Logo Design Trends 2016 – Introduction :
When choosing a logo design ideas for your business, it’s very important that you come up with something unique to you and something that will express what your company is all about.
How do you provide value?
What’s your industry?
Your mission statement?
While this is all true though, you still need to make sure that your logo design ideas ‘stays with the times’. And this means you need it to be informed by some current trends and sensibilities.
While you don’t want to copy other logo design idea by any stretch, you should take some cues from the general trends and direction that logo design is taking and use this to ensure you look up-to-date and modern.
And if you need any evidence of just how important this is, just take a look at any logo design that has been around for the past few years and you’ll see that it’s constantly being tweaked and changed to stay with the times.
Logo Design Inspirations 2016
Take Google for instance.
Today this is a plain, flat typographic logo design with bright pastel colors. Only recently though it used darker shades and a serif typeface.
So if your aim is to ensure that your logo design looks relevant today, what trends do you need to observe?
Let’s take a look…
Logo Design Ideas 2016
Flat Designs :
One thing you’ll notice if you look at icons, logos and other elements of graphic design today is that a lot of it is ‘flat’. That is to say that it doesn’t use shading or other techniques to create a false sense of depth or three dimensions.
Shadows are gone and so are lighting effects. Instead we have crisp, plain colors.
A great example can be seen if you look at the most recent versions of iOS. For the last few versions, iOS has used flat designs for its icons as opposed to the old ‘skeuomorphic’ approach that previous designs favoured. In other words, what would once be represented by an actual picture of a phone is now represented by a 2 dimensional representation of a phone. And this is equally seen in a lot of logo design ideas today.
So what’s the significance of this flat approach?
Read Also – Logo Design Trends 2018
Essentially this is a natural evolution of a general move toward minimalism. And like minimalism generally, it allows for a less ‘cluttered’ look while still conveying all the same information (remember the maxim: ‘communicate, don’t decorate’) and also achieves the maximum amount of ‘contrast’ so that your logos and icons can stand out and grab attention.
On top of all this, flat designs are very portable. They look good as silhouettes and work on a range of backgrounds. Plus they tend to be smaller file sizes for faster loading sites!
Material Designs :
This brings us nicely to material design, which is a design language mandated by Google itself. Originally, this was designed to apply specifically to Android Apps (Android being owned by Google) but has since seen widespread adoption across the web in its entirety.
There are numerous ‘rules’ to implementing material design but generally the idea is that you’ll be using flat icons and graphics once again with highly contrasting colors. At the same time though, you need to think of the various elements more like ‘material’ in the way they look and behave.
That means that there is a place for shadows for instance and that you want things to move in a natural way and communicate the nature of the desired interaction.
For example, you can use a folded corner on a block color to indicate a ‘dog ear’ that can be turned back like a page.
Likewise, things should move in a natural way when animated so that they appear to have weight and momentum (look up ‘ease in’ and ‘ease out’ animations).
Check out Google’s official documentation for more on material design.
Logo Design Typography
So if you’ve applied these two principles, your logo design idea should now be flatter and less ‘cluttered’ while also communicating some heft and physicality.
It’s a great look if you get it right and it’s essentially a process of applying ‘Occam’s Razor’ (a ‘less is more’ approach) to your logo design.
But the last thig you may want to consider is your typography. Because if you really strip everything back with most logos, what you often tend to be left with is the stark text.
That being the case, it’s rather important that the text be good-looking! This is also very in-keeping with the ‘kitsch’ aesthetic that is so popular among hipsters right now.
You’ve probably seen typographic wedding invitations and menus – so why not adapt that for your own design?
What kind of typography should you be using?
Well, what seems most popular right now is the ‘sans-serif’ approach. That means your text doesn’t have the little ‘feet’ on the ends but rather focusses on crisp, clean lines.
In other words? It’s minimalistic again, which also happens to be the easiest to read on a smartphone display.
And ultimately that’s what today’s design trends are all about: adapting to the technology that they’re being viewed on.
Logo design Ideas and Trends 2016 – Summing Up
This should ultimately what informs all of your decisions most.
Does it look good on different smartphones?
Does it load quickly?
Does your logo design idea work in all the situations you need it to?
Meet these criteria and you should find you’re left with something very modern and very attractive!
Read Also – Graphic Design Trends 2018
Disclaimer : All the images used in the article were taken from Behance, Dribble, Collect UI and from the internet. None of the above images are owned by LogoWhistle.
Anusha
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