LOGO DESIGN

A typographic logo
A typographic logo is a logo that consists of the company name or product name in a specific font. This font often fits the company, what the company does or what it stands for and such logos sometimes seem the most basic to someone who knows little about logo design. However, the opposite is true. Finding the right font, where I personally check whether every letter of the company name is beautiful in a certain font and whether the letters blend well with each other, takes a lot of time. And even when the right font has been found, many manual adjustments are often involved in order to put the company name in it optimally. Especially with regard to the space between the letters that we call the ‘tracking’. Making sure that a company name is beautiful, strong, typography and especially perfectionism. I usually go through more than 1,500 fonts before I have a selection of potential contenders.

A symbol or icon logo
Symbol logos are often the most prominent logos in human memory. Think, for example, of the shell of Shell, the apple of Apple and the ‘swoosh’ of Nike.
What many people forget, however, is that these are often logos that in the past were indeed next to the company name to indicate the name of the company. Only so much time has passed and the company has become so well-known that the symbol alone says it all.

Symbol logos are therefore not suitable for every company, for every company name or even for every industry. It depends on many factors whether a symbol logo is the most sensible choice.
When I design a symbol logo myself, I therefore always make a variant of the logo that includes the company name (a combination logo). In this way, both logos can be used interchangeably and the symbol automatically remains in the customer’s memory.

A combination of both (combination logo)
As mentioned, a combination logo is a logo that consists of the combination of a symbol and a company name in a specific font. In general, it is smart not to make the font itself too exotic within this type of logo, because a symbol already requires a lot of attention in the whole. And if, in addition to the symbol, the font is also very striking, both elements compete for attention and it quickly becomes a busy whole. The strongest logos are generally calm, powerful and confident.

When a symbol seems to be very suitable for a company, I usually first make a combination logo. And as soon as the symbol is known enough to the customer, the symbol can also be used separately. Here, for example, you can see two combination logos of which I already highlighted the single symbol above.

A monogram logo
A monogram logo consists of the initials of a company name and this type of logo has a classic image. In the past, this type of logo was often used and you often see this type of logo within arms of old families.
The disadvantage of this type of logo is that – just like with a symbol logo – in many cases the company name has to be very well known before the logo says enough. Everyone knows C&A, H&M or the AD. But these companies get away with just their initials because it says something to almost everyone.

New companies are unknown. So in many cases it is useful to take a critical look at the applicability of a monogram logo. And when this type of logo seems to be the most suitable, it is also wise to make a variant with the full company name. By subsequently using the combination of the monogram and the company name, and the separate monogram, an association between the monogram and the company name automatically takes place in the mind of the customer.

An emblem logo
An emblem logo is often a company name framed by a surface or border. They are powerful, stamp-like logos, but scalability (how well the logo remains legible in small and large format) is extra spicy because you work within a ‘reserved space’. Also with this type of logo the question is how appropriate it is for a certain company and a company name. If you have a very long company name and you also have to frame it, it immediately becomes a difficult story in, for example, a very small format. And even with relatively short company names, it is sometimes still possible to play creatively with the room layout to keep everything optimally legible.

Let’s discuss what type of logo is required for your new business.

Color influences your decisions more than you probably think. For this reason, designers often develop a very thorough knowledge of color theory during their training. As a field, color psychology goes one step further and focuses even more on the question of what exactly color does to people’s behavior and perception. I personally see this mainly as an interesting area of ​​knowledge, but not as hard science. Partly because more than in any part of design, color and its influence are extremely personal. On this page I briefly explain what color psychology is, what its importance is and how I personally apply it within my projects.

What is Color Psychology? And how important is it?
It is of great importance that you as a designer are aware of what colors can mean. With almost all high-quality design work, it is important that the answer to the question: “Why this color?” Not is: “Because it looked beautiful”. Colors have a lot of influence on people and choices regarding the color palette for your company or product must be made after thorough considerations. Colors influence our behavior every day. From the choice of our food, to what we put on today to the colors of road signs. The tricky thing about color psychology is that the meaning and influence of color is determined by many more factors than just the color. Your gender plays a role in how you look at, for example, the color purple. Your origin or cultural background plays a major role (red is a warning color or the color of passion for us, but in South Africa it is the color of mourning). And things like age and sexual orientation also have an influence. For example, it is very difficult to make large generalisations with regard to color use. And some of the world’s most effective brand identities are so striking (and perhaps so successful) because they have deliberately broken the rules on color use. A high-end fashion brand such as Hermès, for example, has the color orange as the figurehead of their visual identity. Very daring for a brand that sells bags that start at thousands of Euros, because the color orange usually does not necessarily have the appearance of luxury. Yet Hermès has managed not only to evoke the feeling of luxury, but to claim the color within the fashion world in such a way that many of their fans can tell which brand it is just by the orange packaging (without the logo). Due to all these factors, color psychology is a very interesting field that I mainly use to make targeted estimates with regard to the perception of the target group and to see where possible opportunities lie.

Applying color psychology
If no broad generalisations can be made about color and if everyone ‘interprets’ a color differently, what is the purpose of color psychology? One of the things you can pretty much estimate with knowledge of color psychology is whether a color might be completely misplaced or even inappropriate. The color pink for a major financial institution such as a bank, for example, could be seen as very original. After all, there is no ‘pink bank’ in the Netherlands yet, which is why you immediately stand out. However, where with a brand like Hermès the color was just outside the comfort zone, but within the ‘appropriate area’, the color pink would most likely fall outside the appropriate spectrum for a sofa. Color has a lot to do with arousing trust, for example, and a color can also appear formal or informal. Pink is both quite informal and less confidence inspiring and since these are two things that weigh heavily within the financial sector, the color pink is not just suitable. The “suitability” of a particular color for a particular product or business is the most universally reliable and consistent assessment factor in color psychology. Is this color appropriate for what is being sold? Then the question is. When it comes to choosing a color for a particular brand, it is generally much more sensible to look at the response to the suitability of the color rather than the response to the color itself. This also involves the emotion associated with the brand and the color, and whether they match each other. For example, a brand like Harley Davidson has ‘toughness’ as a main characteristic of brand identity and when choosing a color for such a brand it is wise to see which colors match this characteristic. It is therefore much more important that colors match well with the character of a company or product, instead of necessarily focusing on stereotypical color descriptions such as: ‘Green stands for: environmentally conscious!’ Ultimately, it’s about the feeling, the atmosphere and the image that your brand creates. For example, a brand like Harley Davidson has ‘toughness’ as a main characteristic of brand identity and when choosing a color for such a brand it is wise to see which colors match this characteristic. It is therefore much more important that colors match well with the character of a company or product, instead of necessarily focusing on stereotypical color descriptions such as: ‘Green stands for: environmentally conscious!’ Ultimately, it’s about the feeling, the atmosphere and the image that your brand creates. For example, a brand like Harley Davidson has ‘toughness’ as a main characteristic of brand identity and when choosing a color for such a brand it is wise to see which colors match this characteristic. It is therefore much more important that colors match well with the character of a company or product, instead of necessarily focusing on stereotypical color descriptions such as: ‘Green stands for: environmentally conscious!’ Ultimately, it’s about the feeling, the atmosphere and the image that your brand creates. It is therefore much more important that colors match well with the character of a company or product, instead of necessarily focusing on stereotypical color descriptions such as: ‘Green stands for: environmentally conscious!’ Ultimately, it’s about the feeling, the atmosphere and the image that your brand creates. It is therefore much more important that colors match well with the character of a company or product, instead of necessarily focusing on stereotypical color descriptions such as: ‘Green stands for: environmentally conscious!’ Ultimately, it’s about the feeling, the atmosphere and the image that your brand creates.

My role in color psychology
Apart from these character and authenticity-oriented matters, there are of course many considerations of a technical nature. For example, you usually do not talk about one specific color for a company or product, but you are talking about a color palette. There is usually one clear accent color, which is followed by a palette of basic colors and any background shades. In addition, you are officially not only talking about colors but also about things such as shades, tones and shades. You also have colors in the warm spectrum and colder colors, and in addition to the question of how suitable or original an accent color is, the main question is how this color goes together with the other colors from the color palette. In many cases you use multiple colors in interplay within a design and it is important that this ‘orchestra’ is well coordinated. All these things together quickly result in an overload of information for my customers, so I limit myself in explanation to them mainly to the concise ‘why’ for certain considerations and choices. Of course, their own taste also plays a role. Because when the color blue is extremely suitable as the main color for a company, but my customer thinks the color is terrible, that is not a good outcome. So I see it as my job to use my knowledge of color theory and color psychology to make informed decisions regarding the suitability of a color, its originality, the opportunities and potential obstacles that the colors bring with them, and I also weigh the personal taste of my client in all this. My knowledge of color psychology is especially useful in the larger projects for non-existent companies or products. Within these projects I can think out-of-the-box without having a ‘color palette heritage’, within which I have to move because that color is already so well known to the target group.

Here I will give you an introduction to one of my areas of expertise that is also becoming more and more a passion: Typography. I explain to you what is meant by typography, what purpose it serves, what interests are involved and what impact typography has on both usability and the purely visual design of your product or company.

What is typography?
Typography is officially engaged in the “…design, layout and printing of text for both functional and aesthetic purposes…”. In other words, it basically focuses on shaping text. Fonts do an enormous amount with the perception and the ‘tone’ of a text. And where some people might think that you just click on a font that looks nice and ‘done’, it really is a much broader and more in-depth discipline than that. Where copywriting focuses on the ‘What?’ of a message, typography determines a large part of the ‘How?’. And it largely determines the entire user experience of your content. This is easily noticed by the difference in tone when I say: That’s how it should be. Versus: THIS IS HOW IT SHOULD BE. The second variant sounds louder and it seems like I’m yelling it at you. And this effect is only generated by the simple use of capital letters (called ‘capitals’ within typography). Let alone the impact of a serif or sans serif font (with or without bulges on the letters), font thicknesses, the spacing between letters, punctuation, text layouts, etc. And there are many factors that determine visually. how a text sounds and comes across, apart from just the font itself. Typography originally originated from the printing press, but nowadays (certainly when it comes to my own role in this) it is mainly digital products that dominate and in which all kinds of new discoveries are currently being made. Think of websites, apps, digital books, etc.

What is the role of typography in design?
As mentioned, your typography largely determines the tone and thus the perception of your entire product or company. For example, a font can help you to appear “established” (even if you’re just getting started), purely by choosing a more classic serif typeface. A font can also make you more approachable by choosing a font that comes across as more informal or even cozy. During the branding phaseof your company it is important to think carefully about the tone of your product or company. How you talk to or with your customer and why you have that tone. For example, an informal and cozy font would (in all likelihood) be less suitable for a Law Firm or a Bank. Where a classic font would perhaps find much less connection with the target group of, for example, a nursery or gym (just to take a few extremes). Devising your tone and the character of your product or company is therefore a very important first step. If only because a designer can then search much more specifically for the most suitable font. As a designer, if I know that my customer wants to communicate very formally with his or her target group, I can, for example, set aside all informal fonts in my head. Which amounts to a scenario where I don’t have to look at at least 250 fonts from my (software) catalog. This saves a lot of time and is therefore a very efficient way of working.

Font size and readability within digital products
Readability (also known as ‘legibility’ internationally) is perhaps the most important factor in typography. And with this, typography has a clear interface with usability. Even before you talk about the ‘tone’ of the text (determined by the design and styling of a font), it is important that the text is legible at all. That same smartphone revolution that has led to a host of new typography opportunities and uses has one major limitation. The size of the screen. The display in any device is in fact the canvas for your message. The size of this canvas also determines how many words fit in one sentence and how long or short a text becomes. If you make a font very large (for example for a page title), a few words may fit on one sentence before it reaches the edge of your smartphone screen and the text jumps to the next sentence. One way to solve this is of course to bluntly make the text smaller so that more words fit in one sentence, but sometimes that is not aesthetically pleasing or makes the text less legible. (Apart from the fact that, for example, it becomes unclear what the title and what the body text is). Of course, smaller letters are also simply less readable, especially for that part of the population with a ‘minus or plus-… sight’.

A very important technique that improves the legibility of smaller letters is that of the introduction of the retina display. Originally introduced by Apple in 2010. These ‘retina screens’ are so sharp that the pixels (dots) on the screen are no longer visible to the naked eye, so that text looks many times sharper (the jagged edges of the past are gone) and with which the legibility increases enormously. Also in smaller text sizes. However, the fact remains that there is a lower limit to how small you can make letters before they become unreadable for a large part of your target audience.

Factors such as spacing between the letters and line height also have a lot of influence on this. Partly for this reason, it is smart to attach great importance to the readability of texts on smartphone-sized screens. Because smartphones are here to stay, for now. And if the growth and popularity continues or continues even further, it will soon become by far the most widely used ‘information consumption’ device in existence. Other factors that also determine the readability of a text are things such as the contrast between the letters and the background, the distance from the user’s eyes to the screen, the number of words per sentence (too many words are tiring for the user). eyes of the reader) and visual hierarchy (think of a structure of title, subtitle and body text and the differences in font size therein). All these things fall under typography and partly for this reason I hesitate when I speak about ‘one of my areas of knowledge’. In fact, it’s a field in its own right and without a doubt I could devote my entire career to typography and not be bored for a day.

Want discuss more about typography? Feel free to contact me.