Lindon Leader, creator of the lauded FedEx logo, encapsulated the importance of straightforward logos: “I strive for two things in design: simplicity and clarity. Great design is born of those two things.”
Your company logo appears everywhere—billboards, packaging, social media, and your website. Ensuring your brand logo is easily recognizable and represents your company across formats often means creating logo variations. Here are the different logo variations, their purposes, and how to design them.
What are logo variations?
Logo variations are rearranged versions of your brand’s logo tailored for different placements. Each variation retains essential design themes, like color, font, or style, so your brand identity stays cohesive, even when the layout changes. You can use variations for different mediums (e.g., email signatures, product labels, and digital ads) or formats (e.g., vertical alignments, color, and transparency). For example, if your logo is white but needs to appear on a white background, you could create a black version of your logo that still conforms with your overall visual brand identity.
Beyond logistics, logo variations can target different audiences, recognize holidays, and adapt to other cultures. For example, Google Doodles, Google’s search page logo variations, elevates historical moments, current events, and days of note throughout the year. If you operate internationally, you can also customize your logo for different countries to suit different color philosophies and languages.
Logo variations vs. brand elements: What’s the difference?
Brand elements are the characteristics that visually establish and represent your brand identity, including design choices like typography and core identifiers like your brand name.
Logos are a part of your overall brand elements, but inversely, other brand elements also inform logo design. Aspects like color and typeface shape your logo and variants to present a cohesive narrative about your company’s story, values, and offerings.
What are the four core types of logo variations?
You can create multiple unique logo variants for any reason, but there are four logo variations your brand needs:
1. Primary logo
Your primary logo is the one most recognized by your customer base. You’ll use it most often and display it prominently in places like your desktop website header or billboards. Other variations will be derived from this main logo.
2. Secondary logo
When the primary logo doesn’t work for your format, a secondary logo offers a simplified version. Secondary logos retain your full business name but strip out additional details, like tagline and location.
Use them in vertical or horizontal formats and on smaller placements like business cards.
3. Submark logo
Submark logos are smaller graphics or icons that retain only key graphic elements, like color and shape, and remove all extraneous details, including your full business name. Use them to represent your brand in condensed spaces, such as a social media profile picture or mobile website header.
A submark logo may also be the stylized initials of your brand name (i.e., a lettermark), as the clothing brand Good American demonstrates in its website footer.
4. Favicon logo
A favicon is a tiny icon that appears in web browser tabs, bookmark bars, favorites bars, browser history results, and search engine results pages (SERPs). Though small, favicons help build brand awareness and verify a website’s authenticity and security.
Your favicon may be text-based or pictorial, like Shopify’s The Shopping Bag brand mark.
How to design logo variations
- Analyze your primary logo
- Create your secondary logo
- Design your submark logo
- Create your favicon logo
- Adapt to holidays and diverse audiences
Once you’ve designed a primary logo, you can develop the alternate logo variations your brand needs. Here’s a guide to creating each of your logo variations:
1. Analyze your primary logo
All logo variations originate from your primary logo design. Evaluate your primary logo’s essential elements, including graphics, color scheme, tagline, and brand name.
Decide which aspects must remain consistent throughout variations to ensure your audience recognizes your brand. Typography, for example, is central to most brand identities, so companies often use the same font across all logo variations.
If you have brand guidelines with a range of preapproved color shades, you may emphasize secondary or accent colors in new logos so variants are versatile while remaining consistent.
2. Create your secondary logo
The secondary logo fits in most spaces your primary logo can’t. Simplify and rearrange your primary logo’s format to develop your secondary logo. For example, you could remove graphic elements like symbols or adjust a horizontal logo into a vertical layout.
Many brands use a wordmark logo, a stylized version of their name, as the secondary logo.
3. Design your submark logo
An impactful submark logo is versatile but easily recognizable. Use submark logos for a consistent presence in spaces where branding isn’t the focus. For example, if you have a downloadable white paper on your site, the first page may center a large primary logo, and each following page may include a small submark in the corner.
Remove your full business name and complex details, like locations, taglines, and gradients. Emphasize a unique symbol or your brand’s initials in a custom, identifiable font. Use the same color palette and focus on your primary brand colors to make sure your submark is identifiable at a glance.
4. Create your favicon logo
Favicons are a tiny, 16 by 16 pixel version of a company logo. Make your favicon straightforward and representative of your brand: Use a streamlined version of a prominent graphic from your primary logo or highlight a single important letter from your name. Try a favicon generator, like favicon.io, to create a simple text-based variation and convert your image into the .ico file format.
5. Adapt to holidays and diverse audiences
Create more logo variations for other countries by researching the cultures of your new target audience. Different cultures can have unique associations with specific colors, fonts, and images—for example, red marks good luck in China but danger in Middle Eastern countries.
If you include a tagline with your logo, consider translating it to that country’s predominantly spoken language, but ensure words and phrases don’t contain inadvertently offensive meanings. Even phrases in the same language can change meanings across countries; “pants” refers to underwear in England.
You don’t need to overhaul your logo to acknowledge a holiday. Try including a given holiday’s colors or distinct symbols in your logo. For example, your logo can sport shades of pink and red on Valentine’s Day and feature a witch’s hat on Halloween. These minor adjustments help build a positive customer perception by keeping your brand fresh, active, and in tune with your audience.
Example of logo variations: Pilgrim
Pilgrim is a natural beauty brand in India that sells a diverse range of vegan, sulfate-free, and paraben-free products. It launched online in 2019, has opened four brick-and-mortar stores, and sells at more than 1,000 additional retail partners.
Pilgrim’s primary logo includes the brand’s logotype and a graphic image. Shoppers see this logo on the website’s header:
Desktop users also see the favicon logo in the website tab at the top of the browser. This logo displays the graphic on a light orange background.
Pilgrim uses another logo variation on its products. The liquid lipstick displays a simplified secondary logo without the icon. Given the narrow surface area of the lipstick, the wordmark logo is a better fit and offers a touch of variety.
Larger products use another version of a secondary logo, which includes the brand name and the graphic stacked rather than side-by-side, as in the primary logo.
Pilgrim also uses a submark logo, with just a black icon set against a white background, on its profile sign-up page. The submark allows PIlgrim to pair different headlines and slogans with its logo.
Logo variations FAQ
What is a stacked logo?
A stacked logo is a scaled-down version of the primary logo, formatted to fit within tighter confines. Stacked logos display elements vertically, offering more flexibility in placement. Create a stacked logo with Shopify’s free logo maker.
Can a company have multiple logos?
Yes, companies can have multiple logos, though they are often logo variations rather than complete redesigns. For instance, your health food brand may use a simple image in browser tabs, a wordmark logo on stores, and a full primary logo with graphics and text on product packaging. However, having multiple conflicting logos with different designs can harm brand recognition.
Should logo variations be designed at the same time as a primary logo?
You don’t need to design logo variations all at once. Instead, focus on finalizing your primary logo as the starting point and foundation for future variations.
