You’re in the midst of starting your ecommerce business.
Until now, everything was going smoothly. You’ve been completing all the tasks as you go along, with no obstacles in your path.
But now the time’s come to upload your logo.
Ah!
There’s just a small problem...you hadn’t thought about this detail.
Despite this, your logo is one of the most important elements of your online store.
However, maybe you have no graphic design skills, and paying a freelancer is not within your budget.
What do you do?
Look at free logo-making software? You know by now that using free tools is not necessarily a good solution.
Don’t panic, I’m going to show you all the tips for creating the perfect logo for your online retail business.
I’ll even give you a recommendation for an online tool to help you create a professional, timeless, and unique logo without much effort!
Why is your logo important for the success of your ecommerce business?
You may already know the answer to this question.
Naturally, your logo is the first visual element that your visitors will see when shopping on your ecommerce website.
Its power? Its visual nature!
Studies show that people recognize and remember images more easily than text. So, visual content is more impactful than text content.
Therefore, your logo will have an influence on a user’s perception of your ecommerce website and business.
There should be no half measures. It’s all or nothing.
A unique, memorable, and timeless logo design demonstrates your professionalism and will immediately engage the confidence of the user. After they’ve been reassured, people are more likely to browse your website and potentially buy your product.
There’s more...
A high-quality logo will increase a user’s perception of the size of your ecommerce business. Even if you are only one person that manages all your ecommerce activity, visitors will get the impression that there’s a productive and professional team behind the website.
They'll believe that you have a solid ecommerce business that will still be running for years to come.
In addition, your logo gives you an opportunity to be unique and differentiate yourself from your competitors. Your logo might seem trivial. However, it could make all the difference when a potential client is choosing between your site and a competitor’s with a more amateur logo.
Finally, a strong logo allows your brand to be recognized across different web platforms. If used consistently, users will identify and remember your logo more easily.
(We’ll come back to this point later on in the article…)
On the other hand, a poor-quality logo that hasn’t been thought through or is too amateurish will put users off as soon as they land on your store. Even if your website has many of the other features that ecommerce customers want, visitors might exit if a badly designed logo leads them to believe that you’re unprofessional.
Your logo can very easily ruin the image of your business and your website and make you lose sales.
Be careful though, though a poor-quality logo can have a negative effect, a high-quality, creative logo on its own is not sufficient to create a strong brand image.
You’ll need to keep your efforts up for the rest of the visual content on your website, notably for the slideshow and product photos. Same goes for your social networks!
A beautiful, uncluttered website design with excellent visual content that accurately reflects your brand is one of the many ecommerce website features that can help bring your business success.
How to create a unique, professional logo
Now that you understand the importance of a great logo, let’s get into how to actually create one to help your business shine!
Take a look at examples of big brands…
In order to help you with the design and creation of your logo, here are a few pieces of advice to follow.
First, look for inspiration from well-known brands. What best practices do these global marketing giants use?
DesignBuddy published a very interesting study about some of the world’s biggest brands. What do they have in common?
- 95% of big brands use only one or two colors—three colors are already too many!
- 93% of logos are simple enough that people are able to recognize them even when the logos are really small.
- 37% of logos are based solely on text.
- 41% of brands use stylized logos—this is to make them easier to remember.
On this point, another study by Signs.com asked 156 individuals to draw, from memory, the logos of the 10 most popular businesses in the US, without being able to look beforehand. These brands included Apple, Adidas, Burger King, Domino’s, Foot Locker, IKEA, Starbucks, and others.
The study showed that even though everyone knew their logos and had already seen them hundreds of times, only a few individuals were able to draw them accurately from memory.
What’s interesting to see is that the logo for IKEA was one of the easiest to remember. Nearly a third of the individuals redrew the logo, almost perfectly matching the original.
IKEA also came out on top of “recognizable drawings” when people were asked to name the brands of the logos that weren’t drawn perfectly but were still recognizable from a glance.
Take a look at this:
Examining the other end of the spectrum, a more complicated logo design is naturally harder to remember.
Starbucks was the loser in this study. Only 6% of the drawings had the detail of the original logo, and 17% were easily recognizable.
These relatively mediocre results can be explained by the complexity of the logo.
As you can see, although 90% of participants remembered the mermaid and the fact that the logo is green, they forgot the majority of the details, including the crown and two tails of the mermaid.
It was the same for Foot Locker, whose logo features a referee with a striped black and white shirt. Most of the participants got that part right, but when it came to which direction he was facing, it was another story. Some even gave the referee a hat…
One last interesting point about this study: the old versions of the logos were easier to memorize. Three percent of participants added the rainbow colors to the Apple logo, even though this logo design hasn’t been used for nearly 20 years!
So how should you take all these questions into account when creating your logo?
Good questions to ask yourself
To start imagining what your future logo is going to be like, you should ask yourself a few pertinent questions beforehand:
- What message does the brand want to convey?
- What need(s) is your ecommerce store responding to? Every successful business responds to a need.
- What criticism would you give your competitors’ logos?
- Who is your target audience? What is their lifestyle like? What are their habits?
- What is your competitive advantage? What differentiates you from your competitors?
My advice: to get the ideas flowing, gather your team together and brainstorm. Note down ALL the ideas suggested and discussed.
Even the ideas that may seem ridiculous. Then, go back through each idea one by one and examine in greater detail for the most interesting ones how you could develop the idea, without losing sight of the answers to all the questions above.
What makes a good logo?
A good logo design should proudly convey the values of your ecommerce business. It should also fit within your corporate identity and style guide, of course.
Company Folders created an infographic to show all the different qualities that a logo should have. In summary, your logo design should be
- Attractive: your logo must attract your target audience.
- Unique: avoid the use of obvious or well-known symbols and clichés.
- Memorable
- Timeless: to make your logo eternally relevant, avoid fonts and design elements that are fashionable at the time of creation.
- New: be bold. Don’t follow the current trends, create new ones! Show your creativity.
- Simple: say one thing and one thing only. Have a single message.
- Coherent
- Capable of adapting to different sizes as well as to whichever background it is placed on. For example, does your logo look good in black and white?
The infographic itself has some great examples. It takes all these different points and demonstrates how to use them, even giving some advice about perception, creation, colors, fonts, and more.
Using the right colors for your logo
Watch out! The choice of colors for your brand should not be your personal favorite color(s) but rather what you want your logo to say about your ecommerce business.
For this, take a look at the infographic below that illustrates different colors and their meanings.
As noted before, pay attention to what your logo design would look like in black and white. The design should still be clear and readable when it’s featured on sites that don’t show the colors of logos.
The font of your logo: pay attention to legibility!
Another important detail to consider when creating your logo is the font.
This is as important as the logo itself.
The writing shouldn’t be too long and shouldn’t look messy. It needs to be readable and easily understood.
There are three fonts that are usually used for logos:
- Serif
- Sans Serif
- Script
The Sans Serif font is used most often and is recommended for logos. You will notice that a lot of big brands use it, such as Pepsi, Sony, and even Apple.
The special characteristic about these fonts is that they have the same width from all angles. If they’re reduced in size, it doesn’t affect their appearance in any way.
Precisions and advice for creating your logo
There are a few details that are particularly important to think about when creating your logo.
First, it should be created in a scalable vector file format. This means it won’t lose its quality when it is resized, and it will always be high quality.
Next, test it!
Test your logo in lots of different sizes and make sure that it is always clear and readable, even when you upload it on Facebook, for example.
In addition, keep it simple. Avoid really fine lines, too many words, and graphic elements that are too detailed.
Finally, once again, be aware of the adaptability of your logo on each social media platform.
Basically, your logo should always be remarkable and easily recognizable whatever form it is in.
For instance, it should be clear in a round or square format and recognizable if, for example, you need to use the initials of your business instead of the full name due to lack of space.
The same is true for display on any communication medium, whether it be a poster, a business card, a flyer, a leaflet, or a banner.
Top tip: create your logo with Looka
There are loads of different ways that you can obtain a logo for your ecommerce store:
- draw it yourself
- call on a designer, freelancer, or a graphics specialist
- contact a web design studio or a communications agency
- use online tools such a Adobe Illustrator, the ultimate logo creation software, or Photoshop
- use an online editor
- use an online logo creator
Each of these methods has advantages and disadvantages of course. It will probably come down to your team’s labor force and the budget you’re able to allocate to the creation of your logo.
The use of a logo generator is the most simple option to help you create your logo.
We recommend using Looka.
Looka enables you to create your own personal and unique logo online with just a few steps. Let me show you how simple it is. All you need to do is the following:
- Enter the name of your brand
- Choose the market your business is in
- Choose a selection of logos you like among a whole host of examples
- Choose the color you like
- Tell them about your brand: the name and a slogan, if you have one
- Select the kind of symbols you’d like to feature on your logo
That’s it! It will generate a wide range of different logos for you to browse.
Once you’ve taken the time to browse the selection and found one that you like that’s a good representation of your brand, you can then customize it. Change the colors and sizes of the font, etc., to make it even more personal.
However, Looka isn’t free.
There are a few different options you can choose from. They offer the simple purchase of the logo at three different price points (based on usage) and logo and brand kit options, again with three different options.
You can see all the different options here with the details of each broken down.
Depending on what you will want to use your logo for, it is up to you which price plan you select. We would recommend choosing the Enterprise logo plan, with a one-off payment of $80, as this includes all the different usage rights for your logo and is the most complete option.
There are, of course, logo generators online that are free to use. However, note that creating a logo using one of these free generators may not provide a very professional-looking result. There will likely be a difference in the quality.
You now have everything you need to get started and create your perfect logo—a unique, professional design that represents your brand and its values to add to your high-performing ecommerce store!
