Ensuring your brand remains consistent across the entire marketing mix and across every communications channel is essential to maintaining a consistent and coherent image in any competitive marketplace and should be the first consideration of your design agency.  The variety of marketing channels available to any company today have their own peculiar demands and their own rules. A design might look great on your business card or letterhead but may look completely different on a poster, tube card, direct mail piece, display advertisement or online.

Print management with a view to not only cost effectiveness, but also how your brand is expressed to its maximum impact across all above, below and through the line channels is vital to effective communication with your target audiences. Central to all this is the initial corporate identity design, aside from its creativity and how it captures the spirit of your proposition, how effectively it can be translated across all those myriad expressions will determine its longevity and impact. There are a few important points to remember when designing a new logo or corporate ID and here are some guidelines to a successful outcome:

A logo designed in a vector based program such as Illustrator allows for much more flexibility in terms of colours and will give you a much clearer image especially if you are planning to use text in the logo and you want to use it in large format. Bearing this in mind, it is inadvisable to use a photograph in a logo. If you can’t use a vector based program then design it as large as possible!

Restrict your text to one or two fonts. Over-use of fonts can make a logo look cluttered and unprofessional. Any text you want to use in a logo should be clear and legible, or don’t use text at all.

You may need to use your logo for a variety of different purposes and in different ways. Remember that just because something looks good on A4 print materials it may not be so wonderful by the time it’s been expanded to fit exhibition graphics or a billboard. Whatever you create should be able to work well from the smallest to the largest of applications.

You might need the logo to work on black or white backgrounds or dark or light coloured backgrounds so it's important that the logo doesn't just work as a stand-alone element but also in a coloured box. Allow for the fact that your logo may be required to work in mono (single colour) as well.

You have probably seen some designs that you like but try to make your logo as individual as you possibly can. There is nothing wrong with using aspects from other logo designs that you find appealing, but when it comes to it being original is what will get your logo noticed.