There are many reasons why one logo design for your business won’t cut it. Even two logo designs isn’t enough today. If you want your brand to be memorable and adaptable, you need a collection of logo styles as part of your brand identity.
Having a series of logos for your business will benefit your brand and make your content creation and general brand creative so much easier. Let me introduce you to the six need-to-have logo designs for your business and how to make them yourself.
But first, I want you to understand why you need more than one logo for your business.
WHY YOU NEED MULTIPLE LOGOS FOR YOUR BUSINESS
You know you need to design a logo for your new business and you really want to make it count. But, before you embark on designing your own logo, I want you to understand why you need more than one logo for your business and brand.
You need logo designs to adapt to different brand touch points
There are a myriad of places your company logo design will end up. From your website, social media profiles, business cards, marketing materials, social media posts, and so much more. Each of these brand touch points will benefit from a different sized logo.
For example: your social profiles need a round or 1:1 ratio logo design whereas your website navigation will benefit from something short and wide. If you use the wide logo in your profile, it will be far too small to read. And unless you want your navigation menu to take up 1/3 of your screen, a 1:1 logo will also need to be shrunk down.
The wide logo (left) is hard to read in the round proportions of a social profile whereas the round logo design (right) fills the space fully for better brand recognition
You need logo designs that can scale down without losing legibility
Anywhere you use one of your company logos, you want it to be easy to recognize, no matter the scale. With many of our brand touch points existing on a screen that fits inside your hand, you need a super simple logo design that scales way down with ease.
Let’s look at Disney as an example. They have a highly detailed primary logo, but as the collection proceeds, you’ll see each new logo design gets simpler and simpler but is still recognizably Disney!
Versatile logo designs allow you to communicate more about your brand
In branding, communication is everything. There are ways to add versatility to your logo designs that allow you to increase communication with your audiences. Adding locations, taglines, and even websites alongside your logo designs will benefit your business, especially as you build brand awareness.
THE 6 NEED-TO-HAVE LOGO DESIGNS FOR YOUR BUSINESS
There are six logo design styles you should be striving to have in your brand identity. Each of these 6 logos plays a different role in your brand. However, as you’ll learn in a moment, some designs can fill multiple roles at once.
1. Primary Logo Design
Your primary logo design is the flagship design for your business. It will typically include the most detail and is often a combination mark design. If you have a tagline for your brand, I encourage you to make a version of your primary logo design that incorporates your tagline for increased versatility.
Song Moon Press has a very detailed, artistic primary logo design.
2. Alternative Logo Design
The alternate logo design should be a variation of your primary logo. You want to feature as many of the same details as your primary but in differing proportions. For instance, if your primary design is particularly wide in proportion, make your alternate logo design stacked or tall.
The alternate logo design for Song Moon Press is a stacked typographic design inside the moon.
3. Wordmark Logo Design
Your wordmark logo design is a simple, typographic logo variation. These can be in one brand font or a font pairing depending on the name and logic of your business name.
Since the primary logo design for Song Moon Press was already of wide proportions, we opted to stack the wordmark (though we still included a wide wordmark too). This offers the brand identity a logo that will fit well in places where a wide design will not.
Song Moon Press actually has two wordmarks: the stacked design and the horizontal design.
4. 1:1 Logo Design — Round or Square
Many logo placements require 1:1 proportions. Think of your Zoom profile, Gmail account or Instagram profile. You want your logo to fill the entire space adequately, without sacrificing legibility. in some instances, your primary logo may be too detailed to fit these logo placements in which case you need to design a logo that is made specifically for those proportions.
For Song Moon Press, their stacked logo design works perfectly as a 1:1 design. Depending on the logo placement, they may also be able to substitute this logo design for a brandmark design.
5. Simplified Brandmark Logo Designs
Your brandmark is a super simple logo that can be used in a supporting role. The goal is to have a logo design that is easy to decipher as YOUR BRAND when scaled down very small. Your brandmark logo design will typically borrow a key icon from your primary logo or, for typographic logo designs, this will often be a monogram.
Generally, you only want to use a brandmark design when brand awareness has already been established because they typically don’t have any name mention in the design.
Song Moon Press has a collection of brandmarks to choose from.
6. Colour Variations for Logos
Finally, you want to ensure you have a range of colour variations for your logo designs. Generally, I tend to include each of my client’s logos in each of their brand colours. But at the very least, you want one in your signature brand colour(s) and one in white or your lightest brand colours. This allows you to use your logos over dark backgrounds and over coloured photography.
The more detailed your logos, especially with colour, the more challenging it can be to create colour variations that make sense. My best piece of advice is to keep your logo designs super simple in terms of colour.
Let's recap the six logo designs your business needs:
primary logo design
alternate logo design
wordmark design
1:1 ratio logo design (round or square)
simplified brandmark design
colour variations
WANT TO KNOW HOW TO MAKE YOUR OWN LOGO DESIGN?
Don’t discredit your business by using a Canva logo template — those designs are used by so many other businesses and if standing out and building brand awareness is important to you — a logo template won’t help you one bit!
BUT if you want to know how you can design your own original, versatile logo collection, you’re going to want to check out the Brand Identity Masterclass for Bootstrapping Small Businesses.
This 80-minute training teaches you how to make your own logo collection, curate your brand colours, brand fonts and brand guidelines. No creative skills required.
I’ve designed this masterclass to help those of us who like to do everything on their own (hi—it’s me) no matter your skillset. You’ll follow a strategic approach that will ensure the brand you launch with will be able to evolve as your business does so your future rebrand will feel more natural, instead of a huge overhaul.
If you’re ready to learn the steps to branding yourself so you can boost your credibility, increase brand awareness, and start making sales—the Brand Identity Masterclass has it all.
Jenny Henderson is a brand strategist and business mentor. She collaborates with service-based solopreneurs to design memorable brands that allow them to make a living doing what they love.Since 2020, her branding studio has become a place where small business owners learn to think like a brand.
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