Designing a Logo for your Moving Company

There is no right or wrong logos, rather just a threshold you have to hit to make it a good logo and that varies depending on your audience. Looking around the industry you will see a wide variety of logo styles, from a childlike drawing of a truck with men in it, to straight lace no frills lettering. What makes for a good logo really depends on how you position your brand in the market. With Two Men and a Truck they strived to reach the mothers and families looking to move and their logo resonated with their market. However had they sought out a high end office or industrial moving the logo might turn away potential clients. After building a name for themselves in one market they are able to transcend markets with no resistance by their logo.

So the real question is what is your target market, and what do the thing they like look like. Can you pull any ideas from items tailored to that market? If you are looking to be a small family operation then it doesn’t really matter about building an elaborate brand and a simple clean letter face or monogram may be enough. However if building a moving franchise is your desire you will need to architect a complete brand from the logo to the shirts on the movers backs. This will require figuring out how you can connect with your audience and stay in their mind. This is where hiring an experienced graphics designer with a knack for making logos is important.

Doing this locally

When you are looking for a designer you will want to review their portfolio ideally see his latest works first. Typically the designer you hire is going to produce a logo similar in style to rest of his body of work. Few are really versatile enough to cross styles much, and if past works are a mismatch for your market yours won’t be much better.

Ways to do this online.

Check out the site 99designs.com it provides a market place to purchase design work. Instead of the typical model of hire someone and live with what they produce, you have people compete to win your money based off a design you like the most.

 

What are your deliverables ?

Logo Uses

You want the logo in full color on white, color on black, and grayscale on white. This way you will be able to use the logo in most typical situations easily without a designer. Ideally you want to stick to a 2 pantone color logo to save on printing, or 4 pantone color maximum.  Half tones can be used to create additional colors.

 

File Format

With a moving company the most important thing is to get a Vector graphic of the finished work. These are typically in the following graphics formats.  eps, ai, svg, and some PDF. These files when build correctly would allow you to use the logo on something as small as a postage stamp or as large as you semi-trailer without a loss in quality or massive file size. There should be 2 sets of files, one that is with text as outlines, another with text as fonts. This way the font won’t need to be present to load the file this is typically preferred by a printer.

 

Additional Files

You should request a copy of any fonts used in the logo so you can rework it if needed or use the text style elsewhere.

 

After Design

When you receive the logo you will want to keep it safe. Burn to multiple cds, email it to your gmail, put it as many places as you can think of so it will survive any tragedy that may occur. These files will be used from here on out for any design work. Your designers will request them so have them ready. Recreating a logo is just as costly and creating it.