There’s so many excellent logos, but occasionally there’s a design that’s almost perfect, with a really well thought out idea, but due to the way its been executed and finished off I’ve needed to give it a lower score that it could have received. It’s a shame that in these instances the logo design was not refined and perfected, or further explored by the designer to make it the amazing logo it had the potential to be. To help other identity designers avoid making the same mistakes, I’ve put together my top 5 tips for refining, perfecting and finessing a logo design.
Tip 1: Hit the ‘sweet line’ for perfect vector paths
Sometimes what lets a logo design down is a tiny mistake with the way the vector paths have been illustrated… its not quite perfect… theirs a part of the line with a bump or bulge which doesn’t look right. In the book Logo Creed from Bill Gardner he uses the phrase ‘sweet line‘ to describe the perfect vector path:“A sign of a quality logo is one in which the designer has cared enough to produce a sweet line. If there is something off about the line in your logo design, consumers may not be able to figure out what is wrong, but they will see it. Its a distraction that will interfere with the logo’s effectiveness.”It’s worth spending time to get paths perfect, as any imperfection will be noticed – consciously or subconsciously. In most cases using less points normally solves the problem, however to get perfect paths it’s worth learning every aspect of the tool itself to become a bézier master! Tuts+ have an excellent guide worth reading – Illustrators Pen Tool: The comprehensive Guide, or try playing the Bezier Game which is great fun.