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Here you are, you've just created a great logo and you're in doubt...anxious for people to find out that you're just an amateur, who only knows Photoshop and Illustrator from their Wikipedia page!

At DocLogo, we understand that there are a few simple rules that will help you avoid slip-ups and make you look like a real pro. After that, your friends are all going to want you to help them with their own logo. Sorry in advance. Readability This first point is essential, and it's a tip we'll keep repeating: a logo should never make you doubt the name of the brand or company. Legibility is fundamental and yet, invoking their creativity, many amateur designers focus too much on aesthetics and neglect this aspect. Yes, your design may deserve an award, but do you know of a single logo of a notable brand that is illegible?

With this in mind, avoid using a typography that is too ornate, too complicated or too experimental. Prefer simple fonts and avoid multiple colors, keep the font size and thickness consistent, neither too thin nor too small. It's all about proportion and balance.

Another critical detail is the icon. It allows a little more fantasy than the name, but beware of double meanings. You can easily find examples of logos with an unintended interpretation on the Internet. You can design an original icon, but it should never lead to mistakes.

The best logo will always be the one that, with the minimum of expression, will be able to synthesize the maximum. Look for minimalism and remove anything unnecessary. A simple logo makes it easy to recognize the brand at a glance and will be easier to remember, associate and reproduce. Adaptability Which brings us to our second point: a good logo must be adaptable to all kinds of formats and reproduction methods. This may limit your creativity a little bit, but never lose sight of the fact that a logo is used to communicate a company, not to show that you are the strongest under Windows Paint.

When designing a logo, always remember that there must be several other versions: negative, grayscale, single color, and even a very small version. A logo should be designed in such a way that it can develop the company's image on a wide variety of formats, even those you don't think of yet. Who knows, one day you may need polo shirts embroidered with your name or a stamp?

In order to facilitate its reproduction, whether physically or on the screen of a smartphone, it is advisable to keep only two or three plain colors at most. Avoid gradients and shadows; these two elements can quickly betray the amateur origin of the logo if you don't master them properly.

Also avoid overly detailed illustrations, watercolors, too light colors...they may be beautiful logos under ideal conditions, but they are not good logos because they do not respect the principle of adaptability and lack versatility. As soon as you go out of the frame for which you imagined it, you'll find yourself having to alter a lot of things.

To keep it simple, avoid Photoshop and its filters; instead, use a vector creation program like Illustrator. In addition to being a much better program for this exercise, creating a vector logo will also allow you to enlarge it to infinity, if necessary. If you ever want to see your logo on the façade of a building, this is the way to go. Coherence It's important to be familiar with the characteristics of your business before you even begin designing the logo.

Your logo will not be designed the same way you sell children's toys or underwear. Also, don't commit the mistake of thinking that the logo of a luxury brand needs to be neater than that of a cheap brand. The two logos should be as neat as each other...just not in the same way.

Look at the logos and communication of your competition, whether local or national. It's not about copying, but about the style you need to give to your own brand. The colors and fonts used by your competitors convey the same values as yours, it's up to you to be inspired by them.

Nothing is more amateurish than a logo with the wrong font. When in doubt, stick to the classics. It's possible to have an original logo with a very common font, if you differentiate it with other elements. Unicity It seems obvious, but your logo must be unique. It would be a mistake to imitate another brand's logo; besides the potential legal consequences, a bad copy of a well-known design, even in a humorous tone, would immediately betray the amateur origin of the logo. No graphic designer and no serious communication agency would take this kind of risk, if only for their own reputation...

More generally, by playing on similarities, you may attract a few consumers by mistake, but you will never build your own brand image. To make your identity memorable, it's wiser to invest a little more time in creating your logo, or to hire a professional, than to have to start all over again a few months later, with more important financial consequences.

An example would be many soda brands, which are on supermarket shelves trying to capitalize on the popularity of Coca-Cola and mimic the color and style of the brand. How many names did you remember the last time you wandered through the soda aisle? These brands sound like "copy", not "competitor". The only brands that really compete with Coca-Cola have a deliberately differentiated logo, color and image. If you still have doubts, before you start, do you know that there are solutions to help you create your logo quickly and at very low cost? We have developed a generator that can automate the creation of original logos, come and discover it on DocLogo.com! Developed by real graphic designers and validated by real professionals, it will allow you to create your logo in less than a minute for a fraction of the real cost of a graphic designer. It's revolutionary and we're very proud of it!