Sadly, most small businesses underplay the true value of a great logo and they do so because of their budget for the most part. So why is this not the thing to do?

A great logo makes a company memorable. It's an accurate depiction of a company's business identity. Simply put, a great logo is your company's regional, national and even international business card.

So, what are the elements that must come together to make a great, memorable logo?

Let's examine the Nike hashmark logo. One of the most memorable logos ever created.

Is it memorable? Without a doubt, it's memorable. Every 5 year-old kid across the globe knows what the logo stands for.

Does it distinguish Nike from its competition? Absolutely. There is never any confusion in anyone's mind whose logo it is when we see Tiger Woods striding across the green with it on his chest.

How about identity? With the most famous athletes emblazoned with it everywhere we turn, we cannot miss knowing what it stands for. Athlethic poweress.

An exceptional quality about Nike's logo is that, in any color, we know what it is. In solid form, in outline, in dots, whatever, we know what it is. Would that meet the color-friendly standard? We would say so!

No font necessary. The symbol itself is powerful enough to convey the message.

The Nike hashmark is an exercise in simplicity itself. We suppose the $200 the person received for drawing it felt like a steal. If only he could see into the future!

Distracting elements are not a problem. It only has one element. The hashmark, that's it.

The same goes for taglines. today, unlike other great logos, Nike's sell products without a single tagline. No "Coke Is It" or "Pepsi Generation" necessary. They did use the tagline "Just Do It!" for several years in conjunction with the hashmark logo. Intense market research found that their products sold as well or even better at times, without a tagline. Now it is no longer in widespread corporate use. Quite a remarkable achievement.

We have shown in the simplest of terms how to go about designing the perfect business logo. As straightforward as this seems, logo design can be quite tedious, technical and frustrating. if you are not familiar with the design tools required and possess a good knowledge of basic logo design principles, your frustration will be compounded.

In addition, a logo should be designed from the beginning with a complete marketing package in mind, especially if you are selling tangible goods and services. Consideration has to be given to  letterhead, businesscards, and envelope design. You'll need black and white versions for paper ads, offline yellow pages, and when applying for your company trademark among other things.

Still think that your company doesn't need a logo?

About the author
M. Lucienne is the COO of Toucanwebhosting.com and is a Website Developer by trade. After several years of designing websites, he realized that the real power in a business website is not in its design at all, but more in it's ability to draw traffic. He now focuses on developing Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI)

Keyword Blueprints for his clients.

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