What Should My Logo Look Like?

Updated : 04-Mar-2023 by Elizabeth Jamieson

You’ve had an idea for a new blog and you’ve researched it to make sure the content you write will have an audience. It’s time to start thinking about the website you’ll need and what it’ll look like.

It’s also the right time to think about your logo.

Here I am not talking about branding – the logo and your colour palette is only a small part of your branding. But branding is another discussion. I’m really concentrating on the practical aspects of a simple logo that you may use to get an initial business idea off the ground quickly, and perhaps for the purposes of testing that business idea.

How Many Colours Are In Your Logo?

If part of your logo is to contain any colour (other than black, grey or white), then it will often inform the colours used on your website. In other words the colour scheme used in your logo might determine the colour scheme of your site.

You could easily come up with a simple text logo like the one I’ve used here on WordStamped, or you may pay for a logo to be designed, or even design something a bit more involved, yourself.

You can make your logo monotone, or you can use your brand colours. Hopefully these are few.

Should My Logo Tell It All Or Should It Be Cryptic?

Almost certainly neither! Logos that contains all the symbols connected to a service or product can look confused and crowded. On the other hand, logos employing devices that are so clever you can’t figure them out, will make people wonder what you’re all about too.

Maybe you will design your own logo or maybe you will employ a logo designer. No matter how you arrive at your logo, the result has to be simple. If you can make it deliver a succinct (but obvious) brand message visually, and somehow comprise more than the sum of its parts, go ahead. If you can also make it memorable and attractive even better. Really talented professional logo designers can do this. They are able to express hidden meanings, and brand identity. That is their talent.

No matter how you’re getting there, your logo should be of flat design (no shadows, highlights or shadows). If you look at the logos of all the biggest companies, they are often simple, flat and use between one and three colours . You will often find that when large companies rebrand, their logos become simpler. There is a general trend toward simpler logos.

Why Are Simple Logos On Trend?

Simple logos are more memorable and nowadays have to be in more venues than before. We have letterheads, business cards, billboards, magazines, TV screens, cinema screens, computer screens, phones, social media sites, websites and so on. Logos have to work in large outdoor spaces but also on tiny screens. On a phone, a complex logo is going to look like a mess of lines or a blur of colour.

Your logo should be basic so that it can be quickly consumed by the eye and understood. No-one should look at your logo and wonder what the heck is going on. No-one should have to squint and it should not leave a potential client wondering what the heck you were on when you made it. Or worse, asking themselves if you drew it in the dark.

More detailed logos may be beautiful to look at but they don’t display well in tiny spaces. Nowadays tiny spaces are the norm when you consider mobile phone app icons, and logos on mobile web pages.

Required Logo Layouts

Whatever you decide to do, make sure you end up with the following versions of your logo. You will need all these versions for various venues such as social media platforms, letterheads, business cards and of course various locations on your website.

The logo in landscape layout in colour (if you’re using colour)
The logo in landscape layout in black
The logo in landscape layout in white
The logo in square layout in colour (if you’re using colour)
The logo in square layout in black
The logo in square layout in white
A favicon (a very simple symbol that alludes to your logo)

What Size Should My Logo Be For WordPress?

You may need all sorts of different sizes of logo for the various venues – not just your WordPress site. However for the purposes of your WordPress website, you should make your logos approximately the following sizes.

Favicon – make this 150px x 150px
Square Logo – make this 250px x 250px
Landscape Logo – make this in two versions a larger one at about 280px wide and a smaller one at about 120px wide. You can make it larger but you can display it at half size if you prefer to do it that way.

The dimensions I mentioned here are not exact – they are just to give you an idea. The png files you produce should be of high quality but the file size should not be very big. It should certainly in all cases be under 40K.

As long as you have a portrait and a square version of your logo you will be able to repurpose them for most social media venues.

What Font Should I use For My Logo?

I use fonts from Google fonts or from Adobe fonts. Google fonts are free, but you jhave to have a subscription to Adobe to have the use of Adobe fonts.

Both these sources allow commercial use of the finished item. So you can easily create a text-only, unique logo for yourself using a font. That is what I did with WordStamped logo. I used a font called Viktor Script from Adobe fonts.

In What Format Should I Save My Logo?

If you go to a professional logo designer they will supply your logo as a number of formats. You should expect the following

JPG – so you can see what the logo looks like on a page
PNG – format so you can use the logo right away on a website
PDF – an editable PDF file so you can read the file on any conputer
AI – Adobe Illustrator format so you can re-size the logo perfectly whenever you need to

If you are doing it yourself, I like to save logos I make in PNG format so that the background is transparent and easy to place on a web page.