If you are thinking of having a small business logo designed any time soon, you will want to make sure your money is well spent. You will need a business logo design created for modern media channels, printing technology and trends.

The last thing you want to do is put a logo on your business website that looks dated and holds back the design. Logo design, like any industry, is always changing and evolving. So, how do you make sure your small business logo is current? Here are some top trends in the design industry.

Logo Simplification

Business logo redesigns all have one common feature, simplification. One which we are all familiar with is the Starbucks logo. Their old logo, a goddess-type female surrounded by a green band with the Starbucks name, is being replaced with a simplified approach.

Removing the green frame, the elements of the females shape are much more pronounced, in particular the rays extending out from her sides. Starbucks is in the process of rolling out their new logo world wide. In the meantime, the new logo can be previewed here: www.starbucks.com/preview.

Color-Coordinated Words

Using color, borders and shading to emphasise words is increasingly popular, producing clean, simple, modern logo designs. Highlighting the use of Color-Coordinated Words is twitpic.

Speech Bubble logos

Although they've been around for a long time speech bubbles are making a comeback. No longer confined to comic books, speech bubbles are now popular for communication and social media businesses.

Quadrangles

Quadrangles shapes are growing in popularity when it comes to new business logo designs. A Quadrangle is like a rectangle or a square stretched and warped into rhombuses and parallelograms.

Groupon is a great example - it’s not a square, or a rectangle, but whatever it is, it’s become a popular style for logo design.

Interconnected Hubs and Nodes

Business logos with interconnected nodes and hubs are mainly intended to represent the interconnections of the Internet and social media. More dated designs represent technology though images of electronic hardware and circuitry.

This year will see many existing business logo designs simplified, and new small business logos with clear clean designs that use shapes, color and style to both be memorable and communicate the right message.

What trends and examples of logo design have you noticed?