What Makes a Great Logo Call: The Initial Consult
Hey WDS Team! Welcome back for another episode of designer’s desk!
In this episode our focus is to bring more clarity on: What Makes a Great Logo Call during the initial consult.
Our Logo Team has taken the time to collect some valuable tips & tricks to help you guide your customers effectively on Logo Intake calls.
The Video
The Why
Logos are the foundation of brand identity, they help grab the attention of potential clients and customers and make a good first impression. Logos should be memorable and simple, think Nike, McDonald’s, Starbucks, etc., all of these brands are well known and all of their logos are simple and grab the attention for the target audience at a glance.
As the experts, our customers trust you to guide and help them be successful as small business owners. We want to instill our WDS team with confidence in speaking about logos, so that you feel more comfortable offering suggestions and engaging in meaningful conversations with our customers. All of this while steering the customer to stay within scope and to help minimize unnecessary revisions.
The How
Now lets talk about how to accomplish a great consultation call.
Timeframes and Expectations
It is important to make sure the customer understands our timeframes and what is being provided to them for their initial concepts, revised concept and final files.
- Initial Concepts = 5 Business Days and 3 concepts
- Revisions = 3 Business Days and a Revision on a single concept
- Publish = 1 Business Day and simple edits to the revised concept
Be sure to advise the customer that revisions will focus on one revised image and any extra versions or revision rounds will incur a small fee. These fees can be found in the Moving Forward with Out-of-Scope Logo Requests and Misc Fees guide, often referred to as the Misc Fees or Out Of Scope Requests guide, in confluence.
You will also want to inform the customer on what they will receive in their final files (brand guide + eps, pdf, jpg and png). Simple edits during the publish phase can include items like adjusting the color or font type.
References and Ideas
During an initial logo call you will want to discuss what the customer is looking for as far as brand identity. When talking about brand identity, you will want to make sure the customer understands that this logo will be the visual identity of their company, it is not an image or illustration, but a simple and recognizable icon. If they are not sure you can show them examples from our gallery or find in scope examples through online searches. Feel free to collect references from the customer, no more than 2-3, but advise them that we cannot reproduce exact copies due to copyright concerns.
Keep in mind that with a logo, less is more, so when talking about any of the following points, make sure we are steering them to one or two options.
Color
When discussing color preferences, try to provide hexcodes if possible, for example, just saying “blue” is a broad term since there are several shades of blue, if they are open to any color, try to gather more information to see if there are any colors we should avoid, or ask questions like “Between these two shades of blue which do you prefer?” There are also several sites that offer color palettes that can be used to get a good idea of what the customer might enjoy (linked below).
Font
If they have a font preference be sure that the font can be found on Google Fonts or Adobe Fonts, if they request a font that is not available in these libraries, they would need to provide the font file for our logo team along with written consent. You will want to narrow down to one or two fonts at most for any one logo which helps to alleviate a cluttered looking logo. If your customer also has a build with us, you can reference the Business Personality Quiz as well.
Taglines
Taglines are not required as part of a strong logo, and can often change based on the company’s current directive. But, if the customer wants to have one added to their design you will want to narrow it down to a simple statement, generally 3-6 words a most, “Your tagline should be short and clear enough that if it’s on a billboard, people won’t drive off the road trying to read it.”
That’s all for today’s video on how to have a great initial logo consult, thanks for watching and stay tuned for our next video where we will discuss what makes a great logo revisions call!
Helpful Articles:
- Logo Scope
- Out of Scope Requests
- Custom Fonts for Logo Designs
- Logo Redraw Process
- Additional Articles in JIRA
Helpful Resources:
Font Pairing:
https://www.typewolf.com/google-fonts
Color Palettes: