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What does your law firm logo suggest to your potential clients?
You only get one chance to make a first impression. By meeting a new or potential client and exchanging business cards, the client will get an impression of your firm based solely on the law firm’s logo.
So what does your logo say about your business?
Your law firm logo represents your law firm to the outside world. Every seemingly insignificant aspect impresses the customer. Make. Color scheme. Name arrangement. Text size. Spacing. Inclusion of a scale or hammer image.
By looking at your business card and company logo, your customer gets an impression. Your customer has an idea in his head of what your company stands for. Is your logo modern or traditional? Does it make you look frugal and indifferent, as if you made the logo yourself in Microsoft Word or do you seem to value your reputation and appearance, and have a professional designer create the logo?
Before approaching a logo designer or creating the logo yourself, there are some very important steps you can take to get a clear picture of what the logo should entail and how it should represent your law firm.
Tip 1: watch your competitors
You don’t want your law firm to look like the other law firms in your practice area and location, so that your firm is not memorable to the client. The last thing you want to do is confuse the customer with what sets your company apart from others. See what you like about their logos. Make annotations. Try to measure how your logos make you perceive your law firms. Do your logos make the firms look professional or do the firms seem unremarkable? Think about what you like and what you don’t like about these signature logos when deciding what your own logo will look like.
Tip 2: modern or traditional? Decide on a topic
Do you want your logo to be modern or traditional?
These are the two main thematic options for law firm logos. This generally means the difference between the serif font and the sans-serif font. What does that mean? Open Microsoft Word or Google Docs. Write the name of your law firm in Times New Roman, Georgia or Garamond font. Then write your company name again in Arial or Helvetica. The first three fonts are considered serif fonts because you can see that they have little lines at the bottom and on the sides of letters like A, B, and C. Sans-serif fonts do not have these lines. Serif fonts are associated with newspapers, considered more traditional fonts. Sans-serif fonts are associated with Internet content and are considered modern. Do you want your law firm to have the appearance of a traditional and historic practice or do you want it to appear elegant, adaptable and modern? The choice is yours.
Tip 3: choose a font
Now that we have decided whether to go serif or sans-serif, we must choose which typeface will represent the company. First things first, it should be noted that you should NOT use a commonly used font. Arial, Helvetica, Times New Roman. People see these fonts every day. Whether they are immediately recognized as Arial, Helvetica, or Times New Roman, people know these fonts. They watch Times New Roman while reading the newspaper. Come Helvetica when they get on the subway. Come to Arial while reading websites. These fonts no longer make an impression.
There are many sites where you can download fonts for free. Google has a directory of free fonts, most of which you are guaranteed not to find. Look around. Use the Google Font tool to test your law firm’s name against different sources and compare them side by side.
One last tip for choosing a font: don’t be indecisive. While two or three fonts may look like you, your clients will never know the difference when choosing a font for your law firm logo. They will never know that it came down to three similar sources. The customer is not likely to be influenced differently by similar-looking fonts. You may want to ask someone else for their opinion on two or three sources, but make a choice and stick with it.
Tip 4: choose your colors
Online, you can find many useful color wheel tools to help web designers choose color schemes. Click on a primary color and they will suggest complementary colors. Just be sure to use a color selection aid tool. Otherwise, you may end up choosing two colors that just don’t work together.
When choosing colors, try to avoid those of a law firm in your practice area and region. You want to make sure you differentiate yourself in the customer’s mind. If you think companies in your region have embraced all color combinations, make sure your logo looks different to distinguish it from your competitors.
Tip 5: Images or no images?
Often times, a law firm logo involves an arrangement of the partners’ names. Sometimes it is an abbreviation of those names. Other times, the logo includes a tried and true symbol of the legal profession, the scales of justice, or a gavel, along with the names of the partners.
Generally, I hate the scales of justice and the hammer. They have been exhausted. They are exaggerated. They are disgusting. They have no imagination.
If you are going to include an image along with the names of your partners, why not include a memorable image that represents your law firm, conveys professionalism and originality as well. You can do this by including an image, if you wish, of the initials of the names of the partners of the firm. If the company is Crane, Poole, and Schmidt, it might have a small logo with the initials CPS. This is a more modern element of law firm logos, it sets the firm apart and looks professional too. So if you’re going to include an image, consider ditching the deck and scales for something a little more contemporary and unique.
Conclution
With all these tips in mind, you are ahead of the game. Whether you decide to make a logo yourself or approach logo designers, you know what you want your logo to convey. You know the message you want your customers to receive. You know what your competitors look like and how you will look different. Now, you can clearly visualize what your logo will look like without having to get very different designs from a designer that won’t be helpful to your business.
If you are proficient in Photoshop, I suggest you try creating a logo yourself. If not, maybe you should consider hiring a logo designer. In this crowdsourced era of internet technology, logo designs can be incredibly inexpensive. Now there are many sites like 99designs.com where you can help design your logo, and freelance designers send you up to several hundred design mockups, and you choose and pay for your favorite.
Good luck.