When you start to put your website together, you’ll want to have a strong logo to build off of, and you’ll want your logo to be flexible enough to use in a variety of mediums.
Keep it simple. You don’t need your logo to be extravagant, in fact the best logos are really quite plain. Look around at the products in your home or your office. The name brand items use a couple of colors, and their logo is usually simple and clean, using a few bold lines or symbols.
Which brings us to our next point: use symbols. A unique symbol and your company name can go a long way to establishing your company’s image. Some examples are Nike, Apple, Pepsi, and Target.
Be flexible. Once you have your design, remember that you’ll need it in a variety of colors. First you’ll want one with your company’s colors. This logo can go on all your materials, whether they’re for print or the web. You’ll also want one in grayscale, or all black if you can swing it. This logo you can use in anything that doesn’t need color, like a black and white ad or as part of standard letterhead. You’ll also want one that’s straight white. This can be used on t-shirts, coffee cups, pens, or any kind of promotional giveaway.
Have a variety of formats because you’ll need to be able to use the logo on the web, in print, and for email signatures. A high res vector logo in either a PDF or EPS format is a necessity for your print materials, but web needs are different. While you can use vector artwork, you can get away just fine with a rasterized logo at 72 dpi. You don’t need it to be larger than that, and remember that web art needs to be RGB. For email attachments use a small, 72 dpi RGB jpeg.