has been settled.

Most off-the-shelf design software is equipped with a feature called auto-kerning. Kerning is the process of adjusting the amount of space between letters. With auto-kerning, the application sets the space automatically. This seems beneficial, but can actually have a negative impact on your design. The reason? The feature "guesses" at an appropriate amount of space, and often does its job poorly. An untrained eye may be unable to pinpoint the problem, but there will still be a feeling that something is "off."

Avoid relying upon auto-kerning. If you are designing your own logo, invest the time to manually modify the space between the letters.

There are many other mistakes that designers - both novices and veterans - make when creating logos. Those described above are among the most common. More importantly, each can lead to costly problems down the road.