Always bear in mind that the logo you create will be the primary visual means of communication with your target demographic. It is crucial that the message conveys precisely what you intend because your brand’s message and personality must be conveyed nonverbally. In order to accomplish this, designers must adhere to specific principles and techniques. To get the reaction you desire from your logo and avoid any “misunderstandings” regarding its message, make sure to adapt your design to these principles.
Graphic designers can utilise the Visual Hierarchy Principles as a foundation for their logo and messaging. By adhering to these guidelines, not only can the designer create solid preliminary designs, but the target audience will be able to understand the logo and its details exactly as you intended.
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Some principles of visual hierarchy that can guide your design are as follows:
Contrast and Color
One way to establish visual hierarchy is through the use of color and contrast. This gives you the power to manipulate how others perceive different parts of the logo by using a wide range of tones and shades. For example, you can use color to make the pictorial mark stand out; this will guarantee that it is perceived first in the sequence by making it more dominant than the other elements. Using gestalt principles and color psychology, designers can choose these colors. In the end, these will help you choose the solutions that are best suited to the designs of your business.
If you look closely at the pictures down below, you can see how the logo mark is made to stand out by adjusting the contrast and color. Some stand out more than others, drawing more attention to themselves; others have a more visually dominant background, moving them up the visual hierarchy.
Fonts for Logo Design
When designing a logo, the typography is king. If you want your logo’s visual hierarchy to stand out, there are two main typographic strategies you can employ: experimenting with different font weights or pairing different fonts.
The thickness of a typeface’s characters is called its weight. For instance, the fact that some font weights stand out more than others—due to characteristics like boldness, thinness, and strong edges—helps to establish a visual hierarchy. For instance, the strong presence of Vimeo’s bold font makes it stand out, whereas the coexistence of Ford’s font and the oval shape is almost imperceptible.
By “pair the fonts,” we mean the specific combinations of typefaces used. When combining styles such as calligraphy with simpler serifs or thick stylistic fonts with receded sans-serifs, for instance. You can mix and match fonts to create a wide variety of styles, but you should only use fonts that work well together in your design and convey your intended message. You can achieve visual hierarchy by balancing the fonts; for instance, you can pair a bold font with a lighter one, or a short, sturdy font with a light, curvy one.
If your logo includes more than just the name of the company or a tagline, you can use font pairing to your advantage by selecting the most visually dominant font for the name and the second most dominant font for the tagline or other additional text.
An Analysis of Scale and Size
Because their relative sizes dictate how much of the logo are visible, playing around with scale in your logo design is a great way to establish visual hierarchy. It stands to reason that whatever is larger will be more noticeable and, by extension, more prominent in the visual hierarchy.
Designers often take the logo’s frame into account when determining the proportions of the logo’s components. But other factors also play a role; for instance, decreasing an object’s scale can give it a more receded and background appearance. Whether the logo image or the text takes center stage in logo design is determined by scale and size.
Positioning and Distinction
The placement of logo elements can also be used to highlight or downplay them; the space and distance surrounding the elements are major factors in determining this placement. For instance, it is more common to perceive a group of elements when their placement is such that there is little space between them. Plus, these components may become more noticeable when spaced farther apart. The designer can utilize this information to highlight specific elements, so it’s important. Similarly, the elements will have different effects when arranged symmetrically with less space between them compared to when they are arranged asymmetrically with more space between them.
Decreased Intervals
Building on the last point, this one goes even further. The empty area surrounding a design is called a negative space. Strategic use of negative space aids in emphasizing key elements and provides a cleaner appearance to the logo as a whole. Because it handles distance and spacing, negative space also aids in visual hierarchy; an element appears more independent with more negative space surrounding it. Additionally, you can make your colors stand out by utilizing negative space to generate strong visual contrasts.
The process of repetition
Logo designers can highlight a particular part of the logo by using repetition of elements. Make sure no one overlooks that particular aspect of your logo by using it. The intriguing thing, though, is that you can utilise repetition to make part of the logo appear receded by simply changing the colors used.
The reason behind this is that when objects are rendered in muted colors, they can be easily seen as a backdrop, which aligns with the principles of gestalt theory that suggest that similar objects are perceived as a group. Take a look at these pictures for instance:
Alignment
An essential method of design organization is alignment. It is useful for making sure your logo has a well-planned layout. It also aids in making sure that no one aspect of the logo gets too much attention. Use a grid or other alignment tool to ensure your logo is properly aligned. You can use a grid as a starting point for your design and to find the main points that will serve as the logo’s visual emphasis. The visual hierarchy of your design can be better understood with this.
Main Attractions
The parts of a picture that draw the eye of the observer are called focal points. These points might be the center of attention because of their size, location, or even the visual contrast between them. To your advantage, you can utilise this to establish visual hierarchy. Anything placed on a focal point will be more noticeable. The reason behind this is that you should pay close attention to the points of interest in your design. For example, the apple is the sole point of focus in the Apple logo. The company achieved this by keeping the logo’s element count low, as having too many elements can be distracting and unattractive.
The use of negative space and larger or smaller elements can also serve as focal points. Negative space can be utilized to highlight certain elements or to downplay others. Centered, symmetrical, or asymmetrical positioning can also be employed for the purpose of drawing attention.
Line and texture power
Once again, texture establishes visual hierarchy by giving a logo the appearance of depth and illusion. A logo with just a few textural lines, for instance, might give the impression of depth or asymmetry. You can easily reduce the visual impact of empty space in your logo by incorporating texture.
Harmonious and Eye-Catching Results
In the context of design, the term “balance” usually denotes some form of symmetry. Having said that, logos with an uneven layout can still be well-balanced. Elements’ sizes, proportions, spacing, colors, and contrasts all contribute to visual balance. Attempts to strike a balance will inevitably lead to a visual hierarchy as you highlight some aspects of the logo while downplaying others.
Final Thoughts
The logo will be both aesthetically pleasing and functionally appropriate if you adhere to all these guidelines. If you want people to decipher your logo in the exact order you specify, you need to make sure they follow the rules of visual hierarchy.
Get some audience feedback if you’re not sure your design’s use of visual hierarchy is working. Have them tell you what they found most striking, prominent, or eye-catching. Additionally, you can evaluate the accuracy of your design!