Logo for a Brand
The logo for a brand should represent your brand values, capture your audience’s attention, and stand out from the crowd. Yes! I keep on going back to brand values, mission, and audience awareness. They should be the most influential factors in the brand design process.
How to Design a Good Logo ?
Logo typically consists of unique shapes and typography. It composes different types of logos. First, look at the few examples below and choose which type will serve you best.
- The image logo uses a simple icon to represent the brand. It is good when the icon embodies your product or service, nevertheless, companies often choose abstract images (Pepsi, Nike, Target). Although it can be open to misinterpretation, many of them work for their brands very well. Repetition is the key to success; nobody is looking at Apple’s logo today wondering: “Maybe it’s an orchard?”.
- Text logo, also known as a wordmark, or lettermark, uses typography to turn the brand name into a logo. It is ideal for companies with unique and short names. If your name is long – maybe an acronym will work for you.
- The combination logo integrates a symbol brand with the brand’s name. This type of logo provides clarity in brand messaging but may become overly busy if not carefully designed and could face challenges in scaling down for smaller applications.
Choose which type of logo will serve you best. Determine it by analyzing where it will be most often used: product labels, printed documents, or maybe online. Each of these places may have different size requirements and limitations. Although the most used type of logo should start your design process, at the end – your brand’s guidelines should show, and describe all the types of logo, with indications of where and how to use them.
Brainstorming
Before opening your Adobe Illustrator or Canva go back to your brand strategy. Think again about your brand’s story and vision. It will define the emotions you want to synthesize in your logo.
Distilling your vision into a logo is a challenge, and you should expect mistakes along the way. Don’t be afraid to experiment, explore, and ask for opinions.
Remember: the logo does not have to represent everything in your brand, but it must express the spirit of your brand and be clear and professional.
Quick tip #1. Logos are often accompanied by taglines. Could you think about that One Sentence That Will Describe Your Brand? If you know it ahead of time it may help in your design process. Later, it will appear in your endless marketing materials as an essential element of your brand strategy, so it needs to go well with your logo anyway. It needs to be simple and positive. Think Nike – “Just do it”, or Home Depot’s “How doers get more done”.
Brainstorm other words that describe your brand and can be used in your future keywords list. Sketch ideas based on these words.
The Best Practice in the Logo Design
- Keep it Simple
Aim for a clean, uncluttered image that communicates your brand identity as straightforwardly as possible. The goal is for viewers to understand your logo instantly and remember it easily.
- Design for your audience.
Your logo design should be appealing to your target audience. You may want to go back again to your best customer’s avatar and reiterate what you know about their preferences and interests. Do you want to appeal to the older or younger generation? Any specific education level or ethnic background?
- Be original.
Standing out from the pack is essential. Not easy in a market that is saturated with millions of competitors. Avoid generic logos and cliché symbols that are already used everywhere. (Check the link above for a great article by VistaPrint on this topic.)
- Be timeless.
A timeless logo means that it will never go out of style. Just like with the font’s choices – be smart, not trendy.
- Choose Unique Font
This font goes beyond just conveying information as text; it is a crucial aspect of your design. It needs to mix well with the logo imagery. You may even design your unique lettering – just for the logo. Also, this time stay away from generic fonts that come as standard with every word processor. These fonts will work against you making your logo less memorable.
- Prioritize versatility.
Start designing in black and white. Your logo should work across various backgrounds and colors. Yes, you will eventually include your color palette, but a well-designed logo will also work well in just a two-color version. Note: black and white are also colors. The two-color aspect is also vital if you plan to use many printing materials in the future. Printing in two colors is always cost-effective.
- Ensure scalability
From a favicon (the tiny icon in a browser’s address bar) to a street billboard, every part of your logo should be sharp. When small, the images loaded with details will look terrible, or will not be legible at all. When blown large digital photography will become pixelated. Therefore, remember that to be suitable for many purposes the final design of your logo should be vector-based.
Finally, to make sure you are on the right path, check the top sketches with your audience persona.
Logo Variations
Speaking about different purposes. It is not possible for a single logo to look great across all the different applications where it will be used. Logo variations allow you to maintain a cohesive look while adapting to different branding needs.
Start with the primary logo, often including an icon and name. Then design some variations also called secondary logos. These logos will be used when layout requirements would make the primary logo too small, too hard to read, or just awkward. See an example below:
From Logo Sketch to Digital
If you’ve been working on paper until now, now is the time to bring your design to the computer and create a digital design layout.
As I said before the logo must be a vector-based graphic. Vector graphics are made of points, lines, and shapes, based on mathematical formulas rather than a set number of pixels. In simple words, it is a set of lines and shapes and not a picture. When you blow up a picture it will eventually show the little colored square (pixels) it is made of. Vector graphics is the only way a logo can be scaled up or down while maintaining image quality. It will also allow you to apply and change any colors.
What software to use? Adobe Illustrator is the industry-leading, vector-based graphics software developed and marketed by Adobe. It is a part of Adobe Creative Cloud and easily integrates with its other popular tools like Photoshop, Lightroom, and InDesign. Illustrator is the best for creating limitless, unique, professional designs, including logos but it is complex and therefore usually not a first choice for DIY entrepreneurs.
DIY Design Tools
First, consider what you have been using until now, and what you are familiar with. Many applications available online offer a variety of services. To simplify your design and marketing process choose one and explore all it has to offer. A logo creator may be on the menu.
Avoid using only predesigned elements. It will increase your chances of ending with another generic layout just like many others.
CANVA is one of the easy-to-use and popular online design platforms. Its intuitive drag-and-drop interface is easy to learn and contains an extensive library of templates and design assets. I used it before in the mood board design. Now, it is time to show you the CANVA Logo Hub a free tool for all who subscribe to CANVA.
Canva Logo Hub includes thousands of patterns and templates. Use them as an inspiration and a starting point for your drawings. The Hub also contains additional information about the logo-creating process – very helpful. Beware of a few rules:
- Do not use pre-made Canva designs for your professional logo. You don’t own them. It is not yours to trademark or copyright. Use instead lines, elements, and fonts to draw your image. If in doubt go to: Canva Licensing Explained.
- In addition to possible legal problems, pre-designed templates will be certainly used by thousands of other people, which will blow away every chance for your uniqueness.
Finally, to use the logo created in Canva as vector graphics outside of Canva you need to share and save it as an SVG file with transparent background. Unfortunately, this feature is available for paid Canva Pro users only. On the other hand, SVG files created somewhere else and imported into Canva – can be edited in its free version.
Creative Fabrica introduced recently a space for DIY creators: Creative Fabrica Studio. The Studio is free with a basic Creative Fabrica subscription, and it allows you to use millions of predesigned elements and fonts helpful to design your logo.
Quick tip #2 After checking its tools and features, I would also recommend the Studio to all who plan to include print-on-demand products within their brand. It contains many presets that can simplify print-on-demand design projects.
If you plan to build your online store, and Shopify is the platform you’d like to use to build its website, please check Hatchful. Hatchful is a fast and easy-to-use logo-creator tool from Shopify. It will ask you questions about your company’s industry, preferred visual style, brand name, and where you expect to use the logo (print, digital, etc.), and then automatically generate a few logo options, which you can select and further customize.
If you are using Squarespace try the Squarespace Logo Creator. It lets you quickly generate a clean-looking logo for your business that will be consistent with the modern and minimal aesthetic that Squarespace templates are known for. It has thousands of vectorized icons and a selection of high-quality fonts good for entrepreneurs and small businesses looking to create a clean, minimalistic logo.
AI Logo Design
When checking all the applications I listed above, I could not miss noticing that they all already offer Artificial Intelligence options to help with designs. Not to mention that “free” Logo Makers and Logo Generators are also popping up all over the Internet. Be careful, especially when designing your logo. AI is pulling data from designs that already exist. Chances that it will create for you something unique are next to none. Unless you are proficient in writing very specific AI prompts, the likelihood that you will get out of it a layout reflecting the soul of your brand is not very high either.
While it is always a good idea to play with different options and investigate places for inspiration, your brand’s logo should be distinct – do not define it by a generic AI scheme.
With your mission, values, color palette, fonts, and color palette ready we may go back to the Brand Style Guide. Did you record all your elements as you gathered them? Now it’s the time to view them all together, make final changes, and when ready collect them in your company Marketing Assets Library.