L Lemaire talking about corporate communication and the use of a company logo.

Have you ever heard that a great logo representing the company faithfully can translate in more leads and sales?

I feel safe buying and using products of famous brands. It is true even when I don’t like the logo. Right now, as an example, I am visualizing a very famous company of cameras with a logo in two colors. I don’t like their logo because of the two colors they use (black an yellow) but I still trust the brand. What’s goin’on?

Since we often hear about brand identity rather than brand logo. I guessed that the color match of the logo didn’t matter so much. What the (targeted) public really needs is a visual they recognize and remember.

A good logo is first a visual people recognize easily and makes the company look good. It is true also for a website as I recently read on a business blog. The post was along the lines of: Credible company logos add website trust.
The best part of that blog page was a logo of a house painting company.
It’s a great logo showing so well and so easily what the company is all about: Its expertise is showed by the house and the brush. The company and logo make one and look trustworthy because the design of the logo is modern. It just fits so well in nowadays design trends.

At the time Ellen Clothing Manufacturer (ECM) did not have a proper logo and we had to come up with one. Easier said than done!

No one could come up with a good idea. At first, nothing looked good. We tried to design a long logo to fit with the size of the company name Ellen Clothing Manufacturer, but it didn’t seem practical and looked more like a banner than a logo.

We also tried writing the company name over three rows but it didn’t look good either. It looked massive and did not communicate  the right feeling about the company. So, we left this part of the business on the side and did other things…

A few months later, we started designing quick links buttons. That was a couple of logos on which one can click. Our only goal was to make it easier to navigate in our website.
That was easy because this time I didn’t have to include the (keyword rich) name of the company.
That was also fun because they didn’t have to be a sure shot forever representing the business.
So it went well and we ended up using them as quick links on most of the pages of the website.

We quickly found out that the world (at least the world wide web) loves logos. They ended up on social marketing websites and did really well the job of getting the company noticed. Then little by little got archived into back pages.

As I was surfing the web I noticed that one of the logo we had designed, the clothing factory, had maintained a good ranking with some search engines.

The t-shirt logo was probably the most exciting from my personal point of view.  I decided to use it as a wall paper for http://twitter.com/clothingfactory

At about the same time, I had Jayz (DJ in Saigon, Vietnam) telling me: Ellen clothing manufacturer is a very long name and www.ellen-clothing-manufacturer.com is too long a url to type!

The tone of voice was 50% laughing at me. The lack of a proper company logo and the lack of a shorter name was causing small but visible problems. This constructive criticism did its effect and a few days later, we (finally) realized we could simply start calling the company ECM. (That’s what we call rebranding)

It was now obvious that a great logo for a clothing manufacturer would be to associate two different expressions and their related visuals: clothing factory and t-shirt manufacturer.

A few minutes on photoshop later, the clothing factory logo was like printed on the red t-shirt design. If you have been watching for a little while, you might have seen the difference made in the overall design of the website.

Quote: Because more credibility translates in more business, more sales, the logo as well as the interface (business card, company website) which supports it, needs to communicate credibility and expertise in a non verbal way.

Related search: How to make a logo? Company logo. Corporate company logos. Brand and branding. Design.

Do you have any tips about how to create a company logo? Let us know here in the comments.