Menu
Now that you have your brand voice and story, it’s time to define your brand logo to match your brand’s personality.
It’s tempting to jump straight to creating marketing campaigns, write some content and design a page with your ideas. But part of building your brand identity is to define your logo.
Without defining your brand logo, you are missing a foundation to give your brand an identity or unique trait. If there’s no boundary to keep your ideas within a framework, it’s easy for you to keep changing your style of writing and designs. This will waste a lot of your time.
That will also lead to inconsistencies in your materials in the long term, lose your audience trust and you’ll have a much harder time growing your leads.
Once and for all, put down what your brand means in words so that you everything you create falls back to the same meaning.
Follow this strategy, and you will never be confused about how to create a brand to speak in a consistent way.
In this lesson, we move beyond just using keywords to explain what your brand represents. It’s time to explain why your logo is created in a certain way and how did that idea came about. All of that should be an extension of your brand story and voice you’ve learned to define in Lessons #1 and #2.
Many people skip this step because there isn’t any direct negative impact from not doing this. Hence, most people simply come up with a logo they love and create one message for one content, another message for another whenever they like.
It’s easy to change style as and when they feel like it. Then when their designs don’t seem to work, they think they need a designer to help pretty things up.
When a professional designer also couldn’t produce the results they want, they look for another and the cycle goes on leaving them in the dark. In fact the real issue is with setting up the foundation for success by defining the brand logo first before creating designs and content.
First of all understand that logo is just one thing out of many elements that build your brand identity. But in this lesson, we will focus on just the logo and move on to subsequent elements in the later lessons.
Let’s look at how some companies do this so well, it’s worth to be inspired first before moving on to your own identity to apply a similar approach.
Here’s what the Atlassian logo represents in words:
We believe the new Atlassian logo balances approachability with professionalism. It’s sturdy and strong while also allowing for flexible expression…Together, the Atlassian logo, our product logos, and our typeface represent a unified brand, a commitment to consistency, and a better platform to support our mission around teamwork.
The example here is to show you a brand identity being successfully defined. Atlassian’s top most value is teamwork and that is made to clearly represented with their logo.
Khan Academy’s new brand logo also comes from their core values and how they have evolved:
Its shape and bright color reflect the joy of learning and the transformational power of education. The hexagon is a fundamental building block in math, nature, and art. And, we’ve retained the leaf symbol from our previous logo—a classic metaphor for personal growth, which we care deeply about…Our new logo is a celebration of the passion for learning that we value as an organization and a community.
How about your logo? Can you put in words to describe the meaning that goes inlined with your brand story and voice you’ve defined in the first two lessons?
You don’t have to a brand makeover. The lesson today is not to design a new logo, it is to help you craft the message your logo represents. But instead of hanging on to the old logo due to emotional attachment that can’t be articulated clearly, I’d suggest that you make the changes to your logo accordingly to the results you get from this exercise.
Many big brands do that for one reason to allow people to resonate with them. It’s worth a change.
Hence, if you find out it’s best to change, just do it. The change will allow your logo to lead your brand in the right direction down the road, gain the trust from your audience and build your following the right way.
Get started by running through the 3 steps to successfully define your own brand logo:
Step 1. You are going to brainstorm all possible messages that your logo represents
Set your timer to 10 minutes and list down as many keywords possible that represent your logo. This step seems similar to listing your values down, but they are not exactly the same. While values are tied to your believes, your logo message helps you tell your brand story.
For example at MeetAnders, our values include reliability, teamwork and communication with care. Our logo then shows the letters “M” and “A” put together to represent a mountain peak.
The message is that we are working as one to support customers to guide them up the mountain. Just like what reliable sherpas do, we help them do the heavy lifting by “carrying their bags” and more so that they can scale their business right up to the summit.
Once the timer is up, you may stop writing.
Step 2. From the list pick out all the words that are closest to what your logo is about.
Keeping this list to about 5 is good enough.
Step 3. You are going make sure your logo does not send the wrong messages.
Hence, from the list, pick out 5 words that you have doubt with or not inlined with your logo’s meaning.
From the two lists, you can clearly discard the list of words that don’t align with your logo’s meaning. Then from the list with the words that you know strongly depict what your logo is about, use them to craft a story about your logo. The resulting story defines your brand logo.
Hope this helps you create a message around what your logo means.
Now that you’ve covered this lesson – we can move on to choosing fonts that work for your brand in the next lesson 🙂