Another fascinating thing you receive while setting up your brand or business is a logo. A logo is more than an image, it is an identifier for the vision represented by everything your brand symbolises. If you are a businessman, freelancer, or simply someone interested in design, this would be your step-by-step guide on how to design a logo, even if you have never created one.
Hopefully, by the end of this blog post, you will know how to create an aesthetically lovely logo that is a treat for the eyes and meaningful.
Step-by-Step Guide To How To Design A Logo
1. Purpose Of A Logo
Before you draw, you will first know what a logo is all about. Well, it happens to be the first impression of your brand. A logo is a symbol that will tell people who you are and what you do. Think about Nike’s swoosh or the Apple icon for Apple. Such logos are good but represent the message of the brand along with its values.
Why Is A logo important?
- It is attention-grabbing.
- It provides a nice first impression
- It’s an expression of your brand identity
- Makes you stand out from the rest of the competition
- It binds the customer to your brand
- It creates brand loyalty
After having this in mind, Start with the logo design step-by-step process.
2. Define Your Brand Identity
Your logo should say something about your brand personality. Is it a playful or a serious one? For experts or kids? The more you define your brand identity, the easier it is to come up with the right logo.
Start With These:
- What does your brand do? What does your business offer?
- What are the core values of your brand? Think of words such as trustworthy, fun, or innovative.
- Who do you want your audience to be? Children, families, or corporate executives?
- As soon as you have those answers, you can create a mood board: all images, colours, and fonts will describe the mood of your brand.
3. Harvest Ideas For A Logo
Don’t start drawing yet! First, gather inspiration! Look at those logos that you like. Why do you like them? What don’t you like?
Where To Seek Inspiration
- Pinterest- You can browse logo design boards and see what appeals to your eyes.
- Instagram- Many designers have accounts for this social media, and therefore, there is the world’s inspiration available.
- Logo Design Websites: For such heights to be achieved, a person should take the help of sites such as Behance or Dribble, and logos should become more pleasing.
- Competitive logos: Check what others, in other industries you have chosen are doing. Do not think that someone else cannot steal something identical, see what works for them.
- Pro Tip: Start thinking about what sorts of logos move you. There are so many ways a logo can be executed.
Here are a few different ways a logo can be executed:
- Wordmark logos: Uses the name of the brand, such as Google or Coca-Cola.
- Symbol logos: These are simple symbols or icons; the Apple logo, for example.
- Combination logos: Both text and a symbol can be utilised Adidas is a great example.
4. Style Of The Logo Design
Style is the main thing in designing a logo, it will be determined by your brand identity. Most of the common styles are:
- Minimalist logos: These very clean, simple, modern minimalist logos rely on simple shapes and neutral colours for the most part.
- Vintage logos: Often used with food or drink, and clothing brands, the vintage logos can give off a sense of being old or antique.
- Handmade logotypes: They exude the feeling of being personal and often betray an impression that it is not done creatively.
- Flashy Logotype: For a company, which is targeting the young market.
Choose the character of your brand. That will be a beacon guiding the design process.
5. Selective Use of Colours
Colour is also important in logo design. Colours have meanings too, and the selective use that you make is going to affect how people perceive your brand.
Here is a colour meanings primer:
- Red- passion, energy, excitement: it is Coca-Cola, YouTube
- Blue: Trust, professionalism, calm: Facebook and Twitter
- Yellow: Happiness, positivity, optimism: McDonald’s and IKEA
- Green: Nature, growth, health: Whole Foods and Starbucks
- Black: Sophistication, luxury, power: Chanel and Nike.
For example, try to limit your logo to two or three colours only, and your logo will not look too busy otherwise, having a colour scheme could help make the logo look balanced enough for it to be professional and memorable.
6. Select Proper Font
Fonts can play a very significant role in the logo, just like colours. Your choice of font can even say a lot about your brand. For instance, if it is a logo for a law firm, do not use Comic Sans but use something more corporate, like Times New Roman.
Four main types of fonts are available to use:
- Serif fonts: Serif fonts have small lines at the end of the letter and are called serifs. These can give an extremely traditional and formal look to your text. Times New Roman is a sample of it.
- Sans-serif fonts: These do not carry any terminal line, and it is giving a very modern and clean look to the text, which can be Helvetica.
- Script fonts: These are lettered or more elegant and playful, such as the Pacifico font.
- Display fonts: These fonts have a decoratively stylised look, are extremely eye-catching, and indeed are very much used for brands that have remarkably strong identities, such as Lobster.
It must be readable in all sizes: you want the reader to be able to quickly read the name of your brand on a business card and meanwhile read it from a distance on a billboard.
7. Draw Your Concepts
This is the most fun part: drawing your concepts! Don’t be an artist for this. Grab your pen and paper and start drawing different logo concepts. Concentrate more on simple designs that go well with the style of your brand.
Some drawing guidelines are as follows:.
- It must be simple enough because the layout will appear clumsy if not easy to memorise.
- Form play: You can use circles, squares, or triangles, or any shape that you like, to give your design form.
- Don’t focus so much on making it perfect at this point: you want as many ideas as possible.
You can use tools like Canva, Adobe Illustrator, or Google Drawings literally to experiment with various logo ideas online.
8. Digitise Your Logo Design
When you have sketched a few ideas, it’s time to digitise your favourite. Below are some easy-to-use tools that you can use for digitizing your logo:
- Canva: perfect for the beginner, Canva comes with pre-made templates and a drag-drop interface.
- Adobe Illustrator: This professional design tool lets you make tremendous changes and creativity but is steeper in the learning curve.
- Hatchful by Shopify: A free online logo maker that guides you step-by-step in creating a logo.
- Looka: An AI-powered tool in logo design that generates logo ideas based on your brand name and preferences.
Spend time perfecting your logo and balance to align everything. You can play with different colours, fonts and other credentials until you liked it.
9. Test Your Logo
Then, before finalising your design, test your logo to see how it works in every context. Meaning of a good logo, in this case, is that a good logo looks good irrespective of the application or use.
Testing of the logo
- Scale it up and down: Ensure that it is clear and readable at large and small sizes.
- In black and white: your logo must be readable and workable when viewed in black and white.
- Let it around: Get some more points from friends, family, or colleagues. Chances are, they may notice something you did not.
10. The Finalised Logo
Having obtained all your changes done and finally fixing your logo for the brand, you will have to save your final logo so it could be presented on the internet through various platforms and media as well as other places you may have in mind for the presentation of your logo.
Formats the logo must be saved by
- PNG: For use online and social media.
- SVG: Very scalable to be print-ready.
- JPG: Smaller file size for sites, emails, etc.
- EPS: They are the vector file format, which one can scale to any size with no loss of image quality. Highly suitable for printing.
As a protection measure, save a version of your logo in colour and another in black/white to provide flexibility on demand.
Conclusion
You might fear the prospect of designing a logo, but these steps will help you realize one that effectively represents your brand. Remember that an excellent logo is simple, memorable, and reflects your brand. Do not rush but explore the idea, test your logo, and get feedback from people.
Now that you know how to design a logo, start the creative process! If you want to create a new one, or perhaps update an old one it all comes down to it, a good logo will help your business achieve its mission as a brand.