Does this situation sound familiar to you? You are looking at your website and your designer put your logo at the top of your design, but it looks a little too small. Don’t worry, you’re not alone.
This is a common request from business owners and it gets asked often. The purpose of this article is to help illustrate how sometimes having a bigger logo can negatively affect your website.
Why would business owners want to make their logo bigger?
It seems natural to want your logo to be the centerpiece of your website. You want your brand to be noticeable and prominent. At first glance, increasing the logo’s size seems like an easy way to do that. However, there are other marketing goals intertwined with a website that are also very important. The key is to find a good balance between everything to accomplish the website’s overall goals.
Brand pride is a common reason for wanting a bigger logo. While pride in your company is wonderful and a key ingredient in a successful business, it can also send the wrong message to your website visitors. Your website is not made to serve you, it is made to serve their needs.
Website Hierarchy
A good website designer will put thought into the size, placement, and design of each element on your website. A logo is a crucial part of any website and the size and placement needs to be carefully thought out. It needs to be big enough to be recognizable but small enough to not get in the way.
Is your logo more important than the product or service you are offering? Nobody is actually buying your logo, so should it be a priority on every page?
Between the logo, the website navigation, contact information and call to action, there are a lot of variables fighting for attention at the top of a website. A designer needs to find a balance between all of those elements in order to form a product that reflects the brand. By placing too much emphasis on one element, you can easily cannibalize the others.
Real Estate
A site’s logo falls into a prime piece of website real estate called “above the fold”. This section, the part of the website you first see without scrolling, is the most important area of your website.
The problem with making your logo bigger is that it pushes the rest of the content on your website down below the fold. Therefore, other very important elements of your website are not as prominent as they should be.
Brand Relationship
Again, website owners like to have their logo bigger due to the pride they feel for their company. Pride isn’t a bad thing, but it’s important to take a step back and look through the eyes of a first time visitor coming to your site. Website visitors are overwhelmed with brand messages all of the time, both online and offline. They see loads of websites, advertisements, and signage constantly in their daily lives. Inflating your logo is only going to add to the noise in their every day life.
Instead of relying on your logo to do the work for you, wouldn’t it be better to try and build an emotional connection with your visitors through other elements on your website? Establishing a level of trust by fulfilling their needs is a much more effective way to create a bond with a website visitor.
Examples
Notice how these brands place their logos on their website? They are relatively small, located on the top left of the screen, and have plenty of white space around them.
Nike, Starbucks and Target even elected to minimalize their logo down to just their icon, leaving their name off of the main logo altogether.
Conclusion
A logo is an important element of any website, but prioritizing your logo over other parts of your site can actually do more damage to your site than good. A much more effective approach is to use your website as a whole to build a relationship with your visitors.
Many businesses see other forms of advertising like TV and magazine ads with large logos and think that a website is another form of a glorified advertisement. A website is more like a store – there is a logo present, but the website is more about forming a connection and business relationship with a client. Visitors need to know who you are, but the priority is forming that business relationship with them.
Your logo won’t be a factor in getting a visitor to buy from you, so a larger logo will only reduce the available space for the factors that do.