A great-looking logo is the centerpiece of any serious marketing plan. Often the first thing prospective customers or business partners see, your logo gives them an immediate impression of your company and its values.

If your logo is clean and professional, the viewer is likely to assume your business is successful. Logos that are poorly designed or hard-to-read reflect negatively on the business, even if it’s thriving.

At its most basic, logo design involves combining letters, numbers and pictographic icons (like the CBS eye, for example) into a distinctive mark. In some cases the logo will include an original illustration, as with Ben & Jerry’s® Holsteins or the Starbucks® siren.

The first goal of good logo design is to create a memorable mark that is unlike any other currently used in its market. The best logo designers also try to capture the essence of the product or service in the logo, or key in on a single feature or detail of corporate history. Expect to pay anywhere from hundreds to hundreds of thousands of dollars for a complete multi-channel roll-out of a new logo.

Once you have a logo you’re happy with, use it consistently on all your marketing materials — business cards, letterhead, Web site, emails, signage, billboards and ads. Changing your logo from one use to the next will only confuse the viewing public. But if used consistently, viewers will come to associate your company – and only your company – with that particular mark. They won’t even need to read the text in the email or ad to know what you’re selling. As soon as they see your logo, they’ll know what’s coming.

This is not to say that good logos never change. Some of the most successful brands have revised their logos over the years to keep pace with changing visual sensibilities. The first Apple logo wasn’t an apple at all, and the sleek silver apple in current use was rainbow-colored until 1998. The Canon® camera company logo – which has been entirely typographic since 1956 – initially included an image of a thousand-armed Buddhist deity when it was created in 1934.

But the strongest logos tend to be subtle with their reincarnations. Over the course of its 120- year history, the IBM® logo has almost always consisted entirely of letters. The last three iterations of this widely recognized logo went from outline letters in 1947 to solid black in 1956 to those distinctive blue pinstripes starting in 1972. One look at those three letters tells you everything you need to know.

Standard Logo Design		Deluxe Logo Design
Simple, clean, and recognizable — like the most powerful brand marks seen every day Created using unique fonts and/or icons You get 3 logos to choose from		Bring out the emotion of your business with a hand-illustrated logo Original artwork, designed just for you More intricate than our standard logos You get 3 illustrations to choose from

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