Your logo is your first impression, make sure it’s right!
Your Logo Is Your First Impression, Make Sure It’s Right!
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The ‘look’ of your company and your logo will be the first impression you create and you need to make sure it’s the right one.”
There are a thousand things to do when you’re starting a business, and starting a recruitment business is no exception. Staff, premises, finance, IT and systems – they all have to be sorted.
And of course there’s the question of your identity. The ‘look’ of your company and your logo will be the first impression you create and you need to make sure it’s the right one.
We all use that word – logo. Once it was part of the internal language of the design and advertising industries. Now – we’re all experts. Or are we?
A quick lesson in language.
‘Logo’ is an abbreviation of logotype. It comes from the Greek, and means ‘a graphic mark, emblem, or symbol commonly used by commercial enterprises and organisations to aid and promote instant public recognition’. Logos are either purely graphic (symbols/icons) or are composed of the name of the organisation.
By extension, the term was also used for a uniquely set and arranged typeface.
You can see that, from the start, logo design has been all about creating something unique.
Today a company’s logo is often synonymous with its trademark or brand.
Ask a marketing professional to expand on that definition and they’ll tell you that a logo has to be constant. It’s the one thing that stays the same, unchanged and consistent, amongst your marketing communications.
The first important piece of advice regarding logo design is ask the professionals. You’re passionate about your new business, and it’s close to your heart. Because of that you’ll have ideas about what your logo should like. You’ll probably be scribbling ideas on envelopes or kicking around designs on your computer. The reality is that you could be the best recruitment professional ever; but that doesn’t mean you’re a designer.
By all means feed your ideas to designer, and let them know what you want to convey about your business and let them develop it.
There are different ways of approaching logo design. Your name alone can be your company’s name, and styled into a particular typeface, and with perhaps some added flourishes, it can become your logo.
Or you could consider designs that use graphics to convey the nature of your business. If you specialise in logistics recruitment for instance it’s feasible to explore designs that echo transport or movement.
An important point to consider when creating a logo for a recruitment company is the audience. Because, although not uniquely so, your business has to ‘speak’ to more than one target group. Your recruiter clients will be organisations who will expect a corporate approach but you also have to convey a friendly ‘consumer’ appeal to your candidates as well.
Colours will be a big discussion point. You want your logo to be legible, and stand out. That applies to the words and letters as well as any graphics. There are certain scientific facts about such things as black and yellow being a highly visible combination, and red and green being a problem for some people, but in truth there are no hard and fast rules. In any case it’s often the logos that broke the rules that have stood out most and lasted longest.
Fashion is an issue. Time was that ‘squirly’ and complicated designs were the big thing. They went out of fashion as clean cut modern European typefaces became all the rage. And they came back into vogue when the design world decided that retro ruled.
Your main concern will be to have a logo that stands the test of time. Firstly because constantly changing it detracts from its key purpose of building your identity. And secondly because constantly changing it detracts from your marketing budget!
If you’re spending your marketing budget wisely you’ll be using online media and techniques as much as any other. And that’s an added demand on logo design today. Now, it has to work not just as ‘ink on paper’ but also on your website, your e mails and banner advertising. The good thing is that, online, you can make it ‘sing and dance’ if you want. The challenging thing is to have a logo design that will work within that technology, and across all the platforms and devices. There’s no point in a logo that looks fantastic on a website if it disappears on a tablet or smartphone.
So, professional input is vital. Even more so now because logo design has to embrace the digital world. It always has been a mixture of art and science, but never more so than today.
You should consider professional help in another area too. I said at the outset that a logo is often seen as synonymous with a company’s trademark. It might be seen that way, but legally it’s not a trademark. For that you need separate guidance and registration processes. Be very aware that a logo is not necessarily a registered trademark.
In fact, be very aware that professional help and guidance is essential in starting up a recruitment company. You want it to be right. With exactly the right logo.