A brand’s logo is one of the building blocks of any company's marketing strategy. It symbolizes corporate personality and helps a brand to connect with its target audience. And because logos are such huge parts of how customers relate to brands, many business owners and managers fear that updating their logo could hurt brand awareness.
The truth? Logo redesigns done right can actually increase brand awareness by spicing things up for current customers and appealing to a broad new audience that may have otherwise gone unreached. So what makes a revised logo right or wrong?
According to the brand design team at Company Folders, there are seven ways to properly redesign a logo.
- Isolate your old logo’s best qualities. If you’re thinking about totally scrapping your old logo design, you might want to think again. Chances are that something about the old design already works. You can play up familiar, positive qualities to help your customers make a smoother transition to the new design.
- Look to your brand’s past. See if you can locate past iterations of your logo—any old first drafts or previously used versions. You might find some worthwhile designs that simply got overlooked or can be reworked for a modern audience.
- Strive for simplicity. Another good strategy is to look at the original and ask yourself, Is there anything here I can get rid of? Simplifying a current logo makes it clearer while keeping the attributes people know and love.
- Focus on the most important colours. Colours deserve an article all their own, really, since they’re one of the most common ways designers overcomplicate logos. Examine the colours in your logo design. Do you see any colour that isn’t part of your corporate colour branding? If so, remove these extra colours to clarify your visual brand message.
- Embrace both new trends and classic traditions. Some brands have a well-established corporate heritage, and they should naturally want to keep it intact. It’s important that your redesigned logo respects these traditions; however, there’s nothing wrong with updating a symbol using a cleaner style, or slightly modifying a colour to make it a little brighter.
- Optimise readability. Creative display fonts are great tools for conveying a brand’s personality, but sometimes they sacrifice readability for visual intrigue. If you find this is the case, look for ways to streamline your font choice and make it legible, without compromising brand personality.
- Add interest with hidden meanings. Here’s your chance to have a little fun with established clientele by using negative space to hide images or symbols in the logo. Doing so can reinforce your brand’s message and encourage your audience to interact with the logo in new ways.
One last word of advice: you may want to use more than one of these logo redesign strategies…and that’s totally okay! Some logo redesigns require a little more work—trying different strategies to see what will produce the best results for your brand.
