Patricia sent us her logo to be critiqued. The company is Apparel US and, surprisingly, she is not a designer. It looks like a designer made this, because there’s a measure of restraint. Everything has a purpose. The stars are there to reflect the United States aspect. The colors are simple. If it weren’t for the gradient on the tag, I would say it’s a 2-color job (that doesn’t look like a halftone, it looks like a third color.

One thing makes me grit my teeth a little. Look at the space between the APP and the AREL. If you give it just that extra 10% that designers do before finishing a logo, then you catch things like this.

Other than that, you made a good looking, simple logo design. Good job.

This logo was submitted by Mani, and it’s for a web design and development company. What does everyone think?

I think this logo needs some work. The custom X is making the logo difficult to read. It needs to be integrated better, perhaps by not using such a condensed font for the rest of the letters. It uses 4 colors, one of the colors being the black for the drop shadow. If anything is used in a logo, it needs to have a reason. Is there a reason for the drop shadow? Not really, and it’s not even consistent with the letters and the X graphic. The Blog text is enclosed in brackets, and I don’t know why. The whole thing looks disjointed and incoherent.

As you can see, we take logo design seriously at BusinessLogos. Logos need to be critiqued, analyzed, and tweaked in order to make the business look professional. You can critique the logos here in the comments section, and you can submit your own logo to be critiqued to info@businesslogos.com. If you’re feeling intimidated, you can let the professional designers at BusinessLogos get to work on your company’s image.

Here’s a great video I found on Behance about taking creative control. I hope it inspires designers to not let their work go for free, to educate clients, and to strive for the best creative solution always.