Designing logos be it personal or for a clients is a tricky creative proccess.

“There are three responses to a piece of design – yes, no, and WOW! Wow is the one to aim for.”

Before you start on designing the logo, you have to understand what is the logo. Logos are like the faces of companies. If you think about your friends, family members, first thing that will pop up in your head is most likely their faces. Each of them have distinctive face that describes them and their personality.So does the logos.

When a designer first takes on a new logo project, he spends a lot of time trying to understand both the organization and its audience. We’ll get to the process of learning what a logo needs to “say” later, but first, let’s talk about what makes a great logo in the first place.

Most logo designers follow some iteration of these principles of great logo design:

  • Simplicity: Are there any unnecessary elements in your design? Get rid of them, keep it simple.
  • Memorability: Is it quickly recognizable? Will people only have to spend a second or two thinking about it to get it?
  • Timelessness: Will it still be a great logo in 10, 20, or even 50 years?
  • Versatility: Does it scale to different sizes without losing quality? Will it work across various media and within different contexts? Will it be still effective on black and white ?
  • Appropriateness: Does it resonate with the desired audience?

All of those questions need to be answered carefully. And if you dedicate enough time for the research phase you wont have to keep coming back and wasting up more time later on.

“Of the top 100 brands of the world 95% of them use only 2 colors.”

Then after establishing the researh and brief fun part, sketching begins. You are like a child who got plasticine for the first time. Go crazy with it. Combine them, place them inside each other , cut the hole inside of them. Explore the ideas, dont hold any of your ideas, thinking “It wdnt work anyway”. Nobody has to see all of your ideas , but youu have to explore each and every of your ideas in order to be more productive. Ofcourse you will initially might have like a lot of ideas and it might scare you and overhelm you. But thats why spent a lot of time researching and finding out about our target audience and brands personality. And thats why we are just playing with the right colors of plasticine. Put shapes upside down and then inside each other. Sketch and explore, keep the flow going. It doesnt matter if it makes sense to you or not.

 

Now that we got our initial sketches we need to proceed to get rid of the useless ones. Dont hold on your ideas, dont be stingy and cheap, trying to force the idea even if it clearly doesnt work. Choose the one that fits principles that we described above. And focus on further emphasizing the brands personality with colors. So how to chose the best color that fits for your logo?

  • Blue: One of the most popular color, wide range usage in the logos, especially corporate logos. Cold, very cold color.
  • Red: Passion, energy, anger. Intense color that summons strong emotions.
  • Green: Green unlike red has a soothing effect. It represents nature , life and regenaration
  • Black: Black is a symbol of power, it can be bold and simplistic, it has a strong presence, shows authority.

Hopefully all these tips would be enough for you to get motivated and start your logo design process. That would be all for now regarding the logo design, in a near future i will explain the creative process of designing logo with further details.