Read this Before You Hire A Logo Designer for Your Small Business

A strong logo and brand identity can help you attract the perfect customer.

Or, it can keep them away, costing you valuable marketing efforts and dollars you put behind your brand.

Your logo is only as good as the designer who created it.

As a small business owner, you need your branding and marketing to count every chance you get.

Many logo designers out there don’t realize this and small businesses end up having to spend more to fix things down the road.

Being a logo designer myself, I want to help you avoid that.

So before you decide to hire a logo designer, here are a some things to think about.

A Good Logo Designer Listens

When you reach out to a designer to create your logo, their first response should be to jump on a call or set up meeting with you.

This allows both of you to see if

(a) the relationship is a good fit and

(b) to help the designer understand your business goals.

A lot of inexperienced designers at this stage jump right into the design phase without considering the business needs.

In this case, you’d typically end up with a mark similar to what you already have, or worse, similar to what your competition has.

An experienced logo designer will ask the right questions, listen closely to your answers, take notes on it all, and follow up with their own research about your company and competition.

All this info gathering helps them determine the best strategy to take going forward with the design.

Your Logo Designer Should Understand That Your Logo Is the Face of Your Company

Just like our faces help distinguish one another in a crowd, the same goes for your logo.

It is the face of your company when your face cannot be present.

A logo is one of the first impressions a potential customer has of your business before getting to know it.

It should be unique enough to differentiate you from your competitors. It should be simple enough to recall in their memory when asked about your brand.

There’s a fine line between creating a mark so simple that it blends in and so unique that it gets complicated.

Many logo designers have a hard time finding the balance between these two directions.

A Logo Designer Should Know Your Logo Can’t Say Everything

Most logos are too damn complicated.

That’s because logo designers try to squeeze in as much about the company as possible into one tiny symbol, over designing it until there’s nothing left for it to be an effective mark.

Think about the top brands in the world and what their logos look like.

Do you have a few logos in mind? Yes? Good.

Whichever logos you’re thinking of right now I bet almost none of them depict the actual product of the company.

What they do show is one simple idea.

This is part of the reason why you can picture these logos without me having to give you examples.

A good logo designer knows how to pull out the essence of your brand and distill it into one simple idea.

Hire A Logo Designer Who Spends Time With Your Logo

I’m fully aware of all the options these days for creating a logo.

Online logo makers, AI, crowdsourcing, stock templates, even friends and family members who “are good with computers” are all in competition to help give you that winning mark.

However, many of those options don’t consider your business goals and how to position your brand for future growth.

These quick logo makers may be able to spit out a decently artistic mark for your business in under an hour, but they haven’t taken the time to get to know you and your company.

As mentioned earlier, a logo designer needs time before the design begins to get to know the organization they’re working with.

They also need time spent exploring various design options, colors, text, supporting imagery, and then testing it all for functionality in usage scenarios.

After the logo is created for presentation, you as the business owner need time to sit with the proposed options and get comfortable with them in order to make a sound business decision on which one version to go with. It’s rare to like something new and unknown at first glance. Especially a logo.

Once the approved version is out in the world, it needs time for your audience and customers to get familiar with it.

Make sure your designer includes this time in the planning of the project before any work begins.

A Logo Designer Should Know Your Logo Is Not Your Brand

Because of all the tasks your logo has to accomplish, it’s easy for logo designers to consider your logo as the overall brand of your company.

It’s not.

Your logo is one piece of your brand identity.

Going back to the face analogy, you can think of a brand as a person.

If your logo is the face of your company, then your brand identity is the way it dresses, the hair style it wears, and the accessories it shows off.

Your brand is the personality, it’s how others perceive you. It is created by others impressions of your business as whole.

Making decisions about what your logo, identity, and marketing material look like can help influence the perception to an extent. At the end of the day, it’s your customers who determine your brand based on everything you’ve built.

With that said, a logo can’t work on its own. It needs the supporting elements of the brand identity and the brand as a whole to make it function out in the world.

A strong logo designer knows your logo is an investment in the future of your entire brand. The logo itself needs to endure for years to come without it drastically changing often.

If You’re Looking for A Logo Designer, I Can Help

I’ve been studying logo design best practices since high school when I entered a competition to redesign the logo for my town’s newspaper.

Since then, I’ve learned a thing or two about creating strong, memorable logos and brand identities.

If the points above struck a chord with you and you’re in need of some help with your logo design, send me some info so we can have a chat.

You may also want to join my email list for free branding and marketing tips sent out every two weeks.