There are more than 1.3 million active lawyers in the US.

While many of them work for established law firms, others are self-employed. As such, if you choose to start your own practice, you’re up against fierce competition.

Unless you’re also an expert in some non-legal field that makes you invaluable, you only have a few ways to stand out. One of those ways is with a quality lawyer logo.

Let’s dig in and look at some tips for creating the perfect logo for you.

Color Choice

If you’re just starting out, give some serious thought to your logo color choices.

There’s an entire area of research on how color influences emotion. A few go-to colors are blue and black.

Cool blues are associated with trustworthiness. Black is associated with authority and intelligence. Both are useful associations for a lawyer.

Keep the Lawyer Logo Consistent with the Brand

The exception to color choice is when your practice has already established a color scheme as part of its brand.

Say you picked colors with local resonance, such as ones similar to the local high school or college colors. If you committed to those colors, the logo design needs to stick with them.

A logo with drastically different colors is not only jarring, but it could confuse people when seen out of context.

If your existing branding includes a specific, memorable font, the logo needs to use that font for any text.

Aim for Simplicity

Memorable logos are easy to remember. In other words, they’re simple.

Think of it this way. How difficult is it to recall the 4-digit PIN for your debit card? How about your bank’s routing number?

You probably remembered your PIN instantly. The routing number, well, most people need to look that up.

The fewer the elements, the easier something is to recall. The stylized quill that Seatons Solicitors uses as a logo is an outstanding example of simplicity. It’s a single image.

Keeping your logo confined to a few essential elements, such as an image and a name, makes your logo memorable.

Local Competitor Research

The odds are that the final version of your logo will resemble at least one other logo somewhere in the world. Unless it looks like a trademarked logo, that isn’t your problem.

What you want to avoid is designing one that resembles the logo of a local competitor. If your logo resembles one of theirs, you may end up giving them free advertising.

Research your competition. Compare your design to their logos before you commit.

Make It Scalable

When you first start out, that logo will probably only go on your website, business cards, and letterhead. Someday, though, you might be successful enough to want to put it on a billboard.

That’ll be difficult if the only version you have is a JPEG image. When you scale that up, it’ll be an unrecognizable mess.

Make sure you have at least one copy of the logo in a scalable file format, such as scalable vector graphics (SVG). Then you can enlarge or decrease as you deem fit.

Parting Thoughts

Designing your lawyer logo takes a little creativity balanced with some practicality.

It should be appealing and consistent with your brand. It should also be original enough to avoid advertising for your competitors. Don’t forget to keep it in a file format that will scale to any need.

If you’re ready to design your logo, give our logo maker a try.