How to create a logo?

The logo is very often the first point of contact with your brand, your business, your products and services. It must therefore represent your brand’s values and personality. It can promote your brand awareness and strengthen your company’s image and visual identity.

A company’s visual communication system and graphic charter will naturally revolve around its logo.

To make sense, to be unique, legible, expressive, functional, easy to remember, timeless, to remain efficient and honest not matter it’s size, colour or medium on which it’s used – these are the essential qualities of a good logotype.

Once created, your logo still needs to be properly chartered by your communication agency or graphic design studio.

You’ve probably come across presentations, internal documents, or worse, external communications, where a logo is distorted or even unrecognisable or illegible… It’s in order to avoid this that the graphic charter will define conditions of use, particularly as regards proportions, minimum size and positioning in relation to other elements (texts, titles, margins, etc.).

The following should be specified:

• The various logo forms: your logo will appear on different types of media so it’s essential that you should have several versions.
• Logo colours (Pantone values, CMJN, and RVB for each colour).
• The preferred or exclusive position on each type of media: headed paper, brochure, folder, vehicle, signs, etc.
• Your logo’s exclusion zone, i.e. the minimum space around the logo which protects it visually and allows it to breathe.
• Minimum size
• The versions of your logo: preferred version and simplified versions, horizontal, vertical or inverted version, in colour or in black & white, on different kinds of backgrounds: light or dark, colour or black & white, etc.
• What’s not allowed: misuses, reports on homothety, colour or shape incompatibility, etc.

The logotype must also be introduced by a text explaining how to interpret the graphic signs used.

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