Many small businesses use logos as a part of their branding so obviously they use them on their websites and sometimes as image backlinks or gravatars to spread brand awareness around other sites too. It’s usually best to get a professional logo designer on the job as they invariably come up with a design which is far more professional (and more likely to impress clients) than self designed efforts!
There are however some guidelines you can bear in mind if you do decide to give it a go yourself and a designer friend gave me these recently as some of his personal guidelines which I happen to agree with, even as a non designer:
Good Logo Design Guidelines
- Think about the people who will be looking at your logo before you start kicking ideas around
- Remember your customers will need to like it as much as you do
- The logo idea should have a clear connection to the business it represents
- Think first about how and where the logo will be used, it should look consistent in its different forms
- It should be very recognisable at all sizes and even upside down
- Keep it simple, avoid intricate detail in the design, it gets lost at smaller sizes anyway
- Two fonts and three colours should be enough for almost any logo, it should also look good in greyscale
- If text and symbols are combined in a logo, try to get them to complement each other
- Unique is good but try to design the logo to fit into a square layout, it can be useful especially for web use
- Photo images and clipart do not make for good logos
- If the brand name is itself very memorable it should be included in the design
- Try several variations of your design before settling on one
That little lot is obviously not exhaustive but ought to help if you are considering undertaking your own logo design. If on the other hand its all too much and you could not draw curtains then you would be much better off getting a professional logo design service to save you hours of pain and angst.