For any new business getting your brand established and easily recognised is an important step, and a big part of this process is the type of logo that you choose for your business.
Every successful business has a logo and some of the world’s largest companies have a logo that is instantly recognisable across the planet. When you are choosing a logo for your business there are four basic types that you can select from with each of them having different elements and characteristics. The four types of logo are:
- Brand Mark
- Letter Mark
- Icon Based
- Text Based
A brand mark logo is one where the representation of your company brand is purely graphical. In other words, there is no text anywhere in the logo. Examples of brand mark logos are the circle and three spars of Mercedes Benz and the blue Twitter bird.
Having a brand mark logo designed will require you to outline to your designer what graphical representation you want your business to have. Sometimes this can be abstract and have no relationship to your business name, as in the case of Mercedes or bear some relationship to it, as with the ‘Twittering’ bird of Twitter.
The next type is a letter type logo which can be one letter or an abbreviation of a company name. Examples of instantly recognisable letter mark logos are the giant ‘m’ arches of McDonald’s and the ‘h’ and ‘p’ of Hewlett Packard.
When you want to have a letter mark logo you will first need to select a font or style for the letter or letters. Another consideration will be the graphical element of the logo, which could whether the letters are set within a shape such as a circle. Finally, the colour or colours of the logo will need to be selected.
Next, we have the icon based logo which tends to combine both a graphical element and some text. One of the best-known examples of an icon based logo is Starbucks Coffee. Their logo has the mermaid inner graphic with the name of the company in the circle which surrounds it. The other element of the text is that it tells anyone seeing it what the company does, which in the case of Starbucks is coffee.
An icon based logo is often recommended for new businesses as it allows you to have both a very distinctive image, but also text which highlights the nature of your business. In time as your business becomes more well known, you may choose to lose the text part of your logo. Starbucks are such a well-known brand that often only the mermaid part of the logo is displayed, and yet people still know who it represents.
The final option is a text based logo which more often than not will simply be the name of the company. Two of the biggest companies in the world with text based logos are Google and Sony. With text based logos, there are no graphics involved although you will want to make a smart choice in terms of the font and the colour your text normally appears in.
