Your logo represents your business. Plain and simple. So, by that token, your business and what message you want to convey about your business determines your type of logo. If at all possible, you want a potential (and current) customer to glance at your logo and instantly know what industry you are in: if you sell chocolate, the logo’s design should say chocolate; if you sell shoes, the logo’s design should say shoes. In some cases, due to the nature of the business you might be in, what you sell is not always easy to convey in a simple logo.

As an example, lawyers tend to use strictly a text-based logo of their name set in a serif typeface (to convey a professional feel). Usually it’s nothing special: just the typeface and the lawyer’s and partners’ names below it. In those types of professions where it doesn’t necessarily pay to advertise a playful personality or a creative side through a logo, it makes sense to go with a bare-bones type-based logo design. Plus, iconically representing a lawyer’s services is difficult to do in a simple way without somehow involving the overused scales of justice or a gavel, and who wants to do whatever everyone else is doing?

On the flipside of the coin, if you find yourself in an industry where you are selling a tangible product, the product itself should by all means be translated into a simple logo. You run a toy car retail shop. You sell nothing but toy cars. Your business lives and dies by toy cars. Can you guess what should somehow be included in the design of your logo? Yes, an icon of a toy car. A text-based logo just wouldn’t do the business justice when you have such a quickly identifiable subject such as a toy car.

Most of the time, a company’s logo will fall somewhere in the grey area between defining the tangible object or service that is at the heart of the business and expressing the personality of the business through the typeface. It’s a balancing act of saying as much as you can in as efficient a way as possible. But you don’t have to worry your head about that part; that’s where us designers come to the rescue!

The personality of your business should shine through with your logo. Sometimes the product/service or industry itself will automatically give the business an inherent personality, but sometimes not. A toy car business will most likely have a playful feeling to it, unless it’s a vintage toy car business that takes itself a bit too seriously.

Other businesses, especially startups or businesses that want to market in a different way from the competition may want to dig deep to understand what their business personality is and how that can contribute to their business strategy.

To be very broad about it, text-based logos tend to take less time to develop than icon-based logos. That will normally translate to a lower cost. That being said, there are always exceptions, especially with logos. For example, you are starting a high-end clothing line called C Fashions. You want a very simple circle with the letter C in the middle of it. Now that is an icon-based logo, but it’s simple, and overall probably will only take a few hours to develop. The cost of a logo doesn’t only depend on time, it also depends upon the business’ prestige and staying power, but that’s another article entirely.

On the other hand, if you want a text-based logo that requires each letter to be painstakingly crafted to look like they are ripples of water (to give a very random example), that will be a more in-depth example of a text-based treatment.

Ultimately, if budgetary considerations are at the top of the list, most designers can work with you to develop a logo within such constraints.

To see a listing of text-based logos that I have designed, visit the text-based logos search results page.