A professional corporate identity inspires confidence among customers and potential customers for your company. It ensures a better presentation of your company and is therefore very important. We give you 7 steps for designing a logo and corporate identity.
Step 1: Your logo based on core values
According to Logo Venture, When you start making a logo, you start with yourself. Who are you? What are you doing? What do you think is important? In other words, what are your core values? Your core values are important starting points for the design choices you will make. Your core values say something about color, shape and typography. In this way you ensure that your visual identity and your house style are in line with your organizational identity. There is a story behind it, namely your story!
Our identity session, visually set in the form of interactive card game, will help you discover your core values. It also helps you write a good mission statement, vision, and slogan or choose a suitable company name. We have developed a Values Design Range that shows the relationship between core values and color form / typography. This will help you design your company and corporate identity.
Step 2: Involve your target group in logo design
Now that you have taken a good look at yourself, it is also important to look at your surroundings. The logo must appeal to your target group. Think about how you want to be positioned relative to your direct competitors. Do you distinguish yourself by standing out or do you want your corporate identity to be in line with other companies in your market? Write down what is important to you.
Step 3: Getting started: sketching concept logos
You get to work with all this input. That means a lot of sketching and developing ideas. Show your best sketches to others and ask for feedback from people who do or do not ” know ” about it. In this way you will discover the associations that your designs evoke and you will avoid nasty surprises of misinterpretation.
Step 4: Develop the logo professionally
Choose your final design and work it out digitally and, of course, professionally. Professional development means that you digitize the logo so that it can be used on any corporate identity carrier, the logo consists of vectors. When your logo consists of vectors, it can be enlarged and reduced without affecting the quality. When enlarging / reducing a logo consisting of pixels, the quality can deteriorate.
Step 5: Determine the colors of the logo
There are different house style carriers that consist of different materials. The colors of your house style should always look the same on the different house style carriers. This ensures uniformity in your corporate identity. Define the colors of your corporate identity in PMS (pantone) coated and uncoated. We use the Pantone solid coated and uncoated impellers for this.
Step 6: Choose logo font
When designing a logo, you take your expressions and texts into account. Choosing the right font makes a big difference in the appearance of your corporate identity. What do you want to radiate with the typography. For example, a font can be modern, stylish, classic or playful. In addition to the font that is used in your logo, it is important that you determine whether that font is also suitable for use in texts or that you specify a second font for this.
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Step 7: Making a corporate identity manual
Record your entire corporate identity in a corporate identity manual. Your corporate identity manual contains your logo, color codes, fonts and the way in which you use your corporate identity. If different designers start working for you, the house style manual will tell you how the house style should be implemented.
Your corporate identity must be / be recognizable for everyone. Your corporate identity must be reflected in everything you do, create and share. By implementing your corporate identity, your target group will see this again and again and will soon recognize your style. Consistency in what you communicate is therefore very important.
If you reverse the word house style, you get: style (of the) house. It is therefore more than just your business card, it also belongs to your company building, company clothing and even how you answer your telephone. Now that your logo is in place, you can implement it in all your corporate identity carriers and you can design business cards, design stationery, design a website or design other advertising material.
