An engaging business logo is a mixture of brand values, audience preferences, and the product’s utility. However, a logo’s placement on the business website is an equally critical brand recall factor. The top-left corner of a web page is traditionally used for logo placement by most businesses. However, logo design services provided by leading design agencies involve experimenting with new website areas for placing the logo. How can we ensure maximum brand recall by adjusting the placement of the website logo? Does a right-aligned or center-aligned logo influence the overall user experience?
This blog post carefully considers the science behind website logo placement that augments maximum brand recognition and significant user adoption.
Why do businesses prefer left-aligned logos?
The reason why most of the world’s websites place their logos on the top-left corner is based on our reading pattern. According to the Nielsen Group*, speakers of left-to-right languages spend more time looking at the left side of the page. Naturally, the first thing that grabs the user’s attention is the brand’s logo. The top-left corner logo placement thus leads to frequent brand recall. It explains why many businesses follow the traditional left-aligned logo design as a rule of thumb.
Why is the left-aligned logo pattern critical?
Easy User Navigation
A logo placed on the top-left corner of a website is always clickable, redirecting the user to the homepage. It is an effective design practice for easy user navigation across layers of web pages. If a user is unable to locate his current position on the website, he can always return to the homepage to start afresh.
The practice is most suitable for large organizations with multiple online services, such as banks and e-commerce websites. A user can always begin with a new task by clicking the top-left logo.
Sense of Surroundings
Eye tracking studies* confirm that users mostly skim through a web page’s content in an F-shaped pattern. Due to the F-shaped reading pattern, users tend to concentrate more on the left side of the web page. Therefore, providers of logo design services fix the logo to the top-left corner to gain maximum user attention. Brand recall becomes stronger as users look at the left-aligned logo often.
Impact of Different Types of Logo Placements on Logo Design Services
Left Vs. Right Logo Alignment
Although UX designers today are willingly experimenting with right-aligned logo design patterns, it still requires careful planning. The recall of a brand’s right-aligned logo is reduced by around 18%* as compared to the left-aligned logo.
Branding services for right-aligned logo websites can prove effective with the right blend of colors, typography, and legibility of the brand name.
Left Vs. Center Logo Alignment
Center-aligned logo design is the second favorite among UX designers. They not only maintain the focus of the user but also work best for mobile-first business interfaces. For instance, The New York Times website logo is centrally aligned and reflects the brand values of the business in an elegant manner.
However, there is still a significantly lower percentage of brand recall with center-aligned logos as compared to the left-alignment. Some studies suggest that user navigation is significantly affected by center-aligned logos. The results suggest that 24% of the users were unable to navigate to the homepage with a single click on the center-aligned logos. On the contrary, only 4% of users failed to navigate to the homepage in one go by clicking the left-aligned logo.
Conclusion
The top-left corner placement of a website logo is indeed effective for consistent user experience. It is an essential element of brand identity design services as it increases brand recall. It should be noted that a brand’s emotional connect and the reliability attributes are an output of a consistent brand experience. Therefore, UX designers must holistically plan the logo design, its alignment, and the brand’s message to establish a consistent brand personality.
The branding experts at Oodles Studio provide custom logo design services for multiple online businesses across the globe. Talk to our logo designing team for establishing a unique market presence with dynamic or animated logo designs.
*Study Sources- https://www.nngroup.com/articles/logo-placement-brand-recall/
