There are some things a company has to have from the very beginning.
For example, a name and a logo. Some names can make or break brands, even though I'm sure we all know several lamely named brands that have made it big and vice versa. The same goes for logos. While quality is bound to show - and should be your most important focus - a good logo is designed to capture the minds of people for more than the few milliseconds the web usually offers. Every memorable work of art, however, doesn't make a good logo. Think of a Monet rendered in a 100X100px space, and you'll see why. A good logo needs to be like a license-plate - easy to see from far off, and unique enough to identify its owner. So, what goes into a logo to make it easily viewable and memorable?1. Bold color. A logo does best with bold, solid, chunky colors. This keeps it visible even from great distances - essential for images that are meant to be seen on billboards or on teeny-weeny magazine ads. Graded shading and such subtleties can be left for other projects. 2. Characteristic shapes. A program with a green duck logo is guaranteed to be remembered by people who have used it. The same goes for a purple bird, or a blue bubble. Go for a familiar shape that hasn't been taken already(tough, I know) and make it synonymous with your brand image. 3. A good tagline - or maybe an excruciatingly bad one. While you would ideally want to have an ad caption that becomes the greeting du jour for people, you would benefit equally well if they say "Did you see that TERRIBLE tagline? The pictures looked good though". For good or for bad, your tagline has to be remembered.4. Relevance. A logo has to be relevant in some way or the other to the brand it represents. A graphics site with a palette, for example, is self-explanatory. Google's distinctive "G", on the other hand, has become known by association; on its own, it serves to catch the eye and keep it there. Apart from being directly related to the theme or being a part of the brand name, a logo can also convey the general feel or outlook of a company. Lightning on a dark background, for example, is the perfect logo design for a metal band. Even though these essentials are quite easy to explain, it is actually very difficult to generate a winning logo. However, just because someone has taken a course in graphic design, s/he doesn't have to be great with it - creativity is born, not made through schools. So if you don't want to pay a graphic designer just yet, you can pick out free online tools to try and design logos. You may have to pay for printouts, but still works out much cheaper than the premier software. So log on to a free logo creator tool, and get cracking!
