Colors

Creating a logo is more than just throwing together an image with a fun font and bright colors. Truly successful companies, such as Starbucks and Target, know the key to logo design actually lies in the psychology behind it. Each choice, from shape to color to font, delivers a specific message to customers.

In pop culture, we are surrounded by logos that are so incredible, they have become recognizable across multiple generations, such as the golden arches, a silhouette of an apple or the black swoosh. Even these descriptors alone automatically trigger in most minds the brands they represent.

Color is more important to brands than you probably think. It's one of the things that makes logos stand out and also helps shape perceptions about products and services in almost every business sector. How color plays its part is almost as fascinating as seeing how it is used in marketing.

If you keep a close eye on marketing, you know that rebranding has been a prominent strategy over the last two years. From all the evidence we've seen, rebranding is not just a recent trend. Likewise, with so many different types of businesses retooling their marketing strategies, it's pretty clear also that this approach is not going away.

What do the colors of a brand, logo and business say? What kind of messaging do brand colors convey to current customers, future customers and would-be customers? And what do they say about what a company stands for?

We’ve been hearing a lot re-brands in the last 12 months. It seems that every sector, from big corporations to non-profits and from government-affiliated institutions to cities big and small are making decisive moves. They are thinking hard about their names, their logos, and ultimately their “brands”. But branding a business of any size should not be done without careful consideration.

A few weeks ago we reviewed some old and new ideas on the discussion of logo design. One interesting tidbit from the multibillion dollar fast food sector is the large number of companies, such as McDonald’s, Burger King, Checkers and more, that use “exciting,” high-wavelength colors like red and yellow to draw in consumer eyes.