Never underestimate the marketing effects and branding ability a quality, custom designed logo can have on your business. A well-designed logo will, through appropriate usage of colors, shapes, graphics and text effectively project the corporate personality or "image" of your company. Here is a checklist of important things to keep in mind when paying a designer to build a logo for you. This will help you make sure you get the most quality for your money, or determine if you even need a custom built logo.
Your logo is essentially the face of your business, and you need for it to deliver the proper message. A well designed logo's look should transcend time and not be based on any passing web trends. It is an iconic representation of the work you do and should be deployable on any medium, from a faxed letter head to a billboard. When created in Vector format, a logo has the ability to be enlarged in size to accommodate the dimensions of infinite mediums - large or small. If your logo is designed specifically for the web and delivered to you in as a gif/jpeg/png or other rasterized format, it cannot be enlarged without high pixellation and a serious loss of quality.
Many designers type up some text in a fancy font with photoshop, toss in a meaningless symbol, then apply a slick gradient and drop shadow to it and call it a logo. While a soft gradient or a drop shadow can assist with your logo's presentation on the web, the look of it should by no means be reliant upon those elements. You want your logo to be flexible, memorable, and ready available for a wide variety of mediums -- not just your web site. Color, though often overlooked, can also be a very important of a logo's design if you believe in the seldom-documented psychology behind each one.
While some logos might happen to fall within this pattern, don't get too hung up on it. Your logo's branding potential probably shouldn't be too reliant upon its coloration anyway. You won't be losing any business because you're unable to convey your company's Kindness and Honesty in a faxed letterhead. Take into consideration these things like company letterheads, faxed documents, phone book advertisements, classified ads, They might feature your logo in the only colors available for that particular medium - black and white. So before you commit to using a specific logo, always see how it looks monochrome. Does it lose it's branding when you view it in black and white?
A symbol is often a major piece, if not the entirety of a good, brandable logo. A good logo will often contain
a symbolic, iconic representation of your company or organization's mission, intention, products, services, and/or
industry to which you belong. It may even be something as simple as your company's initials. (And that's not always such a bad thing either - 
) Always keep in mind your logo's purpose -- a first line of advertising to clients.
You want it to convey trust, quality, a sense of establishment, and of course, professionalism.
Consistency is an extremely important facet of company branding. Not having a logo or having multiple graphic-based representations of your company name floating around out there on different mediums can certainly have a negative impact on your business. A customer or client might have forgotten your name and try searching for your company only to stumble upon one of your closely-named competitor's business. Find a logo and stick with it. Use it wherever you can. Plaster it all over any marketing material you produce.
Always convey to your designer what kind of feeling/reactions you want the logo to invoke. Choose your coloring wisely, while keeping in mind it should still maintain its brandability when displayed in monotone. You want your logo to be something your proud of, you want it to be unique, and above-all, you want it to be memorable to clients and customers for branding purposes. Pack as much of a punch into as small of an area as you can graphically. Without a good logo, your company is lost in a sea of text-based competition.
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