I read a good article a long time ago about some of the general design rules for company logos. I wish I could find it, both to credit the original author, to reference myself, and to refer other people to. Until then, I am going to recreate it.

There are a lot of more abstract guides about the artistry of composing a logo. Here's one from Adobe that concludes that you need to hire a designer. These are more concrete technical things that I have found people don't think about.

Make It Recognizable (In All Forms)

Your logo is going to blown up to 10 ft tall on signs and shrunk down to half an inch tall on phone screens. It should look good in both places.

BuffyCorp runs their empire from their worldwide headquarters in this nondescript office building with a big sign.

"Flat" logos are currently in, and they generally scale and shrink easily. If your logo has gradients or textures, make sure it still looks good when those are scaled down and some of the fidelity in those features is lost.

An Invoice from BuffyCorp. You should probably declare bankruptcy now.

Monochrome and Grayscale Variants

This is important for two reasons:

  1. 1.

    The white version will go on busy backgrounds, potentially with a drop shadow and other monochrome logos.

  2. 2.

    The black version will be printed on documents (e.g. invoices) that get printed on monochrome printers.

If you tally up all of the places the logo gets used, the monochrome black version may be the most used version.

Colorful monochrome logos are easy to make look good when you're using an embroidery machine to put them on clothing too.

BuffyCorp emotionally (but not financially) supports the cherry blossom festivals in many locations. Background photo by Arno Smit on Unsplash.

Leave the Background in the Design Guide

This is the "No Capes!" of my design experience (and is a little more subjective and aesthetic than the other rules). There are just going to be a ton of places where your background doesn't fit aesthetically (or geometrically). It's great that you're trying to "do it all" and bring your background with you, but the correct place for the background is going to be in your design guide and PowerPoint templates (where you also have more room to try things).

Try putting your logo next to some Fortune 500 companies and see how it looks. It's really hard to make a background not feel way too heavy.

The brands in this image have a combined market capitalization of over $4 Trillion.

You Probably Want a Combination Mark

Logos fall into a few categories (here's an article from VistaPrint that probably breaks them into too many categories), but the most common one is a combination mark consisting of a "wordmark" (text of your name) and a "logomark" (a brand image). It's also probably the easiest variant to get right.

You can easily use just a wordmark if you feel that fits your company more. If you have a combination mark, you can omit the logomark and only use the wordmark if you want. It is generally a bad idea to only use a logomark because you basically need to be a household name for it to work.

The way that your logomark and wordmark align when laid out on a page is called a "lockup". When logos are placed next to each other (and companies that partner love putting their logos next to each other), generally the wordmarks get aligned and each logomark gets aligned to the wordmark it belongs to. Large companies have styleguides about exactly how the wordmarks should align.

Look at how the logomarks are aligned to each wordmark but are in different places. Buffy Airlines unfortunately does not fly across the Atlantic, but this was the best example by far.

You Don't Have to get it Right the First Try

Companies' logos evolve. For most companies, especially companies whose products are web applications, the cost of changing your logo is pretty low. Now that I have finished generating the images for this blog post, I see quite a few changes that I would make to the quick-and-dirty BuffyCorp logo that I made to demonstrate these rules. Once you make it big, you can hire a professional to design your logo.

Just please – no backgrounds!