Five Secrets To Designing A Practice Logo
A good logo makes all your advertising look more professional. Once a good logo is created it makes your advertising easier to create. It gives you a brand, palette and type style that can flow through all your marketing.
1. Choose a good name for the practice. Its very hard to sell a practice thats been branded heavily under a doctors name. Its also much easier to make a logo for SmileChicago than for The Practice Of Dr. Smedley K. Leibowitz. SmileChicago is just going to be a shorter, more interesting looking logo. Good names are also easily transferable. The first element of a good logo is a good name.
2. Choose (and use) good type. Type can convey all sorts of emotions. A wedding invitation looks like a wedding invitation because of the way its typeset and that loopy, cursive font. If you pick a couple of good typefaces for your practice youll be on your way to a identity for all your advertising and marketing.
So how do you choose typefaces? Look at magazine covers because theyre very, very sophisticated and the ones you relate to are going to have a typographic treatment that will work well for your practice. Magazines are a great place to get inspiration for your typestyle and if you choose one that works for you, you can use it for everything you create, saving a lot of time.
3. Tracking. Tracking is the space between letters. Tracking issues make advertising and logos looking amateurish. When theres giant spaces between letters, words get hard to read and its a sure sign your graphic designer doesnt know whats going on.
4. The FAX test. Basically, logos need to degrade well. A great litmus test for the quality of a logo is how well does it FAX. If theres too much going on, if theres too many gradients, it wont FAX very well. They need to still read and work when a fax turns them black and white.
5. Logo design sites online. Go to Google and search logo design and youll find literally hundreds of websites on the topic. Youll quickly find designs that really resonate with you. Use this to get something you really want.
