Your logo has a few jobs:
1. To communicate your brand story to your target audience. It can do this with a meaningful picture, or icon. It can communicate through the choice of font – fonts all have different meanings. And it can communicate through its’ color palette.
2. To be scalable. Your logo needs to able to be as big as a billboard and as small as a postage stamp and retain its’ legibility. And still look good!
3. To be legible. If you can’t read a part of your business name in your logo, the logo becomes somewhat useless for introducing a new company or building a new brand. Don’t make your customers work unnecessarily hard to decipher it.
4. To act as the visual keystone in your brand. Your logo will appear on all of your marketing materials. Some of the visual aspects of the logo will be echoed throughout your other design elements. Make sure that your logo can take on this responsibility.
5. To represent your company – proudly. You want to be happy with your logo. You want it to instill that little spark of pride, of “this is mine” for you. This doesn’t mean that it has to be in your favorite colors, though. You should be proud of your logo’s communication capabilities – and know that it tells your brand story in the best possible way.
6. To appeal to your customers. You want your customers to be happy with your logo. To really like it, and to be glad to be affiliated with it once they hire you. Part of this is built through the logo itself – making sure the colors, fonts and image appeal to the clients. The other half of this is reputation – delivering a great product or service so that people have a good feeling about your company and your materials.