The first thing most people will see from your business is your logo. The impression they get, that first snapshot, will colour every other experience they have with you. So, it’s essential to convey the right impression.
What’s in a logo?
We spend a disproportionate amount of time designing a logo for such a small, often simple little thing. It’s extremely important to get it right. Get it wrong, and you can send a messy or even straight-up misleading impression. But nail it? You can inspire emotion in the viewer and convey values, ethics, and meaning in just a few short seconds.
Psychology in design
It’s a well-known fact, and we go on about it often, that people make decisions with their emotions. Feelings, hopes, and ideas convince people. Offers, benefits, and facts justify what they’ve already decided.
What does this mean for design?
It means that a sales pitch isn’t really connecting with people. Especially if you really value a great working relationship and alignment of values with your clients. You need to convey why you operate and, in many cases, reach people without words.
And that’s where design comes in.
What can you say with colour?
A lot of what we know about colour is just a matter of instinct! But it’s not just a wishy-washy sense that we run from; there’s been plenty of research to back up what we mostly know from experience. Be it from evolution or just everyday experiences, specific colours elicit a broad range of emotions, especially if paired together with shapes, but more on that later.
While colours are interpreted differently depending on the person viewing the logo, they broadly evoke certain emotions.
Red generally conveys excitement, strength, love, and energy. Orange; power, confidence, success and bravery. Yellow, another warm colour, gives a sense of creativity and cheer.
Cool colours like blue; trust, peace, loyalty, and purple; royalty, luxury, and ambition, can be used in contrast to browns for dependence, ruggedness, and simplicity.
You can convey compassion, femininity and sincerity with pinks or a sense of nature, healing, and freshness with greens.
Black gives a sense of power, sophistication, substance, and authority, while white if used as a prominent feature rather than a background, provides clarity, simplicity, sterility, and purity.
There are many ways to tell your story. Colour gives you the perfect opportunity to visually connect your audience with the important key elements of what makes up your brand story. And don’t feel that you need to stick with one colour story. Through the combination of colours, you can tell a wider story, such as the Redbull example we’ll go into further below, but it’s essential that the final result is still pleasing to the eye, or you may not get any message across at all.
How shapes add to the picture.
While colours inspire direct emotion, shapes tend to provoke a sense, or lack of, structure. The shapes that we use in logos generally set the tone for your business, amplifying your message. Another way to put it, colour tends towards expressing the values you exhibit, while shapes show how you carry those values.
For example, square shapes and rectangles give a sense of discipline, structure, and size. At the same time, circles or other rounded shapes provoke a sense of creativity, continuity, or wholeness. A triangle, the most commonly used shape for structural stability, imparts the same sense of durability and strength to a logo. More abstract shapes, such as spirals or freehand shapes, impart a sense of freedom and willingness to break the mould.
So how does this add up in practice?
Let’s look at some examples.
The red bull logo, something most are familiar with, imparts a feeling of excitement, strength, and energy. Something that their sponsorship of a formula 1 team definitely adds to! The red and yellow colours give a sense of strength, energy, and positivity, while the prominent circle shows longevity and focus.
Airbnb, a company known for a quick rise through innovation and new technology, presents itself with a logo stylised to look like a person’s head or location symbol. It has a loose shape without much structure and uses a light pink colour. It gives a feeling of modernity and cleanness with its sleek and minimal design. It also shows innovation with their ability to paint outside the lines and smooth function with the looping shape while giving a sense of community.
Finally, the Lego logo, a red square with yellow and white type. The rounded letters impart a sense of creativity and freedom within a square of structure and stability. The red is bold with excitement, and the yellow imparts creativity and fun.
So, how do you create a logo that sparks the emotion and carries the depth of information like these big companies?
To get the most out of a logo, you need to know precisely what you’re trying to say. It’s your first impression, so make sure it says the right thing. Be sure to understand your values and how you can align them with the core of your business.
If you’re as passionate about reaching people through design as we are, we’d love to hear from you. And, if you have any questions, tips, or stories of your own, let us know!
