Your Brand Icon: What It Is and How It Should Look
When it comes to your brand development, there is no such thing as unimportant features. Every little detail matters, that’s why it should be well-considered, balanced, and be perfectly in line with the entire brand concept. This is more than true for a brand icon. Being an integral part of any business, it makes a significant contribution to the brand value. Being much more than simply a combination of colors, words and/or letters, a brand icon is more of a symbol that, as a two-way street, points to your business just the same way your business is inextricably associated with a certain icon in the customer’s eye. And the main reason for that is that the human brain is much more efficient in processing graphic data rather than text or figures. Nowadays that the competition among businesses is so high, the more recognizable your icon is the better your company will be doing. While all experts agree on the crucial role a brand icon plays in every business, there are still various ideas and approaches as to how brand icons should be designed and which elements to entail. We’ve collected some most useful bits of advice you will for sure appreciate while elaborating your brand icon and its key components:
Professional Design
First and foremost, the icon of your business must be professionally done. Whereas in some situations improvised and amateur design might be compelling, still this is the wrong place to run such experiments. Only a professionally developed mark can be both meaningful and easily understandable by the target audience. You can make icon online, it is always a perfect solution in this regard because it offers a wide range of various designs suitable for any company. And keep in mind that a professional-looking brand icon passes a subtle yet powerful message to the customers that the company is professional in everything they do.
No Rush
One of the frequent mistakes entrepreneurs make is that as soon as they got their business idea, they immediately proceed with designing their brand icon. Yet, the key idea behind any business icon is to reflect, like a mirror, the company and what it offers to its potential customers. And to ensure a high-quality reflection, any mirror needs a clear unblurred original. So, start with your business idea, let it crystallize and take a concrete shape and only then move on to the next step which is developing a proper icon for your company. Everyone understands it’s not easy at all to ensure that a small graphic mark can convey a powerful message of what exactly and how your company does, but it’s doable. Just give it some time and thought.
Strive for Simplicity
Customers already face so many complicated things in their everyday day life that there is definitely no need to overburden them with another one. While there may be individual cases when a sophisticatedly designed brand icon is well justified, the current trend is a simple intuitive mark that is easy to understand even during the first encounter with your business. We’ve already mentioned that a brand icon makes use of colors, figures, whole words or just letters – but it doesn’t mean at all that all of them should be integrated at once. And this trend seems to be dominating in the years to come. So our advice is – keep it simple!
Emotionally-Charged Icon
If a company’s icon doesn’t evoke any emotion among its prospective target audience, then it’s a really bad one. An effective and efficient brand icon must convey a clear emotion, the only difference here being what kind of emotion it is. Any brand mark is about an impression it causes its customer to have, no matter be it somewhat playful or totally businesslike. That’s why emotion is the cornerstone of any icon design.
Plan B
A business can have only one icon – that’s a universal truth that doesn’t require any further explanations. However, this doesn’t automatically mean that one can’t come up with two or three icon variants in the process of its creation. On the contrary, the majority of experts are of the opinion that it’s a good thing to have several brand icon prototypes to choose from. As soon as they are ready, you can start consultations with your team or even a broader audience to decide on the pros and cons of every suggested option. This process will help you select the most suitable option out of the existing ones or even come up with a new variant that incorporates the best features of the suggested variants.
Still Have Doubts? No Need
A graphic image is worth a thousand words and in terms of brand icon design, this is a card you would definitely want to play to your maximum advantage. A brand icon is a little thing that carries huge importance and potential for your business’s future, that’s why it should be treated very seriously. On the other hand, in our fast-paced world, everything changes with time and so does your company. History has been many examples of the successful redesigning of a brand icon, so this is not something carved in stone forever.
