How I Got An Amzing Logo For My Business
Tags: Logo Design Company, Logo, Create Logo, Logo Designing Services, Logo Design

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Logos are perhaps as vital and crucial for the marketing success of a brand or company as appearance is important for the first meeting with a client or employer. It’s much easier to get a job you want, make friends or partnerships if you are a person of substance and have something memorable in your identity. The same happens with brands: it takes seconds for them to lose in the ocean of competitors if they don’t build up the strong image and character via which clients, buyers or users can get the chance to recognize them.

The logo is the basic mark of brand identity, the most prominent symbol of brand image and the foundation of an effective marketing strategy enabling its connection with the target audience. One of the misperceptions in the world of business is that if the product or service is good, it doesn’t need additional investments of time and money into its promotion. However, it doesn’t work like that: without brand identity, even the high-quality product can get lost just because users or buyers won’t get even a slim chance to learn about it or try it. On the contrary, a strong branding strategy sets the immediate connection of the product or company and its essential benefits with the sign that represents it. Brands, products and companies need their own personalities that will attract people in the way it often happens with a personal relationship.

Showing personality in your app, website, or brand can be a very powerful way for your audience to identify and empathize with you. People want to connect with real people and too often we forget that businesses are just collections of people. (Aaron Walter)

Here are the most important steps to designing a logo:

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You may be asking yourself: How can I design my own logo? These are the steps you need to follow:

1. Understand why you need a logo. And why it needs to be great.

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Business really is like dating — you’re trying to attract the right customers and make them fall head over heels in love with your brand. So think of your logo as the picture on your dating profile. It’s what’s going to make people take interest and try to learn more about you (or swipe left because you’re not for them). So you want to look your best, right?

Define Your Workflow

While not the most glamorous of design tips, it’s essential to have a plan in place when you have a deadline looming.

Designing a logo is for many designers the holy grail of creative projects. It can be tempting to dive in straightaway and start brainstorming and sketching ideas, but take just 10 minutes to draft out your design process and you’ll reap the benefits all day long.

Experienced designers will have a set-in-stone routine for putting together brand designs, and this is an often overlooked technique that can make the difference between simply producing a few good ideas and producing an actual, polished logo that the client loves.

This is a basic workflow that provides a solid structure for approaching the logo design process:

Step 1: Study the Brief

As soon as you’ve put the phone down or replied ‘YES’ to that client request email, you need to reflect on the brief. If the client provided you with a detailed brief, make sure you digest every inch of the document to get a strong sense of the client’s brand and creative request. Even if you feel confident about creating logos, your expertise means less if you don’t deliver on the client’s brief.

If you have the time, follow up your brief-reading with some online research about the client’s market and competition. Can you spot any similarities between brand designs in their sector? Make some mental notes about commonly used colors, symbols, and type styles.

Step 2: Get Inspired

Once you know everything there is about the brief and the brand it’s time to step away and find inspiration. Whether that’s through online browsing or by going for a walk outside, you should try to access the mental space where creative ideas flow freely. Once you have an idea, make a note of it, and then take your brain elsewhere. At this stage you want to generate lots of ideas and possibilities to explore, so making a long list of random ideas, or a mind map, is great practice.

Step 3: Sketch

Pull out a large sketchpad and pencil, and start sketching out lots of ideas, using your inspiration notes as a prompt. Don’t worry about refining your drawings, and don’t erase anything! Focus on drawing out as many ideas — and iterations of those ideas — as you can.

Step 4: Revise

Isolate three or four sketches that you feel have the most potential. You may want to refine these sketches further, drawing them out onto a clean sheet. If you’re tight for time, you may want to involve the client, as they can give you direction on which design(s) they prefer. This can save you time by avoiding the need to digitize a whole set of logos. With the client’s opinion in mind, narrow down to the strongest logo idea, and refine further. Sketch it out again, aiming to simplify any complex elements, and thinking about other details like color and texture, which may add to the overall look of the design.

Step 5: Vectorize

Now you’re ready to commit your logo design to the computer. Using a scanner or simply by uploading a high-quality photo from your cameraphone, upload up an image of your logo sketch to your computer. Open it up in a vector program like Adobe Illustrator, CorelDRAW or Inkscape, and using either the drawing tools or trace functions (if you’re especially short on time), vectorize your logo. You may want to create two or three versions in different colorways, to show the client some options.

Step 6: Finalize

Finally, send off the vectorized logo(s) to your client. Hopefully, if they gave the thumbs-up to your sketched version they should be very happy with the digitized result, and you may only have a few tweaks to do before submitting the final artwork to them. Make sure to provide all the files that the client would need to be able to put the logo into use, so include the native vector file, a swatch palette (Adobe Swatch Exchange [ASE] format is usually the most helpful) and any font files associated with the design if used.

This generalized workflow gives you an idea of how to organize your tasks when you have a logo project to do. But to make it even better, you can divide the workflow into units of time, helping you schedule your project much more effectively. Below, I’ve divided up the workflow into units.

For example, if you had one working day, or approximately 8 hours, to complete the work, 1 unit would be equivalent to about 45 minutes. Some parts of the flow will inevitably take longer than others, so while 45 minutes might be sufficient for studying a brief, a period of 2 hours and 15 minutes would be more appropriate for refining a logo design.

If you take just a moment to plan out your workflow and decide how much time you can spend on each task, you’ll find that your whole logo design process is not only more efficient, but also more stress-free!

Know the Difference Between Typographic and Symbolic Logos

There are two main types of logo: typographic and symbolic. Knowing the difference between these — and when it’s appropriate to use each type — can save you a lot of grief down the line. Let’s take a look at each type in more detail…

Typographic Logos

Typographic logos are made up almost entirely of text. The brand’s name is laid out in a particular style and may or not be accompanied by other small elements like color detailing or minor graphics.

This logo design for a brand called ‘Panda’ would be a purist example of a typographic logo, but adding a small detail like a bamboo branch intertwining around a letter would also be considered a typographic logo style.

Typographic logos are a failsafe style which work for almost any kind of brand, whether large corporations or small independent businesses. The brand message communicated by the logo is instant and connects the viewer directly with the brand name. If your client wants to make their brand more searchable and the name more memorable, a typographic logo is a sensible choice.

Symbolic Logos

Symbolic logos are very different to type logos, in that they rely on a symbolic association between an image and the brand.

A symbolic logo tends to consist of one strong graphic image or symbol, which communicates either the name of the company through pictorial representation (e.g. here the company name ‘Panda’ is symbolized by the image of a panda) or the mood, ethos, or industry of the brand through something more abstract.

Symbolic logos are among the most iconic and famed logos in the world. Take for example the Apple logo, or the iconic yellow and red Shell symbol. Purely symbolic logos tend to work best for very large, established companies which can afford to put lots of revenue towards advertising and marketing. Through this, customers become familiar with the brand and its logo, creating a long-lasting psychological association between seeing the logo and a trademark of quality and trustworthiness.

A Happy Medium

A purely symbolic logo might not be appropriate for a small coffee shop — how would customers know the shop’s name unless the business advertised heavily? At the other end of the spectrum, a larger business might want to include the name of the brand in their logo to reinforce recall of their brand. So how do you know which type of logo will suit your client’s business?

This is a dilemma often faced by logo designers, but happily the answer often lies somewhere in the middle. You don’t have to create a purely typographic or symbolic design, and often blending the two together results in a logo that is more memorable and ultimately more versatile.

Adding a symbolic image of a panda to this otherwise typographic logo design adds interesting detail to the design, while simultaneously reinforcing the brand name through symbolism.

This design is also now much more flexible. In the future the brand might find that using the typographic or symbolic elements of the logo in isolation (e.g. social media, stationery, website etc) might work well, while having the security of the full logo design in significant communications.

Small Details Can Make the Biggest Difference

What’s the difference between an OK logo and a polished logo that stands the test of time? The main factor that separates really good logos from the rest is the quality of execution. You can have roughly the same idea for a logo, say a panda for a brand named ‘Panda’, but the small ways you refine the design can make all the difference.

Professional logo designers will often spend more time on refining the minute details of a logo design than on looking for inspiration or drafting ideas. Designers know that it’s these minute details that can make a logo feel exceptionally well put together and contemporary.

Remember when Google released a “new” version of their logo back in 2014? To many people, it didn’t even look like a new logo. The difference was in the kerning (the space between two characters) — with the lowercase ‘g’ nudged along only a single pixel to the right.

Google’s 2014 logo redesign

Big deal, right? Well, for some designers changes like this are a huge deal. And this is in large part because even tiny changes like adjusting kerning can improve a logo considerably.

So when you come to refine your own logos, think about the minute details of your design. Is the baseline of your type completely straight? Would the type look better in a slightly thicker or thinner weight? Can you simplify your vector graphic any more, and smooth out any unnecessary lumps and bumps?

If you’re working on a typographic design there are lots of clever tweaks you can do to your design to perfect it. Kerning is a really key element of making a logo look more whole and concise, and here’s a great tip for making sure it’s just right: If you flip your logo upside down…

…you’ll find that it’s much easier to get a nice kern between your letters. Without looking at the text content of the logo, you can assess the space between characters on a purely visual level.

Another thing to consider is whether your typographic logo would look better set in uppercase or lowercase letters. Calvin Klein certainly thought that uppercase would be an improvement this year, making the decision to ditch the trademark Nineties lowercase logo for a more modernist style set in capital letters.