Logo Design Mistake

11 Logo Design Mistakes To Avoid + Tips On How to Get Better at Creating Logos

Logo design is not an easy task, whatever people say nowadays. There are so many elements that go into the process, that making a mistake along the way is a no-brainer. Especially if you’re a beginner. In this blog post, we are about to walk you through some of the logo design mistakes awaiting you and offer some genuine advice on how to avoid them.

Logo design mistake #1: Not doing proper research

Being eager to get to the creative part of the logo creation – the designing itself it’s great, but that is certainly not the first stop on the tour. Before jumping into sketching, you have to do your research. The logo is a face of a brand, and in order for it to be effective, you need to be familiar with the brand. 

Tip: Make sure you briefed the client from head to toe, learning every aspect of the brand before designing a logo for them. See this cheat sheet to learn how to make a proper design brief.

Logo design mistake #2: Incorrect typography

If you’re using text in your logo design, make sure it’s readable and balanced out. Here are the elements you want to take into account:

  • Font: is the font suitable for the brand? 
  • Spacing: is the spacing enough or should I add more for it to be readable?
  • Kerning: are letters too close to each other, or a bit too far?
  • Weight: does this weight suit the brand? If I apply different weights to different elements, will it look balanced?

Logo design mistake #3: Too complicated

If you take a quick look at the logo design trends of today’s, you might notice the tendency for minimalism. That is due to the fact that the fewer elements there are on the logo, the easier it is for the human eye to process and remember it. Since the main goal of a good logo is to represent the brand, and make it recognizable, minimalism is a great way to achieve that.

Try not to add too many elements to your logo design, in an attempt to convey all the brand’s values. Your job will be to balance the symbolism in your logo and the number of elements on the design itself.

Logo design mistake #4: Not experimenting

Some clients and their designers are not willing to go out of the field’s comfort zone. We mean, depicting things strongly associated with the certain field on the logotype. Like, a tooth for dental services; or a house for the insurance company.

The logo is one of the branding tools allowing you to stand out among your competitors. If everybody uses the same imagery, people will have a hard time remembering and choosing. Even though your client might seem hesitant, try to explain the point or prepare some out-of-the-box prototypes for them to look through.

Logo design mistake #5: Copying

This one is a huge no-no. Sometimes clients come to you asking to simply copycat someone else’s logo, changing only a few elements. We wouldn’t recommend you do that. First of all, it will be extremely damaging to your reputation as a designer; second of all, the brand can get sued for stealing intellectual property. 

Logo design mistake #6: Using raster

Many beginner designers don’t have experience with vectors, so they stick to raster. This is not the right way to go about it. If you’re a designer, vectors should be something you nailed. Nowadays, logos aren’t just used on the website, or printed onto the flyer. It has to be scalable to be used in all possible mediums. And only vector logos can stretch and shrink without losing resolution. Make sure that after the design process is all done you send your client the logo in a vector format.

Logo design mistake #7: Not giving your eyes a break

If you look at your logo design for way too long, you might get tunnel vision. We would recommend taking a day, or a few hours off, to later come back and see your work from another perspective. This practice will help you to detect mistakes you haven’t noticed before, and view the design from the outside viewpoint.

Logo design mistake #8: Not defining the clear space

Clear space is just as much of an element, as anything else on your design. Beginner designers often make mistake of not describing the cler space to the client in their presentations. The client later ends up butchering the look of the logo.

Logo design mistake #9: Not providing proportions

We all know that a good logo should have good proportions at the base of it. Everything in this world abides by rules, and beauty is not an exception. The mistake, however lies in, again, not describing the proportions of your logo to the client. Why do you need to do that?

In case you won’t continue working with that client, your successor will need to know the proportions for designing other branding elements. Such as icons, for example.

If to talk about the immediate value, seeing that you put a lot of thought into creating a logo, the client will definitely be left amazed.

P.S. Gingersauce, a tool for creating brand books, calculates the logo proportions automatically. Just upload it and it’s all done!


You might be interested in Using The Golden Ratio In Logo Design: Why & How?


Logo design mistake #10: Not offering a full brand identity

Sometimes clients don’t know exactly what they want. They often believe that logo equals branding, when in fact it’s much more than that. We recommend you offering your client a full brand identity, explaining how it works, and how other brands are doing it. You’ll see that uponknowing this, your clients will be willing to ask for more than just a single logo.

Logo design mistake #11: Not presenting the prototypes correctly

That’s a hot take: presentation is half the job, when it comes to design. At the end, no matter how good is your visual, it will all depend on how good you pitch it to the client. Beginner designers often just send the prototypes in the attachments to the e-mail, but does it tell the client the stoty behind the logos?

One of the reasons we created Gingersauce – a pro branding tool – was to help designer present their designs in a professional way. We offer you to create a brand book for each of the prototypes, offering a lot more value to the client than they have imagined. With Gingersauce, creating brand books won’t take you days of work. We offer smart automatization, that will take your assets and directly place them onto an awesome template. In a matter of minutes! Present professionally with Gingersauce.

Create a brand book

The author

Josh Bloch
Josh Bloch

Josh is a multidisciplinary designer with over 20 years of experience in industrial design, exhibitions, branding, 2d and 3d animation, graphics for print and digital, illustration, and UX/UI for mobile and desktop apps.

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