Top 5 Logo Mistakes to Avoid

logo mistakes on paper

Remember, first impressions count. Your logo is the first thing your potential customers and clients will see.

Here are the top five logo mistakes to avoid when designing your masterpiece. 

 

1. Poor Font Choices

Remember that each font has a personality, and it’s all about choosing the right “persona” for your brand. If you are a stockbroker, for instance, using the Comic Sans font for your corporation’s logo probably isn’t the best way to project trustworthiness and reliability. A party supplies company, meanwhile, may not want to present their customers with a dark, heavy font.

Match the style of your font with the style of your icon to avoid competing with it or overwhelming it. For a better selection of fonts, choose professional font foundries such as MyFonts rather than free website versions.

Choosing a font is more important than you probably realize. It’s setting the tone and the expectations of your business. 

 

2. Contradictory Messages and Unclear Intentions

The second fatal logo mistake is when it sends an inconsistent message about your company or brand. This emotional perception of your message is a combination of your font, colors, and images.

Since customers will associate your company with your branding, the messages and emotions you want associated with your business need to be immediately apparent. Remember, first impressions count. 

Let’s revisit our stockbroker. This is a profession that requires trustworthiness, reliability, and expertise. A bright design featuring a clown, for instance? Not the best choice. Our party supply company, however, will send a clear message of “fun” with brighter colors, lighter fonts, and maybe even our stockbroker’s unused clown.

 

3. Too “Busy”

If there is visually has too much going on, it’s forgettable. This logo mistake will also undermine the importance of your message and lessen its impact.

Your brand will be recreated in a variety of applications for your business, from digital to print. Keep in mind that a busy, complex design will lose its detail if its size is reduced. A simple, clean design will be far more versatile than a complex or “busy” design.

Stick with a few simple elements:

  • Your business name
  • Your icon
  • Your tagline
  • No more than two fonts
  • No more than three colors

 

4. Too Reliant on Colors

It’s tempting to want to make your logo really stand out with bold, bright splashes of color. If you’re too reliant on color, however, you will lose its efficacy when it’s reproduced in black and white. Too many colors also confuse the eye, making your branding appear “busy” and sloppy.

If your brand can’t stand on its own in black and white, it’s not a strong one. Create your initial concept without using colors, shadows, layering, or other design elements. Once you’ve created something that can stand out in black and white, it’s time to choose your colors.

Remember to keep your design under three colors, and choose them widely. Color, as we talked about above, play a large role in your logo’s intent. Certain colors convey strong emotions, such as red or black. 

If your colors clash with each other, overwhelm your icon, or don’t match your intention, your logo will be far less effective.

 

5. Neglecting Visual Hierarchy

We’ve all come across words painted on the road near an intersection that read “stop here,” with the word “here” overtop the word “stop.” The idea is that you theoretically should read the words in the order that your car approaches them, reading “stop” before “here.” The majority of people, however, will read the words painted on our theoretical road from top to bottom: “here stop.” But why?

We are all programmed to visualize things in a certain way, seeing bright colors or large, bold writing before noticing smaller writing or duller colors. This programming creates a logical way to consume information. Visual hierarchy is a design element that uses this logic to encourage a viewer to read or notice important information first.

Think about visual hierarchy. What part of your design catches your eye? Does the flow make logical sense? Are the important pieces being overshadowed by bright colors or other strong design elements? 

 

Want to avoid these common logo mistakes?

Whether you’re thinking of a complete overhaul or simply giving your existing one an update, ArachnidWorks has talented creative teams ready to help. Let us help you design your next logo to help you stand out from the competition.

AW President & CEO Monica Kolbay Participates in Digital Marketing Webinar

As we return to more normalcy after a year of pandemic-enforced restrictions, we’ve noticed that many of our clients are asking us to help them embrace more aspects of digital marketing. Obviously, digital marketing has been trending upward for the past 10 years or more, but recent factors have caused interest to skyrocket.

Our President & CEO Monica Kolbay recently joined two other thought leaders in the digital marketing field in a one-hour webinar entitled “Banking on Digital Marketing with Stories That Connect.” Jay Sedgwick, Banking Industry Specialist of WebbMason Marketing, led the webinar.
Continue reading

Top 5 Post COVID-19 Digital Marketing Trends


Call it a quarantine, lockdown, shelter-in-place, or a “safer at home” order, unprecedented public health measures forced by the global pandemic drove millions of people around the world into virtual seclusion. During this time, apps and platforms that were once used entirely for entertainment and personal connection have been hijacked for use by digital markers to reach consumers.

However, as the number and severity of COVID-19 cases begins to trend more positively, and some countries and US states are beginning to open back up, these same digital markers are wondering: how different will things look over the next year? Will things go back to normal? How has the novel coronavirus affected consumer behavior? And how will that affect digital marketing attempts to reach a society of consumers that have made significant changes in many areas of ordinary life?

Continue reading

Advertising & Marketing in the Time of COVID


It would be hard to find a segment of American life that has not been affected by the COVID-19 pandemic—and sales and marketing are no exception. Influencer Marketing Hub (IMH), a US-based marketing strategy company, recently surveyed 237 brands of all sizes to see how they the coronavirus public health crisis has affected them, and combined those results with additional COVID-related sales and marketing statistics to create an overall snapshot of lessons and trends.

General Findings

• Some industries have been and will continue to be more affected than others. Luxury, travel, and service-related companies are struggling to survive, while business that have been classified as “essential” are struggling to meet demand.
• Companies that rely on “old media” are especially at risk. Prestigious publishers have already ceased publication of well-known, long-running publications, with more likely to come.
• Both small (less than 50 employees) and large companies (more than 1,000 employees) surveyed express significant concern over the coronavirus’s impact, and are strategizing carefully about how to market their way through the economic downturn.

Findings from the IMH Survey:

Ad Spends

• 69% of brands expect they will decrease their ad spend in 2020. Many companies indicated that there is either a high likelihood that they will be decreasing their ad spend this year, the majority from regions still in lockdown.
• 25% indicated they will increase their ad spend during the latter half of 2020.
Whereas the majority of companies indicated that they have switched to survival mode, it was interesting to note that one company out of four indicated that it would increase marketing activities.

COVID-19 has had a massive impact on the media, but this impact has been very uneven. There are clear winners and losers:

• Winners:
o There has been increased interest in news. This sector saw a 52% increase in ad spending from before the global impact.
o Other areas to have seen rises in ad spending in that timeframe include hobbies & interests (31%), technology & computing (14%), and education (13%). Notably, these are all activities that can be consumed at home.
o e-Commerce companies doubled their ad spending in the four weeks between February 17 and March 9—a trend that has continued. Ad spend from e-Commerce sites doubled from $4.8 million for a trailing four-week period starting on February 17 to $9.6 million for the week of March 9. Brands that operate both an online and physical presence have moved their marketing to the web.

• Losers
o Of course, many sectors have cut back on their advertising activity. At 72%, the most significant drop in ad spending is for law, government, and politics
o At a spending slowdown of 65% is the travel sector, making it the most significantly affected private-sector group.
o There were also noticeable drops in ad spending on sports (40%), science (26%), and family & parenting (24%).

Social Media

Especially in places that experienced strict lockdown, people turned to social media in increasing numbers for information. They have also used videoconferencing and messaging apps to remain in contact with families, friends, work colleagues, and clients.

• In March when stay-at-home orders began, nearly three quarters of the firms surveyed reported having slowed down their social media posting after closing or slowing down activities. This number rose significantly after social media managers settled into working from home.

• Early in the pandemic, IMH’s research indicated that 34% of respondents indicated a shift in social network preference from Instagram to Twitter, presumably because of its focus on news. A significant number of respondents reported increasing their Facebook usage, although this may have been more to check in on their family and friends than for work activities.

• Facebook has seen a definite surge in the use of both Messenger and WhatsApp over the last few months, reporting 70% more time spent across their apps and a doubling of live views in a week. They saw messaging increase over 50% and time in group calling (calls with three or more participants) increase by over 1,000% during March. The countries with the strictest lockdowns have seen the highest use in messaging apps.

Email Campaigns

A possibly surprising stat relates to email open rates during the time that consumers stay at home.

• Email open rates have risen by up to 25% week-on-week in retail. Clearly, people have more time on their hands at the moment and can devote more of it to opening and reading their emails.
• Daily email open rates are generally increasing by 5-10% each week.
• Email opens and resulting interactions have increased more on desktop than mobile. Clearly, more people are working at home on their laptops, which they use to check their emails, rather than their smartphones, as they have previously. Reading email communications on the desktop provides a less distracting browsing experience than on mobile devices, and consumers are taking more time to read longer content.

A study by Pattern89 has noticed a shift in the types of imagery used by brands in social media ads during the pandemic. They found 27.4% fewer images showing models hugging or shaking hands in ads on Facebook and Instagram. According to the study, images and videos displaying water splashing, hand/face washing, or cleaning have risen at six times the regular rate.

Last week, despite the prediction that the global ad market would shrink by 7%, or $42 billion, a new study from Viamedia shows marketers are quickly adapting. According to the study, 83% of US businesses have overhauled their marketing strategies for a post-pandemic world. (Viamedia’s findings are based on a survey among business owners [59%] and advertising agencies on behalf of businesses [29%], conducted between May 15 and May 27.)

The study found that despite the economic downturn, there remains a strong need for advertising—45% of business owners from various industries say they’re seeking creative incentives for advertising. 40% of respondents also reported an annual marketing budget of at least $75,000—over half of which was allotted to advertising.
More than 46% of respondents say they’re offering incentives and promotions to drive sales and continue operating during the downturn, while 10% have shifted to digital operations, and 9% plan to expand. Still, 28% report that they are looking for guidance on how to change their marketing strategy to weather the pandemic.

This latest study reports that many respondents expressed optimism over their post-pandemic futures, with 36% saying they felt their business would be the same as it was pre-pandemic.

Marketing in the Post-COVID Era


During the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, most state and local governments created and enforced stay-at-home orders to help slow the transmission of the novel coronavirus. With movie theaters, swimming pools, bowling alleys, churches, and other large venues locked down, people turned to other activities to fill their hours—and much of those involved screens. These are the top ways marketing is changing in the post-COVID era.

Continue reading

What is a Brand Style Guide & Why You Need One


As a business, your brand is everything. The way you represent yourself to customers is crucial, as giving off the wrong impression – even one time – can do costly damage. Consistency is key, as customers and clients want to know they are working with the same company each time they place an order or take some other action. Don’t give them any reason to doubt your professionalism or authenticity.

Continue reading

Four Marketing Trends To Watch For In 2018

Advertising Trends
The world of marketing moves fast. Really fast. If you think you are up on the current marketing trends because you read an article a few months ago, you are probably falling behind already. In the digital age, you have to constantly keep your thumb on the latest and greatest marketing methods if you are going to be competitive.

Continue reading

The Advantages to Hiring a Marketing Agency for Your Small Business

AW Marketing Staff

As a small business owner, driving new customers to your business is one of your main responsibilities. Obviously, without customers, you are going to be out of business in a hurry. Of course, driving customers to your business might not be your greatest strength. For instance, if you run a bakery, you got into business because you love to bake – not because you are a marketer. To make sure your business is promoted successfully while you focus on your own personal strength, it may be best to hire a marketing agency (like us!) to represent your business. Here are some great reasons why a team like ours can help your business grow!

Continue reading

Advertising Trends in 2016 Infographic

What are the top trends to look for in the advertising industry in 2016? We’re glad you asked! This great infographic features four of the digital trends to be on the lookout for. For instance, digital ad spends are set to take over TV ad budgets. Currently at 35% of all digital spending, mobile is set to be the fastest growing marketing segment.

Continue reading