We recently announced our winners for our community's Saturn DAO logo contest; where we discovered some very talented designers in our community. As a result, I wanted to start a conversation about why logo design is not an element you can quickly skip over during the creation of your token. In fact, I am of the belief that at the birth of your project, having a well-designed token logo, is in fact a must.

This is not to say that you need to spend thousands of dollars on a marketing or design company to create your token's logo that reflects your brand identity perfectly. However, if you do not have the necessary skills to make a pixel smooth shape & do not want to spend the time learning how - then designing your token logo is definitely something you should consider outsourcing.

Logo And Colours

Do not kid yourself that potential investors or users will read up on your whitepaper before judging your project, in my experience, there is only a handful of people who will dive into a whitepaper first. The larger majority will first look at the representation of your project, before choosing to learn about the technology or goals behind it. And what is the first representation they will see? Well you guessed it: your token logo. This means your logo design needs to be chosen wisely, and its colours should reflect what you are doing. Preferably, it should be something that will be easily memorable. For example, Litecoin Classic Token, does this very well:





You immediately spot the similarities to the Litecoin logo but also there is enough difference for you to know it is an ETC token. I also recommend sticking to a simple colour scheme, without shadows and fancy effects. Because the more complex your logo looks the worst it will look in a smaller format: CoinMarketCap, for example, displays coin or token logos in 32 x 32 size.

Format & Ratio Matter

Making a unique logo in a strange ratio may sound like a good idea to stand out, but ultimately you are just giving yourself some more headaches. Remember that your token logo is going to need to be uploaded everywhere: ICO calendars, exchanges, price trackers, forums, twitter, Reddit & more. If you can not easily fit your token's logo into their requirements: which are almost always square, then it will not look very good. And if it does not look very good then all that will happen is fewer people will click on your listing.

You would be surprised how many token logos I have had to edit this month just to ensure they looked passable on our exchange's dashboard or how many projects did not have a .PNG format readily available. If your logo is not versatile, in the sense, a designer cannot easily scale it to transform it between sizes and formats - then its use is limited. That is why if you do use a professional designer they will almost always provide you with a logo in a vector format. You do not want its use to be limited, you want your token logo to be out there for your community to use & promote your project.

Pixel Smooth Edges Or Don't Bother

Lastly, you can't build up a brand identity around a logo that has pixelated edges on its shapes or letters. By this I mean if your logo consists of maybe a letter on a shape, that shape needs to be smooth. If your edges are pixelated, then your community will not really be able to play around creating content with your logo because the end result will never look very good.

I think we can all agree which side looks better.

So what do you think, I am blowing the importance of your token's logo design out of proportion? Would love to hear your thoughts. Comment below to let me know!

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