Ensuring your brand remains consistent across the entire marketing mix and across every communications channel is essential to maintaining a consistent and coherent image in any competitive marketplace and should be the first consideration of your advertising agency.The variety of marketing channels available to any company today have their own specific demands and their own rules. A design might look great on your business card or letterhead but may look completely different on a poster, tube card, direct mail piece, display advertisement or online in your website.

Print management with a view to not only cost effectiveness, but also how your brand is expressed to its maximum impact across all above, below and through the line channels is vital to effective communication with your target audiences. Central to all this is the initial corporate identity design, aside from its creativity and how it captures the spirit of your proposition, how effectively it can be translated across all those myriad expressions will determine its longevity and impact. There are a few important points to remember when designing a new logo or corporate ID and here are some guidelines:

A logo designed in a vector based program such as Illustrator gives you much more flexibility in terms of colours and will give you a much clearer image especially if you are planning to use text in the logo and you want to use it in large format. Bearing this in mind, it is inadvisable to use photographs in a logo. If you can’t use a vector based program then make the design as large as you can!

Stick to one or two fonts in your logo. Over-use of different fonts can make a logo look cluttered and unprofessional. Make sure that any text you want to use in a logo is clear and legible, or don’t use text at all.

You may need to use your logo for a variety of different purposes and in different ways. Remember that just because something looks good on A4 print materials it may not be so wonderful after it’s been blown up to fit exhibition graphics or a billboard. Whatever you create should be able to work well from the smallest to the largest of applications.

You might need the logo to work on black or white backgrounds or other different coloured backgrounds so the logo should work equally well as a stand-alone element or in a coloured box. Allow for the possiblity that your logo could sometimes need to be used in mono (single colour) as well.

You may have seen logos that you like but it’s important to try to make your logo as individual as possible. There is nothing wrong with using aspects from other logo designs that you find appealing, but when it comes to it being original is what will get your logo noticed.