6 GOLDEN Rules Of Logo Design (Logotype) — 100% Essential!

when it comes to logo type there are five different golden rules that you must adhere to if you are a graphic designer who wants to be serious about their craft the first rule is something that a lot of amateur designers like to do and that is to replace a letter in the logo type with a relevant symbol or graphic but wait a moment it can be that bad can it surely to illustrate just how bad this can be we're going to dive into the world of british television more specifically into a famous show where wannabe

marketing and business professionals compete to become the sole work partner of a famous tycoon trust me this is relevant and i am going somewhere eye-opening with this on one episode the contestants were split into two different teams each team had to come up with a branding and logo solution for a baby food company and i present to you one of the logos that a team of so say up and coming marketing professionals created it doesn't really instill the best confidence in a product meant for babies because parents want their babies to be alive after they

fed them their food anyway this doesn't just happen once on the show it happened numerous different times and another amazing example you can see here with this cruise ship experience and logo design my point here is that a lot of amateur logo designers instantly gravitate towards the notion of replacing a letter in the logo type with a symbol or graphic and it's something that should be completely stayed away from so if you're breaking this golden rule at the moment try and find a different design direction not only does it look amateurish but it also confuses

people who interact with the logo sure 8 out of 10 people are going to read astro but there are people out there who would just read stro and thus the brand enters into confusion town golden rule number two is possibly the juiciest part of today's video and it's something i have touched upon before on this channel but if i left this out of today's list of golden rules it would be like eating cereal without having the milk and who really does that if you do that then you're just weird your logo type 100 absolutely has

to help communicate the message of the brand to the right audience i cannot emphasize the importance of having at least the basic understanding of marketing when you venture into the business of logo designing and here's why honda has a leverage over the market when it comes to their engines and the quality of their builds yet they managed to have competitive prices importantly the target market of honda according to my research are the middle income groups in society the thing about the middle income groups in society is that they have that slight taste of luxury they

get a chance to sample luxury in the slightest forms yeah they're comfortable financially but they want to appear greater than that to their friends their family and other people in society quite often the people in this bracket of income in the middle sector they want to have access to the luxuries of you know the people in the higher sectors of income having something that will elevate their social status or reward the amount of hours and effort they put into their work in their jobs is something very very highly sought after to this middle income bracket

of people when you see the logo type for the brand name of honda you can see why they chose a serif font in uppercase letter forms serif fonts typically suggest quality being superior and high status this serif font helps make honda appeal to that middle income audience it suggests to them that honda is a little bit luxurious it is a quality product and the uppercase letter forms help command authority in this nice sector of automobiles notice how when i spoke about the honda target audience i spoke about what they want but also how that thing

they want will make them feel or be perceived by others this is the kind of marketing tactics that you want to think about when choosing the logo type for your logos also notice how the honda tagline is the power of dreams people who are extremely wealthy and have been for a long time aren't dreaming or hoping for luxury and wealth because they already have that a lot of people in the middle income sectors will be dreaming of this however the next golden rule for logotype is to make sure your logo type is legible at all

scales obviously you don't want to have the brand's name out there on say a corporate letterhead where it's impossible for the name to be read for the brand itself one tip is to step you know four to six feet away from your monitor and check to see if it is still legible at a distance but also try printing out your logo on paper in different scales and sizes just to see how it functions a bonus tip here is that it's very common to send the client to two different versions of any logo variation that you

make one with the kerning closely packed together for larger scale usability and then another version with wider set kerning for smaller scale designs and speaking of kerning check out this rebrand for an english fashion brand zara either the designer was going through some kind of mid-life crisis or they were just very bored that day and decided to ruin this logo in all kinds of ways and this brings me on to golden rule number four which is don't use automatic kerning on your designs this is a big no-no by default programs such as adobe illustrator will

have various different settings for tracking which in a lot of cases is totally fine save for a body text but when you're designing something that is so strikingly exposed and obvious to everyone who sees it as with the logo type you need to manually turn things yourself i like to sort of unfocus my eyes a bit so the design becomes blurry and then you can kind of see the gaps in your logo type or the problems really really easily you might look like a bit of an idiot but nobody's gonna be watching you do this

probably also try kerning your logo type in groups of three characters then bring everything together at the very end another strategy is to flip the logo type upside down so you have no bias towards the letter forms themselves the letters then just become shapes which you can work with and gold and rule number five is the sheer inability to properly pair fonts on a logo the main logo type is the most memorable part of the typography and the secondary set of typography tells us the audience more about what the brand does both have a very

important role to play in expressing the story behind a brand and they must work in harmonious ways with honda the brand name is authoritarian in bold large letters and in uppercase the tagline is in title case and a lot smaller and discrete the tagline sort of appears as if it's being said to you by a person personally and the main logo type itself is being announced strikingly so great ways to pair logo type are to go with serif and sans-serif fonts as seen on honda and not to use two fonts that are overly dramatic or

complicated also you can mix it up with bold and thin fonts as well as this often results in a good end outcome and golden rule number six is to avoid the dreaded t-word oh my god the t-word and that is of course trends when it comes to logo type try and stay away from those trending typefaces or just simply using fonts that you like that might be implicated within trends take for example this fictitious soap brand lavender this logo type may very well work for the brand in accordance to the brief brand message and target

audience but if the designer chose this font simply because this style is currently trending the likelihood is that this brand is not going to communicate well with the intended audience there are trends in logo type and typography as there are just in graphic design in general or in any kind of sector of society they come and go of course so do stay away from trends and make sure that your logo type doesn't rely on a trend to succeed in it itself so there are six golden rules on logo type design and if you learned something

today consider dropping a like on this video and of course if you want to learn something else about graphic design just click a video on screen and until next time guys design your future today peace [Music] [Music] [Music] you