Landscape Leadership picks the best logos

 

Yes, we have the audacity to pick the five best landscaping logos in all the land!

 

I haven't seen anybody else tackle this, so why not the Landscape Leadership team?

 

Creating your landscape company's logo – along with naming your company – are two of the most important marketing decisions you'll ever make. These are two cornerstones of your brand.

 

When it comes to creating the logo that will represent your company, there are very specific guidelines to keep in mind, two of which served as our starting criteria for selecting our favorite landscaping logos. We'll get to this in a second.

 

But where to begin? I believe there are 1.67 million landscaping companies...just in the state of Texas. That might be an exaggeration, but you know what I'm getting at. We needed a clear starting point.

 

I decided we would start with Lawn & Landscape magazine's Top 100 List from 2014. I thought the list would offer a decent sample size of company logos to review with many meeting certain criteria we were looking for.

 

If you have an awesome logo but you're not on the Top 100 list, sorry we didn't consider you.

 

"The Best" in the title is really just hyperbole to get you to read this article, our intent is to teach you up on what goes into designing a killer landscape logo. So the Top 100 List seemed like a good pool to draw from.

 

We started with two criteria:

Shape: A logo should always be aligned horizontally with an ideal proportion of 2.25:1 (Disney, Coca Cola). A 1:1 proportion is equally effective (McDonalds, Starbucks).

Colors: A single, dominant color is almost always the best strategy for a logo. Stick with two colors at the most.

 

Of the 100 landscape companies on Lawn & Landscape's list only 44 logos met both criteria. If you review the top 100 brands in the world you'll see that close to 90 percent of their logos share these qualities related to shape and color. 44 percent versus 90 percent – I think there are some lessons our industry can learn from these top brands.

 

The next criteria I set forth for our team was much more subjective. I asked each of us to select our five favorite landscaping logos, keeping in mind the logo clearly identify what the company does (Landscaping!). For example, I really like Gothic's logo – but it says nothing about who they are and what they do. In my opinion this is very important in our industry – we are not Fortune 500 companies with the brand recognition of Apple or Nike.

 

Of the 44 companies who met the shape and color criteria, our team of four chose 12 unique landscaping logos as our favorites. Two companies were chosen by three out of the four of us (slow down, partner – you'll find out below).

 

Click here for a breakdown of our favorites with comments from each of us.