Logos and brand marks

What a logo has to do

Confirm that the visitor is where they think they are, and be recognizable when they come back. An answer engine reads the alt text, never the mark. That is the whole job on a small business website, and a plain wordmark does it as well as anything.

A symbol that means nothing to a stranger adds a puzzle rather than recognition. Large brands can afford symbols because repetition taught the meaning; a local business has no such repetition to draw on.

So the safe answer for most small businesses is the business name, set clearly, with a symbol only where it earns its place. That is cheaper and more effective than the reverse.

Legibility beats cleverness

The logo will be displayed small, on a phone, sometimes over a photograph. A design that works on a business card and turns into a smudge at that size has failed the only test that matters here.

Check it at the actual size on an actual phone rather than in a design view. Fine lines, thin type and small taglines all vanish, and the tagline is the first thing to go.

Where a tagline is part of the logo, consider a version without it for small sizes. That is a normal thing for a logo to have and most small business marks do not have one.

The technical requirements

The list below is what a website actually needs from a logo file. A business that has only a single image of a logo will hit at least three of these problems within a year.

• A version that scales without blurring
• A version that works on a dark background
• A version with no tagline, for small sizes
• A square version, for profiles and app icons
• The original editable file, kept somewhere safe
• A file small enough not to delay the page
• Alt text that is the business name

Scalable beats a photograph of a logo

A logo should be a shape-based file rather than a fixed grid of pixels, so it stays crisp at any size and on any screen. Most logos delivered as a single image have already lost this.

That matters more on modern screens than it used to, because a mark that looks acceptable on an older display is visibly soft on a current phone.

Ask for the original editable file whenever a logo is made. Our page on images and copyright covers why ownership of that file is worth settling in writing.

Placement and size

Top left, linked to the homepage, at a size that is legible and not dominant. A logo taking a quarter of the first screen on a phone is taking space from the sentence that says what you do.

Do not repeat it several times on one page. Once in the header and once in the footer is the convention, and anything more reads as insecurity rather than branding.

Our page on homepage structure covers what that first screen has to achieve. The logo is the smallest-value element competing for it.

When paying for one is worth it

When the business is new and the name needs setting properly, when appearance is part of what you sell, or when the current mark is genuinely illegible at small sizes.

It is not worth it as a first spend for a business with no website content. A clear name in a good typeface plus real photographs of work beats a designed mark on a thin site, every time.

Where you do commission one, agree the file formats and the ownership up front. Those two details cause more trouble later than the design ever does.

The favicon and profile versions

The small icon in a browser tab is a separate problem from the logo, because at that size almost nothing survives. Usually it has to be a single letter or a simplified mark.

The sizes and formats for that icon are a detail that looks trivial and is noticed immediately when missing, so treat it as part of the same job.

Business profiles want a square version, frequently cropped to a circle. A wordmark designed wide will be cropped badly, which is why the square version belongs on the list above.