Good graphics can inspire movement for the potential customer. If a client can get a sense of your business merely from the logo and your website design, you’ve already established yourself in the mind of the client.
There shouldn’t be any question about what type of business you run. The business pictured above deals with land management. The graphics are representative of the place, history, and management approach of the company. The artwork is old enough to be placed in the public domain, which provides a feeling of age and substance.
Compare that to a skincare day spa, which is pretty and feminine and focused on beauty.
Good graphics involve color management, good use of negative space, balanced composition, and a respect for shapes that work together. A client may throw 10 different ideas at you, but it’s your job to thin the herd and focus on one or two elements that can be used compatibly.
One client was moving to Seattle and needed a logo for her new yoga studio business. She tossed ideas out from Mt Rainer to the Space Needle to a tree with 8 limbs of yoga to a yoga pose. She didn’t expect them all to be incorporated. Simplifying the idea down to a tree with a yogi got her logo design down to a manageable level.
And that’s really the secret: keep it simple. One graphic element with text can actually make a logo look bigger and more impressive than 5 different art elements competing for the viewer’s attention. If someone has to spend more than 10 seconds trying to figure out what a graphic is trying to tell them, you’ve missed the mark.
