A good logo can look deceptively simple.

A shape, a few letters, perhaps a carefully chosen colour. Yet behind the best logos is a surprising amount of thought. They need to be recognisable, distinctive, practical and appropriate for the business they represent — often all within a design that somebody might only glance at for a second.

So what makes a good logo?

It isn’t simply a logo that looks attractive. Good logo design is about creating something that can represent a business consistently, work across a wide range of applications and become more recognisable over time.

Some of the world’s most familiar logos demonstrate these principles particularly well. They don’t all follow the same visual style, but they do share many of the characteristics that make a logo effective.

A good logo is simple

Simplicity is one of the most important principles of good logo design.

That doesn’t necessarily mean minimalist. It means removing anything that doesn’t need to be there.

A logo may need to appear on a website, business card, social media profile, invoice, vehicle, uniform, sign or tiny browser icon. Every unnecessary detail makes that job a little harder.

The Nike Swoosh is an obvious example. It is essentially a single shape, yet it is instantly recognisable.

The WWF panda is another good example. A surprisingly small collection of black shapes creates an image that is unmistakably a panda. There is enough information for your brain to complete the picture without every detail having to be drawn.

That’s an important distinction.

Simple doesn’t have to mean boring.

A strong logo often communicates more by using less.

A good logo is distinctive

There is a difference between a logo looking professional and a logo being distinctive.

You could create a perfectly polished logo for a financial company using a blue geometric symbol and clean sans-serif typeface. It might look entirely respectable.

The problem is that it could also look like another hundred financial companies.

The same happens across almost every industry. Builders get roofs. Accountants get bar charts. Technology businesses get interconnected dots. Coffee shops get coffee cups. Estate agents get houses.

There is nothing inherently wrong with any of those ideas, but when everybody reaches for the same visual language it becomes much harder for one business to stand apart.

A good logo should have something identifiable about it: its shape, typography, proportions, colour, symbol or combination of elements.

You don’t necessarily need somebody to remember every detail.

You want them to think, I’ve seen that before.

You can see some examples of how I’ve approached this across very different types of businesses in my logo design portfolio.

A logo doesn’t need to explain what your business does

This is one of the most common misconceptions about logo design.

A plumber doesn’t necessarily need a tap in their logo.

A builder doesn’t need a house.

A web designer doesn’t need a computer screen.

Your logo is not an instruction manual for your business.

Consider Apple. Its logo doesn’t contain a computer, phone or tablet. The Nike Swoosh doesn’t depict a shoe. The Shell logo doesn’t need to show a petrol pump.

These symbols have become associated with their businesses through consistent use.

For a smaller business, the company name, strapline, website and wider marketing can explain what the business actually does. The logo’s job is to provide a distinctive visual identity that people can begin to recognise.

Sometimes an obvious industry reference can work extremely well. It simply shouldn’t be there because you feel obliged to explain the entire company in a two-centimetre square.

A good logo is memorable

Recognition is one of the biggest jobs a logo has to perform.

People rarely sit down and study logos. They encounter them while browsing websites, driving past vans, opening emails, walking along a high street or scrolling through social media.

You may only have their attention for a moment.

Simple shapes, distinctive typography and consistent colours can all make a logo easier to recognise again.

The London Underground roundel is a great example. The combination of the circle and horizontal bar creates such a distinctive structure that you can recognise it before you’ve even read the station name.

That’s the sort of recognition a strong visual identity gradually builds.

For a small business, you obviously aren’t expecting millions of people to recognise your logo on sight. But the principle is exactly the same.

A prospective customer might visit your website today, see your van next week and encounter one of your social posts a month later.

Consistent branding helps connect those encounters.

A good logo works at different sizes

This is where some logos that look fantastic in a design presentation begin to fall apart.

Imagine a beautifully detailed crest containing a building, landscape, decorative lettering and several tiny flourishes.

At 30cm wide it might look magnificent.

At 30 pixels wide it becomes soup.

A logo needs to cope with the real world.

It could appear enormous on exhibition graphics or building signage one day and as a tiny social media avatar or website favicon the next.

That doesn’t mean every version has to be identical. A well-developed identity can include alternative configurations, simplified marks and icon versions for particularly small spaces.

But the underlying design needs to be strong enough to survive being reduced.

A useful test is simply to make the logo smaller.

Then smaller again.

If all the things that made the design special disappear with it, there may be too much going on.

A good logo works without colour

Colour can become an extremely powerful part of a brand identity, but a logo shouldn’t depend entirely upon it.

There will inevitably be situations where the logo needs to appear in one colour: invoices, engraving, embroidery, vinyl graphics, stamps, photocopies, packaging or certain print processes.

A strong logo should still be recognisable.

The WWF panda demonstrates this beautifully because the design is fundamentally based around positive and negative shapes rather than effects.

This is also why checking a logo in black and white during the design process is useful. Take away the colour, gradients and effects and you can see whether the underlying shape is doing enough work.

If a logo works in black and white, it will generally work in any colour. The strength is coming from the design itself – its shape, form, typography and composition – rather than relying on colour to hold everything together.

Colour can then enhance the identity, create personality and improve recognition, but it won’t rescue a weak design.

If a logo only comes alive after three gradients, two shadows and a glow have been added, the decoration may be doing more work than the design.

Typography matters

Not every logo needs a separate symbol.

Some of the most successful identities are built primarily around typography.

But choosing a typeface is only the beginning.

Letter spacing, proportions, weight and subtle alterations to individual characters can transform relatively ordinary lettering into something distinctive.

The FedEx logo is a famous example. At first glance it is simply the company name in bold lettering. Look between the E and x, however, and the negative space creates an arrow.

It’s clever, but importantly, the clever bit doesn’t get in the way.

Even if you never notice the arrow, the logo still works.

That’s a useful lesson for logo design generally. A clever idea can add another layer to a design, but the logo shouldn’t require an explanation before it makes sense.

A good logo should be versatile

Businesses rarely use their logo in just one place.

There may be a horizontal version for a website header, a stacked version for narrower spaces and a symbol that can be used independently once the identity has been established.

The logo may sit on white one moment and over a photograph the next. It could be printed, embroidered, engraved, cut from vinyl or displayed on a screen.

Thinking about those applications during the design process can prevent problems later.

This is also one reason why professional logo design is usually about creating an identity system rather than handing over a single JPG and wishing you the best of luck.

Different file formats, colour variations and logo configurations give a business the tools to use its identity properly.

A good logo doesn’t rely too heavily on trends

Every era leaves its fingerprints on graphic design.

Certain typefaces become fashionable. Particular colours appear everywhere. Gradients return. Shadows disappear. Corners become rounded. Then everything becomes flat. Then flat design becomes boring and somebody discovers texture again.

Design fashions aren’t necessarily bad. Contemporary influences are inevitable.

The danger is building an entire identity around a visual trend simply because it happens to be popular when the logo is created.

A business may keep the same identity for ten, twenty or even thirty years.

The IBM logo designed by Paul Rand is a particularly good example. IBM’s familiar 8-bar design has remained fundamentally unchanged since 1972. You can see the evolution and history of the identity in IBM’s own history of its logo.

The Rolling Stones tongue and lips symbol dates back even further, to 1971. Both identities remain immediately recognisable because they are distinctive enough to exist beyond the design fashions of the period in which they were created.

A good logo doesn’t need to look as though it could have been designed in any decade. It can absolutely reflect the design and culture of its time. The important thing is that it isn’t so dependent on a passing trend that, a few years later, it immediately looks dated.

The strongest identities tend to outlive the fashions that influenced them rather than being defined by them.

Avoid trying to put everything into the logo

Businesses understandably want their logo to communicate as much as possible.

We’re established.

We’re friendly.

We’re professional.

We’re innovative.

We’re local.

We’re environmentally responsible.

We provide seven different services.

Oh, and could we somehow get Sussex in there?

At some point the poor logo collapses under the weight of responsibility.

Your wider brand identity has much more room to tell that story. Typography, colour, photography, illustration, graphic elements, tone of voice, website design and marketing materials all contribute to how a business is perceived.

The logo is one important part of that system.

It doesn’t need to perform every job simultaneously.

Complete guide to logo design & brand identity is where I look at that wider relationship between the logo, visual identity and the overall brand in considerably more detail.

A logo should be appropriate for the business

While a logo doesn’t have to illustrate exactly what a company does, it should feel appropriate for the organisation it represents.

A children’s nursery and a firm of corporate solicitors probably shouldn’t look identical.

Neither should a punk clothing label and a private healthcare provider.

Typography, colour, shape and composition all influence how a logo feels before somebody has consciously considered what they’re looking at.

Sharp geometric forms can communicate something very different from soft organic shapes. A traditional serif typeface creates a different impression from a contemporary sans serif. Bright colours behave differently from a restrained palette.

There isn’t one visual formula for a good logo.

The question is whether the design is right for that particular business and the people it needs to communicate with.

A good logo becomes stronger through consistent use

Even an excellent logo won’t become recognisable overnight.

Recognition is built through repetition.

Use the same identity on your website, social media, signage, stationery, advertising, presentations and printed material and people gradually begin connecting those visual elements with your business.

Constantly changing the colours, using different typefaces or squeezing and stretching the logo into whatever space happens to be available weakens that process.

IBM makes much the same point in its current 8-bar logo guidance: consistent, visible use reinforces the brand and helps make the identity more memorable.

This is why a logo shouldn’t really exist in isolation.

A broader brand identity establishes how the logo, colours, typography and supporting visual elements should work together, giving a business a consistent appearance wherever customers encounter it.

So, what makes a good logo?

A good logo doesn’t need to be complicated, fashionable or packed with hidden meaning.

It needs to do its job.

It should be simple enough to recognise, distinctive enough to remember, appropriate for the business and versatile enough to work wherever it is needed.

It should still work when it’s tiny. It should survive without colour. It shouldn’t depend entirely on whichever design trend happens to be having its moment.

Most importantly, it should give the business something it can genuinely make its own.

Because the real test of a logo isn’t how impressive it looks when it’s beautifully presented on a designer’s screen.

It’s how well it works once it’s out there representing the business in the real world.