6 Things to Avoid When Designing a Logo

We teamed up with the brilliant minds at LogoLounge to provide our readers with an extensive look into this year’s logo design trends and insights in the latest issue of HOW magazine. LogoLounge’s Bill Gardner and an esteemed panel of judges pored through 40,000 logos collectively to select the cream of the crop in logo design from around the world. This year’s judges were:

Aaron Draplin, Draplin Design Co.
Von Glitschka, Glitschka Studios
Su Mathews Hale, Lippincott
Andreas Karl, Karl Design
Chad Michael, Chad Michael Studio

Emily Oberman, Pentagram
Yo Santosa, Ferroconcrete
Felix Sockwell
Alex Tass
Alex Trochut

Naturally, the submissions included some designs that simply didn’t work. Here, the judges offer insights on what not to do when designing a logo.

1. Display Type
“The solution to a logo design should never be simply setting a display face,” Chad Michael advises. “Your clients deserve more than this, and you’ve missed an opportunity to solve the problem in a more conceptual way.”

2. Unscalable Logo Designs
“I tend to gravitate toward things that’ll scale well later on,” says Aaron Draplin. “So, to see things with complexity and sharp, tiny, complicated little details that’ll get lost in a Twitter avatar, well, it just sort of shows that folks aren’t considering where we’ll be seeing these things 99 out of 100 times—on a phone app or Instagram avatar! Things need to work small in the smartphone era, so I’m always looking for simplicity, a quick read, legibility and whether or not the thing will work in 20-by-20 pixels, or on the side of a van!”

3. Multicolored, 3D Logos
“Each year I see more and more of these,” Andreas Karl says. “Some were created by hand in 2D in order to look like 3D objects, while some have been generated by a 3D computer program (I guess). I think these kinds of logos will not prevail, because they are difficult to reproduce in black and white, and more important, hard to remember.”

4. Too Much, Too Little
“Trying to pack too many ideas into the design and using type that’s way too small to read” can be a big problem, Su Mathews Hale points out. “If it’s too small to read, it’s not worth having it there.”

5. Designing a Logo with Stock Images
“I feel designers and even the average person can spot a stock image—Frankenstein logo creation—a mile away… It feels like cheating,” Michael adds. “A good rule of thumb is if you didn’t create it or are not manipulating it, then don’t use it.”

6. Just Plain Ugly
“Every industry has the good, the bad and the ugly,” Von Glitschka says. “When it comes to logo design, what is bad isn’t always an aesthetic issue. It usually reflects a lack of concept or playing off a low-hanging fruit of an idea, and is thus forgettable. Ugly is just that: poorly designed and thus aesthetically challenged. Didn’t see a ton of those, but every so often you’d run into something that bruised your rods and cones.”

read more/source: http://www.howdesign.com/design-business/design-thinking/6-things-to-avoid-when-designing-a-logo/