Logo Design – The Ultimate Guide

Logo design is arguably one of the most important and valued areas of design. A quality logo design, combined with the branding of an organisation or company, can become one of the most powerful forces in today’s society.

Below are some important tips to keep in mind when designing a logo.

Concepts, concepts, concepts!

There’s a perfect concept out there for every project, but the hard part is finding it, or at least something close to it. The only way to do this is to brainstorm like crazy.

Start looking up competitors, do Google image searches, write down keywords, do some mind mapping and make sure you put everything down on paper. You don’t want to come up with a great idea only to forget it the next morning.

Nothing like sketching

A lot of designers like to go straight to the computer, but the power of sketching is often underestimated. You can quickly sketch out multiple concepts and create variations to see what works and what doesn’t, in a matter of minutes. The computer will slow you down, so be sure to break out the sketch pad, coloured pencils, markers or whatever you prefer and start sketching away.

Did you know that large design companies will often sketch out dozens of pages of logo concepts before they even touch a computer mouse? Take a tip from the pros and focus on your sketches first.

Research the end requirements

It’s always a good idea to talk to your client at the start to see what they plan on doing with the logo. Ask them if it going to just be on stationery, logo items or is it going to be on billboards and banners and such. This can help you better fine tune the logo for them to make sure it will look right in multiple instances.

Use the most professional program

Although it can be tempting to use a program like Adobe Photoshop to design logos when starting out, mastering Adobe Illustrator and its pen tool will be essential if you are serious about logo design. Adobe Illustrator has a vector format that will allow your logo to be scaled up and down with no loss of quality.

Keep it simple

In general, it’s better to keep logo design simple. The main idea behind this is that you want the logo to be able to hold up well at very tiny sizes. A good test is to create a 16×16 pixel favicon of the logo and see how it looks. This is the smallest size the logo will probably ever be in.

Test it at varying sizes

Similar to the above mentioned, you should physically test the logo yourself by printing it in varying sizes. Also take a look at the logo from different distances to see how it would look on a poster or on a t-shirt and stationery.

Test it in multiple colours

Clients always have different needs and different budgets and a quality logo design will be able to adapt to these circumstances and still look great. Test the logo in a variety of colour printing processes, such as one-colour, two-colour, four-colour and so on.

Test with surrounding text

Logos will rarely be seen totally alone. Most of the time they will have taglines or other text nearby. So test the logo ahead of time and see how it looks in different situations.

Add a temporary tagline and see where it looks best. Justify the logo and text to the left, to the right, centre it, and try out any other combinations of text and sizes.

SOURCE: You The Designer