Can you make my logo bigger?

Its is by far the most popular request we get from clients during the process of building a website

We get it. Businesses invest a lot of time and emotion in their logo and want to see it uses as much as possible to expand their brand and get exposure. Outside of your business environments, we agree, but there is a difference between your business card, a billboard and a brochure and your website. 

Look at it like this, we are all used to the high energy presentation pitch used in TV advertising to encourage you to visit the car dealership, but if you visited the dealership and the salespeople used the same high energy voice while showing you through the vehicle, you would probably feel quite awkward. 

Your large logo on a bus may encourage someone to visit your site, but when people land on your site you want to make your products and services the hero; with your brand in the top left-hand corner quietly providing the reassurance that your visitors are in the right place. 

Examples of why you don’t need a bigger logo

Making your logo too big on your website can have some damaging effects:

Makes the customer feel less important. 

If you are providing solutions, make them the hero. Make your site feel more about the people you are trying to reach than about yourself, Overbanding your website can make it feel as if your business is too self-absorbed.

It feels like shouting

We are conditioned these days to feel as if those who have the most confidence and knowledge don’t need to shout to be heard. 

It looks insecure

Those that have to talk loudly are often the most insecure in the room, large logos and lots of branding can look as if you have nothing else to say

It’s Distracting

If they have landed on your site, to a certain degree that has already settled on your brand, they now want to find what they’re looking for in the space they are looking at. Don’t steal their attention with a logo they have already moved on from.

It breaks best design principles.

Believe it or not  we know what we are doing, the logo and menu section of your site is a tried and proven design that works on many levels, we have used space and layout design rules to maximise the impact of all the elements whilst still optimising it for the hundreds of computer, tablet, phone and watch screens your visitors will see it on. Just resizing the logo for one view may disrupt the experience on other devices.

Ok but I’m the customer so…

Absolutely, if you have considered the above, we are happy to go ahead and make the changes you request. There are some things that we need to let you know.

• Most of our budget website builds are based on a pre-existing template that is tried and proven, changes to the layout and space that cater for your request may require addition design and code changes to ensure that the changes do not break either aspects of the design. For instance, a larger logo in the header of the site may require an adjustment or relocation of the menu. These changes will need to be quoted and approved by you.
• If we break some design rules to cater for your requirements, it is highly possible that we will not be adding the project to portfolio display. This is not a sour grapes situation, it’s just that many of our clients are educated in marketing and design and to promote a project that shows a job that does not employ best practice is not optimal to our best efforts to promote our work

Please be assured that we have employed our best knowledge and experience in creating your site using methods that have been tried and tested over twenty years. Please ask questions and make requests as we are here to serve you. In order to get you the best results for you project, we would like you to get the benifits of our skills and experience.

“Can you make my logo bigger” is a request heard so much by web designers that there have been thousands of memes and even t-shirts designed around the request. Just Google it to see how popular the request is.

T Shirt from teepublic.com

The “Can you make my logo bigger” movement is not about making fun of the client who requests it (we don’t expect our clients to understand the technicalities of our profession, an don’t profess to understand their expertise), is more about unity with other web designers on a common theme.

Website logo rules…

Should go in the top left corner

• preferably horizontal to minimise the space it takes up
• on evey page, reminding visitors where they are
• should adapt to the device that you are using it on

Also in the footer

• along with contact details and address