We have been designing logos and brand identities for decades. The most successful companies have instant recognition. Adopting a good design for your brand isn’t only about flair—it needs to serve you well for years. Effective design requires patience and meticulous attention to detail.
Best Examples of Emotional Design
Developing a brand identity with design can be challenging. Wrestling with the challenges during the process, however, produces a more effective result. Visuals need to aid potential customers in understanding the brand’s purpose. Logos, as the visual representation of brand messaging, help rally employees and team members to grow and perform toward a single goal.
Chris Lo, Principal and Creative Director of Matcha Design, points out, “I’ve witnessed many companies expand and flourish since using my work. Some have even been acquired and purchased, allowing their founders early retirement. I’m not saying that scenario is solely the result of my logo design, but having a meaningful and effective image definitely aligns it under a single emotion. Trust and positivity make your brand attractive.”
Acknowledging your company history while moving forward is a delicate balance. This is crucial when re-designing the logo of an existing company that has built existing relationships. Our method of preserving those desired elements is through hard work, years of experience, and dedicated research.
The Importance of Brand Reputation
The marketing world goes through cycles. Current trends evolve as businesses, organizations, and even individuals rethink how best to present themselves. The methods and platforms we communicate on are constantly changing, but what we communicate is essentially the same.
That’s why it’s important to establish proper visual communication, and a meaningful logo is an integral factor.
Sales and branding are two sides of the coin that marketers have to flip.
When a logo represents your brand, you can think of “brand” as your reputation. While the two are not strictly interchangeable, as the Reputation Institute points out, both are inextricably connected with the promises your team makes to your customers.
What you promise and what you stand for is what should come immediately to viewers’ minds when they see your logo. Like a wax seal on a letter, your brand’s logo should guarantee a specific experience, a known quantity.
If you have what it takes to deliver on that promise, then your logo will serve to reinforce your reputation.
Logos and Color Meanings
The history of color principles has forever been linked with how we interpret nature, and ultimately, emotion. Our cultures, experiences, and even industry can affect our color associations in given contexts.
Loud or eye-catching colors can be exciting, adding vitality to your brand. You may benefit from using a color that’s tied to the national, cultural, or historical origins of your founder or company heritage—incorporating color combinations that mirror the nation’s flag or using a color that evokes a certain energy or charm will achieve this.
Using color to help tell the story of your brand within your logo is a monumental task, which requires intimate knowledge of your organization and industry, but color alone shouldn’t carry the weight of the message. Your logo and graphics may need to be placed in areas where color isn’t an option. Your design and brand identity should include dual-tone and monotone variations that still reference all the elements that remind viewers what you stand for.
Positive Emotion as a Goal
Your logo needs to represent who you are and what your organization promises. That is its mission. If it succeeds, just a glimpse of the logo should make someone familiar with your brand smile with recognition.
Connecting this memory with positive emotions will reinforce those values. Positive content is likely to be shared and thought about more often. Your customers will begin taking on ownership of your brand, acting as ambassadors when they talk with friends or network in the professional world.
Evoking an exclusive, positive response may have more to do with your overall brand identity than your logo alone, so it is imperative that you inject this emotional weight into the design process.
A Stroke of Genius
An effective design not only carries the emotional weight behind the brand, it also paints a picture. It tells the story of the company it represents. Each specific detail should be carefully contemplated and work in concert with the others.
Why use a certain font style? What is the impact of the thickness of a stroke? Which graphical elements should be included? How is white space utilized? Every one of these elements should have purpose. If a design is going to last well into the future, it needs to draw from powerful memories of the past. Otherwise it’s just a consumable, like an attractive bowl of fruit or a fancy dress for a reception or gala—disposable, easily forgotten.
Genius is by design. Developing logos and brand identities takes time, a nurturing hand, and the patience to become fluent with the subject. More than a pretty picture, iconic representations of a company need to be enduring, not going out of vogue when the trends shift.
