What makes an effective logo? The easy answer is it is memorable. At a glance you should be able to recognize the brand it represents. Whether you have a wordmark logo (where the whole logo is just a specific font without graphics – think FedEx) or you have a true trademark (where an image represents your brand – think Nike swoosh), or a combination of both, people should recognize your company in a split second.

How do you put together a logo that people will remember? What makes one logo stand out above another? Let’s talk first about design. The biggest mistake you can make with a logo is to make it too complicated. When the artwork is too complex, it is too much information for our brains to decipher at a glance. In logo design, the simpler the better. When you look at the way logos have changed over time, especially with very old brands, you will notice that they have simplified their visuals over time. Take a look at the logos above. In the left column are very early logos for the companies, with the most recent logo in the right column. The top two logos for AT&T and 3M are over 100 years old. Walmart and Burger King logos are a bit newer. The Walmart logo is from 1960s and the Burger King sitting atop the logo is from the 1950s. Starbucks is much newer. The left logo is from 1992. Obviously logos have changed over the years, but you can see that regardless of the year they were designed, the one consistent design element is that now they have all been simplified.

One big mistake companies make when designing a logo is to describe everything that the company stands for in its logo. That is putting a lot on one image. Notice that none of the current logos tell us with words what they make, with the exception of Burger King, since it is part of the brand name. The original logos all tried to tell us with words what the brand was supposed to be. The top three logos in particular are so cluttered that you could never read all of that information at a glance. And when you cannot recognize it in a glance, the logo becomes less memorable. In time, the wordiness has been stripped away. Even the Starbucks logo has dropped the name of the company and the product. The graphic is strong enough on its own for people to recognize the logo as the Starbucks brand. Now you might be thinking, "of course people recognize a modest graphic. These companies are household names and can get away with a simplified logo.” You might have a point, and there is nothing wrong with putting words in a logo. But you have to ask how these brands got to the point that their logo is so recognizable. It works the same way regardless of the size of your company. Simple is memorable, dozens of details are not.

The other thing I want to recognize with the new logos is the use of bold graphics and color. There are no fine lines. There is also a good use of white space to contrast against a solid primary color. All of the fonts used are sans serifs (without the small lines at the top and feet of characters, like is used in Roman fonts). This again is keeping it all easy on our brains to distinguish when we whisk past a logo and catch it out of the corner of our eye.

The other piece of making a logo effective is to use it often. The point of a logo is to help your brand be recognized, not to make perfect sense in the mind of the viewer. The more you use it, the better your chances of a memorable logo doing its job. Let me explain. Many times corporate logo design comes with a committee of people who all have different ideas on how it should look and what it should represent. Often logo design by committee ends up being a conglomeration of all ideas, which makes it much too complicated to be memorable. There is a tendency in these committees to overthink the logo. Logos do not necessarily have to make perfect sense with the brands they represent. Think of the classic three-pointed logo for car maker Mercedes-Benz. That logo has changed very little since it was first used in 1910. Do you know what the three points are representing? The original designer had in mind that they would represent the Mercedes commitment to building transportation for air, land and sea. If I had to guess, you thought it had to do with a hippy peace symbol. However, what it really represents is neither of these. What it represents is a classy car – nothing more and nothing less. The reason we associate it with high-end automobiles is that it has been used extensively in that manner for 115 years. We cannot escape it. The same will be true of your logo. Design it and use it. People will make the association when they see it enough that it registers in their brains.

If your current logo needs to be updated, keep in mind that to make it memorable, the design has to be simple. Make the graphics bold and the colors contrasting so that it can be seen at a glance. Keep the words to a minimum or do not use them at all. The logo does not have to make perfect sense to be effective – it just has to be used. The more you use it, the more it will be remembered.