Your Logo Isn't Separate From Your Brand
Like a musical symphony, your logo and your brand must be closely linked and perfectly orchestrated to effectively tell your brand’s story and create its memorable signature look and voice.
After founding their companies, the next thing entrepreneurs usually have on their minds is to create a logo for their new venture.
The reason is simple.
You need a logo, a symbol identifying your brand, for all customer communications, such as your social media page, website, email, store sign, and business cards.
Understandably, the pressure is often intense to design a logo quickly because the social media experts, the web designers, the sign makers, and the printers are waiting for it.
However, in our experience, rushing through the logo design process could necessitate a rebranding shortly after launch at significant additional costs once it becomes clear that the logo doesn't fit the brand you are creating.
A Logo Is Only One of Several Visual Brand Design Elements
Your brand captures how the public perceives your products and services. You can shape this perception through branding, which develops a coherent set of verbal and visual design elements that help communicate your brand. One of these visual design elements is your logo.
However, branding doesn't happen in isolation. It usually starts with defining your purpose, vision, mission, goals, and values (brand compass). Like a North Star, they anchor your brand and ensure that your verbal and visual design elements align seamlessly with them, creating the coveted signature look and voice of a strong brand.
You can compare a brand to a musical symphony. Each instrument alone wouldn't wow the audience as much as the magnificent sound of all instruments perfectly and beautifully playing together. In branding, you choose typefaces, colors, shapes, and the tone of your words based on your purpose, vision, mission, goals, and values. Perfectly aligned, they form a coherent, contradiction-free look and feel the public can easily recognize (brand recognition) and remember (brand awareness).
Your Brand Is More Than Your Logo
Designing a logo before defining a brand compass can confuse the public because they may perceive the selection of design elements as random. Low coherence is typical for weak brands.
But to make a weak brand stronger, you have to follow these six steps:
Define your company's purpose, vision, mission, goals, and values (brand compass).
Define your target customers.
Define your brand promise.
Define your brand personality.
Define the verbal and visual design elements.
Design your logo.
Logo design is not about finding the most creative logo for your business.
Instead, a logo results from a process that defines your brand and chooses different design elements to tell your brand's story.
Like a symphony, a logo plays an essential role in your storytelling, just like the other design elements. Perfectly orchestrated, they create your brand's memorable signature look and voice.
