Business Logo Ideas

A company's business logo is its first line of marketing. The logo will be on business cards, stationary, invoices and advertising or marketing materials. Having a logo that is easy to understand, translates into a variety of mediums and appropriately represents your company is essential.

Company Mission

A logo that is pertinent to the name and/or the company mission statement helps consumers understand what the company does. With a good understanding of these two concepts, a few visual ideas can be drafted.
For example, an dog day-care business called Puppy Play could have as its mission to make each dog feel at home. Some visuals for this would be a dog, a house, balls and other things that would make a dog happy. Playing with these concepts would be the best place to start with a logo design.

Easy to Understand

Remembering that the logo will be business-card size to billboard size is important when designing the logo. In the example of Puppy Play, the words could be the primary focus with the images as a way to accent the words. A cluttered image will keep people from really looking at the logo, and they'll never remember you.
Keep it simple. If someone is looking for your office or store while driving and has to process a lot of information, chances are he will bypass you as his eyes catch information that's easier to understand.

Mediums

Your logo will be on different types of paper and card stock, perhaps on television, and in different color combinations. Some mediums may allow only a black-and-white logo, while others can be in color. Because of this, the logo not only should be created in a high-resolution file (300 dpi or higher) but also should translate into a variety of color combinations without losing its meaning.
Once again taking the example of Puppy Play, the logo should have details highlighted in a way that doesn't make the dog or any other image a black blob when it's made into a black-and-white ad for a newspaper. It can be the most beautiful color logo, but if it isn't understood in black-and-white, you are wasting valuable marketing dollars.

Initials

Using the first letter from each word in the name of the company can be a great starting point for an innovative, simple and fun logo. In the design, different fonts can be utilized to emphasize certain elements. The letters can be stacked within a graphic that encompasses the company's mission. In our example of Puppy Play, both words start with the same letter, which can be a larger font with a Frisbee in the inside the "P" with the words following. Perhaps the tail of the "y" in puppy can be a dog's tail wagging to give this logo a personal touch.