Consider key components when designing your logo, including important principles of logo design.

What is a logo and what does it do? It is the summation of who you are as a business. It represents you concisely, while being a visual tool to help your customers retain your identity. 

When choosing how to identify yourself, you need to consider the structure of a logo as you build your brand. A general logo includes the company name, combined with a color palette indicative of the brand, a font choice that helps establish the brand, and sometimes can include a graphic or icon to accompany the brand identity.

Font choice
A good starting point is font choice. Fonts generally fall into three groups: serif, sans-serif, and stylized. Serif fonts are the fonts that have little tails coming off the letters (Graphic A). One might choose a serif font because it invokes a traditional feeling and a sense of prestige. Sans-serif fonts have flat strokes and solid bodies, with no tails or strokes coming off the main component of the letter structure (Graphic B). Sans-serif fonts are considered more modern, and their simplistic forms are clean and easy to read. Stylized (or display) fonts are more decorative, unique, and even thematic (Graphic C). These are generally built to represent a brand, and the stylized font is generally used throughout all marketing and branding components (such as Disney). 

There is not necessarily a wrong choice when it comes to fonts, aside from readability. It’s important to choose a font that’s right for you and sends the message about your brand that you want your audience to grasp.

Readability comes into play when your logo is presented different ways. A standard black logo on a white background has easy readability (Graphic D), but negative logo design has become more popular in recent years (Graphic E). 

Negative logo design features a light-colored logo on a darker background but does not necessarily have to be white text on a black background (Graphic F). Warning: Some people experience an issue called “halation” which makes light colored text on dark background appear blurry, and this occurs when fonts are thinner in structure. This is an important factor to consider when choosing your logo design.

Color palette
Once you’ve settled on a design for your logo, you need to choose your color palette. 

Let’s say you’ve decided you want red to be a key color. You settle on a standard, bright red color. Now, bright red text is notoriously difficult to read on any background color, so let’s say you choose a red background. 

You want to choose a color that will stand out on the red, but vibration is another component that needs to be considered.  Vibration occurs when you have two bright colors that are either high contrast to each other or are analogous colors (meaning colors that are adjacent to each other on the color wheel). 

An orange is difficult to read on the red background because of the analogous vibration (Graphic G).  A bright yellow is not a contrast color, but the brightness of it still gives high vibration against the red background (Graphic H).  White is an excellent choice because it is neither an analogous nor contrasting color but is strong enough to stand out against the red without high vibration (Graphic I).

Graphic components
After you’ve settled on your color palette, you might choose to include an accent graphic component to make the logo pop.  Placement of the icon or graphic is crucial. An icon on top of the logo makes the logo quite tall, and therefore harder to fit into tighter spaces (Graphic J). An icon placed after the logo loses impact and feels out of place (Graphic K). An icon before the logo brings the audience visually into the logo and offers balance to the weight of the logo (Graphic L). Now, none of this is to say that these individual pieces couldn’t work in a logo design. 

All of these components come together to make a successful logo here, and all of them need to be considered when building a logo. Given any other choices or adjustments, any of these selections that did not work for this particular logo could work in a different scenario.

For a more in-depth color analysis, please see my article on the 2025 Colors of the Year here: woodworkingnetwork.com/design/2025-colors-year.

As always, feel free to email me at [email protected] with any questions or comments. Let me know if there are other design related topics you would like me to discuss!