Logo Design narrative and brief form for clients

Why it’s important to hire a professional logo designer?

Your logo is your visual ambassador to the world. It must be memorable and unique. Logos exist because we remember faces and landmarks. Your logo is the unique face of your business – your interesting landmark – so people can find you again in the crowd.

Consider the following scenario: You are a plumber. You give your business card to someone at a party. A year later they need a plumber but they can’t find your card, so they start looking through the yellow pages. But because they don’t remember your name, and your logo looked like that of every other plumber, they never find you again. You didn’t stand out. Good logos are designed individually, not chosen from a library of clip art.

It must be reproducible in a variety of sizes because it might be used on a pencil, a key fob, a business card, a billboard, a menu, a mailing label, a website, a television advertisement, a product package, or an invoice – anything used for conducting business. Think of all the packaging and promotional material businesses generate with their logo on it. With so much riding on a logo, it’s a wonder how often it gets overlooked.

Your logo design should be timeless. It will be with you as long as your business exists. Changing it for a completely different one later is not generally an option – at best, they’re updated. We don’t get married thinking we can trade later on. You’re going to invest years of hard work in developing a positive public image. Your logo will be the face of that image. You owe it to yourself to begin with a logo design worth investing in.

The journey from desire to creation requires research, reflection, inspiration, sketching, analysis, and testing before final deployment. The process can take a few days, or a few weeks. A professional, formally educated designer draws on the lessons of art history, heraldry, architecture, marketing, color theory, culture and psychology.

One area of logo design commonly ignored is the typeface. Typeface itself sends a subtle message to the viewer. You don’t want to send one message with your logo and another with the typeface. Logos that are entirely text, such as Disney, are called type logos. Businesses that choose a type logo should have an original typeface designed especially for their needs, as opposed to using a typeface that already exists. The necessity of originality demands it. If you choose a typeface that anyone can purchase, you run the risk of undermining the unique character of your logo. Many logos are symbols combined with text. Combining a symbol with text allows you to take advantage of the many different type faces currently available yet still have a unique, recognizable symbol to present to the public. Target Stores is a good example.

A logo should look as good in black on white as it does in color. Experienced designers do their initial mockups in black-on-white and save color choices for later. This ensures that when copies of documents are made, the design translates.

A photograph or painting is not a logo. Detailed, colorful images are frequently used in the design of product packaging such as beer bottle labels, and such artwork is often used as signage for store fronts. But a logo is much, much more reduced. The more detail, the more difficult it will be for customers to recognize it clearly at small sizes or from their car at 70 miles per hour.

Brief

Please answer the following questions as completely as possible. The more information, the better.

1. What does your company/organization do? What service or product do you provide and how do you provide it? Think store front, web, one-on-one, seminars, etc.
2. What is the history of your company? Is this a new start-up or a longtime business? If new, what made you decide to do this?
3. What is the overall goal of the design project?
4. What are you trying to communicate and why? Ask yourself, “What is the most important thing I want people to know about me and my business?” Think value, experience, cutting-edge technology, family-friendly, delicious, safe, peaceful, rejuvenating, etc.
5. How do you differ from your competitors?
6. Are you looking to create a new identity or update your current material?
7. Who is your target market?
• age:
• income:
• demographics:
• employment:
• lifestyle:
8. What copy (text) and/or pictures are needed?
9. What are the specifications? Size, where printed/used i.e., mugs, T shirts, pencils, billboards, vehicle wraps, etc.
10. Do you have any benchmarks? Example: competitor’s material you like, other materials you find interesting.
11. What do you NOT want? i.e., colors, shapes, treatments, etc.
12. What is your time scale/deadline?

Thanks to Mitch Elder from StockLogos for the write-up.