It's great to love your logo and want it to be bigger and more prominent, but sometimes it's actually better for your company if it stays small.
I hear it all the time: “That logo is just a little bit too small. Do you think the featured image is making the logo unnoticeable? Can we make it just a little bigger? I can hardly read the small type in the very bottom. Bump it up.” I know why clients ask these questions. It’s great to love your logo and want it to be bigger and more prominent. But the answer is that the logo doesn’t need to get bigger, and that it’s actually better for your company if it stays small.
Visitors aren’t coming to your website to see your logo
This is blunt, but true. Visitors to your site want the content and functionality of your website. Your logo is just an extra step. You may be afraid that people will overlook your logo, but that’s actually the point. It takes less than a second to read the logo and understand it. As long as it’s readable (which is about 25 to 30 pixels high), your logo has done its job. Let your visitors move on to the meat of your website.
On a website, your logo serves only one purpose
Your logo is there to let people know they’re in the right place. They see your company name, acknowledge they’re in the place they were looking for, and then they want to move on to find what they actually came to your site for. You don’t want to crowd out the important stuff. Your content is what sells your products. Your content is what’s going to drive someone to give you a call. The fact that your logo is bigger won’t. If you make the logo bigger, you’re taking away premium space from other more important elements on your website and you’re pulling attention away from everything else.
You don’t want people staring at your logo
A person who is stuck staring at your logo is not reading about your company or searching for the product they want. You want them to get to your content. The only logos that make a sale are the logos from giant brands that spend hundreds of millions of dollars on advertising. If you spend that much on ads, your brand identity will be strong, your logo will sell stuff, and I’ll be happy to make your logo huge.
There’s a reason the logo is always in the top left
The first place people look on a website or even printed material is the top left corner — it’s been proven time and time again. When you put the logo there, people can see it and move on. The real reason to put the logo in the top left corner is so you can make it small and unobtrusive and still have people notice it.
But … can you bump up my logo?
After all of that, you still might say, “Okay, okay … but can we make it bigger anyway?” To that, I can only say — of course I will.