Hi! My name is Page and I’m the graphic designer for Lighten Your WorkLoad. I’d like to talk to you about some of the ideas I think about when I’m designing a logo.

There are many things you want your logo to do for you.

• Your logo needs to be memorable to your customers.

• Your logo needs to be simple enough so it can be easily recognized on large street signs and reduced for small business cards.

• Your logo needs to be quickly associated with your business and what your business offers.

Examples of good logos:

You may be asking why I chose the above logos and why they were either good or bad? I admit that some of it is personal preference, but I also look at certain things in a logo. Is it simple? Is it memorable? If it is script, is it legible? Does the logo tell you something about the company?

Let us examine the Coca Cola logo for a moment. It is script and it is fairly legible. It is very recognizable around the world. It does not tell what Coca Cola is, however. Having been raised knowing what Coca Cola is, most people don’t need the logo to tell them the contents of the can or box on display. This ingrained knowledge works not only to the Coca Cola Company’s advantage, but also to other company’s advantages.

Take a look at Pepsi. The logo is distinct from Coca Cola’s logo, but there are certain elements that are the same. There is a prominent red color and a white wave reminiscent to the Coca Cola script. When the Pepsi Company was designing their logo, they did not need to reinvent the wheel. Instead, they took a few elements from an existing cola company’s logo and wove them into their own logo. With these subtle common elements, customers instinctively know what they are buying.

What about Seagate? This logo is subtler, by far, than the previous two logos I have mentioned. What is this company? It’s a simple logo that can be made larger or smaller to fit on either billboards or business cards. It gives the illusion of movement, but movement that is almost digital in nature. To someone unfamiliar with the industry, the Seagate logo would make little or no sense. Seagate designs and sells internal hard drives for computers. The logo simulates the disks spinning inside computers. While it may appear to be a poor logo in that it does not tell the layman what business Seagate is in, it is, in fact, a good logo as it points to the internal working components of a computer. The layperson does not need to know from the logo what Seagate sells, but someone familiar to the industry would need to know and can easily recognize Seagate’s logo.

When designing a logo, I try to remember each of these points. When I was handed the company name Lighten Your WorkLoad, I was unsure of what to do with the name. Often, the company’s name holds a clue to the perfectlogo. Lighten Your WorkLoad was a very descriptive name, and I knew there was a logo that would reflect that. The company assists people virtually by taking on tasks the client would like to farm out eliminating the paperwork and hassle of hiring a part-time employee. Lighten Your WorkLoad works hard for their clients so they have more time on their hands, thus, the “lighten” within the company title. I wanted to accentuate the word “lighten,” but I also wanted to show something that was working. I started to play with the idea of a pen. A pen was a good idea: it works hard and shows the proprietor’s interest in editing and writing, but it didn’t ring true for the company’s name. I toyed with the idea of writing and it struck me: a feather is light and a quill pen works hard. I had stumbled upon the perfect logo for Lighten Your WorkLoad.

I will not say the quill logo is the best logo ever designed, but it has enough detail to make it stand out to a passerby or someone browsing the Internet, the colors are subtle, but do have a calm tone to them. The logo illustrates the three points I made earlier:

• It is memorable to clients.

• It is simple enough for large street signs and small business cards.

• It can be quickly associated with the business and what that business offers.

These are only a few points that need to be thought of when designing a good logo.

Here’s Another Feather In Your Hat!