Letters as Design: Letterform Logos

A letterform logo is a logo design that uses the primary letter of your company name as the graphic for your company. This type of logo, similarly to the word mark logo is a good solution when your company name does not have a clear connection to an image. For example, if your name is Williams Home Inspections, the logo would be a capital W. The W graphic connects with the name in a way that helps people to remember the name “Williams”.

Some common mistakes with letterform logos are:

Trying to add too many letters and ending with a logo that is difficult to remember because it is too lengthy. A “W” for “Williams” is great, but when you start setting up “WHIS” for “Williams Home Inspection Services” into a graphic it can be a bit too long to be helpful. In logo design erring toward simplicity can make your logo easier to remember. In logo design, the rule “less is more” holds especially true.

I’ve also seen many home inspection logos where folks will take a bunch of letters and try to make them look like a house. Often, what ends up happening in this situation is that you cannot make out either the house or the letters, so the graphic looks messy, cluttered and confusing. As a home inspector, one of the reasons that folks hire you is so that they can be less confused. Your logo shouldn’t imply that you are confusing.

Trying to force letters to look like objects. I’ve seen an awful lot of capital A’s rendered out as houses at the beginning of a word, the more detail added into that shape, the more difficult it is to read as a letter. Typically it’s better to keep images and words separate unless the image is simple.

Some recognizable letterform logos are McDonalds, Netflix, and Tesla.

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Good stuff Levi!

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Very informative.

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