Logos on the Internet: The Importance of Simplicity

Every day we visit different websites; every day we see different logos. In this article, I’ll try to explain the importance of a logo design in the world we all love – the Internet – to show you how much a logo actually does. The logo is as important as the “About” page of a website.

On the About page, visitors can find information about the author(s) or website; looking at the logo, however, the visitor builds an idea of the ”quality” of the information/services he’s going to get.

In my opinion the most important things about a logo are:

1. Simplicity

The logo you provide to the visitor (the most important person on the website), should not be very “rich”. When looking at it, the visitor should be amazed about the extremely good design, not on tons of hard, visible details. Putting great detail in a logo is just wasting time and effort.

2. Description

Whether you use the word “description” or the word “representation”, it amounts to the same thing. Part of the logo should represent the activity promoted on the site. A slogan or mascot would look great on a logo. For example, let’s say you’re a dentist. You have your own clinic and decide to do an advertising campaign. A larger number of clients may come to your clinic if you have, say, teeth in your logo, or a bright, smiling man or woman.

I hope these two points will help you to create stronger logo designs in the future.

Some examples of well-known logos, and their meaning:

Logo importance

Take a look at this well designed logo; LG is one of the most popular electronic provider companies. The logo contains both points described above. It doesn’t contain many details (even if looks like it has them), the slogan is present and the mix of colors is good. The big red dot also contains the main letters “L” and “G”, and a face is clearly seen in the same red dot. I think the designers did a great job.

logo importance

Another well-known website, which provides high quality tutorials, is tutsplus.com. First, look at the design; it gives the impression of good work. The font used is awesome; the dark orange background color also fits for a well-designed logotype. The plus (+) near the “tuts” writing shows advantage, performance, and a kind of “domination”.

The + sign indicates medical help, a profession that needs a high amount of education; this indicates, or implies, that those writing the tutorials have a high degree of knowledge. The slogan “Mad Skills” also shows professionalism, as well as the ability to teach everyone. The logo doesn’t contain many details, so it uses both important points as described above.

Snickers

Everyone has surely seen this logo at least once. The most famous chocolate ever also has a nice logo; the logo on products is very important, especially on kinds of chocolates. If you never ate chocolate and wanted to try it, you’d probably first look at its logo. If it’s attractive, you’ll take that chocolate, if not – not.

The both points (explained above) are respected. The brown as a background is perfect; brown is also color of chocolate. The blue, bolded font on a white background, with a red line that surrounds the font, looks great. By the way, the snickers font you can find here.

magazine

This is the logo of a popular website magazine for web designers and freelancers, smashingmagazine.com. The logo uses the points described and more, the name contains the description and it looks very simple, happy and clean.

The colours are just perfected and will match almost anything, the S on top of a square is a smart move as well, it could be used for avatars, icons etc.. And because they’ve already reached their audience many will recognise the S shape.

Conclusion

To reach the desired audience and the amount of visitors you want, you should have a beautiful logotype. Finally, don’t forget this ~ there’s always a place for a better logo.

Image by Shutterstock

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 26th, 2010 at 08:30 and is filed under Articles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Stelian Subotin is an enthusiast and design fan from Republic of Moldova. Right now he is working on his new design-related blog called Rocket Graphics. Visit RocketGraphs or follow his twitter account @rocketgraphs.

About the author Published by Stelian

4 Responses »

  1. Great article. Its true that logo should be very rich. And the points which you have discussed here can really make the logo rich.
    Thanks for sharing.

  2. I’ve recently started a site, the information you provide on this web site has helped me tremendously. Thanks for all of your time & work.

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