Practice logo / name

Only when the name or designation of your practice has been clearly clarified should you start developing the logo - after all, the name is very closely linked to the design of the logo. Otherwise, you will be working "into the void" and developing creative ideas will be unnecessarily difficult. In addition, even changing individual letters at a later stage can throw the entire design concept into disarray.

You should therefore clarify the following questions in advance:

• Should your own surname be included?
• Should it be a so-called fantasy name?
  (Jameda, for example, is a fantasy name)
• Is the practice name already in use?
  (see next paragraph)
• What message should be conveyed?
• Synonyms? Other languages?
• Which target group should be addressed?
• Is there room for expansion?
• Is the right domain still available?
• Is the practice name easy to remember?

Before deciding on a practice name and starting to design the practice logo, you should first check whether the desired name could lead to problems under trade mark law. This may be the case, for example, if another practice already has the same name and has registered it as a trade mark.

A first step towards excluding such disputes is the Trade mark search by the German Patent and Trade Mark Office. Here you can use a simple search tool to check whether the desired name is already in use. However, even if the desired name is already listed here as a registered trade mark, this does not automatically mean that you are not allowed to use it.

The choice of colour(s) for the practice logo should also be carefully considered and match or at least harmonise with the rest of the practice design (e.g. walls, treatment chairs). Even if a colour logo is usually desired, it is still important that it also "works" in black and white - after all, sooner or later the doctor's logo will end up on a monochrome copy (fax, stamp) and should of course still look good and be recognisable.

The font used in a logo says more about a practice than you might think at first glance. Fonts can be serious, funky, playful, exclusive, infantile, aggressive, cool, soft or feminine. It breathes life into the name of the practice and gives the logo a certain character. It is therefore important to clarify the message to be conveyed and the clientele to be reached before designing the logo.

Especially when it comes to logo design, less is more. Because when you look at the biggest and best-known companies and brands in the world, such as Mercedes, Apple or Telekom, it becomes clear that any child can draw the corresponding logo in the sand with their finger. Most of the world's best-known logos are very simple and not overloaded with detail or various elements.

WORD MARKET

A word mark is a trade mark that consists exclusively of letters, numbers or other characters.

IMAGE

A figurative mark is a trade mark that consists exclusively of graphic elements.

WORD/FIGURATIVE MARK

What is generally referred to as a "logo" or "signet" is usually a word/figurative mark - i.e. a combination of letters/numbers and a design graphic element.

DPMA

Is the abbreviation for the German Patent and Trade Mark Office. This is where you can register trade marks with protective effect in Germany.

CMYK

Abbreviation for the printing colours of four-colour printing - cyan, magenta, yellow, key (=> black as the key colour).

RGB

Abbreviation for red, green, blue and thus refers to the additive RGB colour spectrum, which is used in all self-luminous systems (screens, monitors).

PANTONE and RAL

Best-known companies and suppliers of special colours and special colour systems.

SCALABILITY

Refers to the ability to change the size of graphics without any significant loss of quality.

VECTOR GRAPHICS

These are usually two-dimensional representations that can be precisely defined by image descriptions without having to assign a colour value to each pixel. For example, a circle on a plane is only defined by two factors: The position of the centre of the circle and the radius. Accordingly, photos cannot be saved as vector graphics. The advantages are scalability and a much smaller amount of data.