In building your brand, one important thing you need is a logo. Yes, the graphic designer will do it for you. But there’s one mistake you might make – being a spectator of your own brand. I mean, who knows your brand more than yourself? How can you let the graphic designer decide which type of logo suits your business?
If you want to create a brand, you’ll need a good logo and the best person to make that decision as to which kind of logo is needed is yourself. These are the types of logos available to you, when to use them, and some examples.
Type1: A Wordmark
Wordmarks are logos that are created in a text form using the brand’s name. They can come in the form of a signature, a handwriting, or even a custom font. Many big brands use this type because of its simplicity, stability, and easy recognisability. For startups, this is a good choice to showcase the company’s name in the logo without being ambiguous.
Type2: The Lettermark
Unlike wordmarks, lettermarks are created from a brand or company’s initials rather than their full names. Lettermarks are also called monogram logos.
When to use them? If your company name is so difficult that people have to use a lot of energy before they mention it, then you need a letter mark. Or when your brand’s name is too long that squeezing everything into a logo will not be possible. Lettermarks makes it possible for people to easily recognize your brand. This makes lettermarks useful branding choices, especially for organizations that operate on a global scale.
TYPE3: The Brandmark
Brandmark logos are made up of symbols, images, or icons that are used to represent a brand or a company. Also called pictorial marks, brand marks are great in helping an audience to have a psychological view of your company or brand. This creates a more intuitive and deeper meaning, sometimes than just text.
For a global audience, a symbol can easily be recognized. Though some of the best-known brands use this kind of logo design, it’s sometimes not easy for the market to recognize a brand, especially for lesser known or unpopular brands.
Examples in this space include the WWF panda, the Nike ‘Swoosh’, the Target bullseye, and the Red Cross symbol. Social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook have made use of the symbol to enable people to share content.
Type 4: Combination Mark
The name says it all. This involves a combination of a symbol and a wordmark. Combination marks are also called iconic logotypes and help brands and companies to use two different branding options to convey meaning. The symbol shows a representation of the brand and the wordmark shows the name of the brand.
This type of logo design sets brands apart and reduce confusion with other brands. For lesser-known brands, this is also a good way of conveying meaning, giving your brand a more distinctive look and feel.
Type 5: The Emblem
Emblems are just like combination mark logos but with a simple difference: instead of the text appearing differently from the image as in combination type, the text is created inside the image. In most cases, emblems pose a difficulty in recognition and separation because the elements are combined, which reduces the flexibility of audience in reading into the meaning of a brand.
Organisations that use emblems include sports teams, schools, government agencies, and charities. Examples of emblem type logos include UPS, Burger King, MasterCard, Ford, Harley-Davidson, and Starbucks among others.
That’s a rundown of the different logo types you can use to distinguish your brand. It doesn’t matter what you do, whether you do professional pet sitting, a freelance babysitter, a web developer or the next Google or Microsoft, you need a logo and it will be in your own interest to chose which type fits you best.
