Logo Basics
Logos should be based on several different factors.
The look and feel of the logo must match the company's:
- mission statement
- beliefs
- target audience
- style
Effective Logo Designs
- Simple
- Memorable
- Timeless
- Versatile
- Appropriate
- Work well large or small
- Encompass your brand vibe
Strong Logo Designs
Characteristics of Strong Logo Designs:
- They have balance between symbols, type and elements
- They are recognizable using only part of the logo design
- They do not depend on color to be effective
- They work well on a wide variety of applications
- They need to be flexible and dynamic:
- Do they work at any size?
- Are they recognizable from a distance?
- Do they work in black/white and a variety of colors?
- They can stand the test of time
- Get input and feedback from leadership of the company
- Know where the company is heading to help make the logo flexible and adapt to their future needs
- They avoid popular trends
- They use negative space to their advantage
- They are liked by the company's target demographic
- Knowing your target audience is half of your battle
- Use social media for feedback before going forward with a launch or rebranding
- People can read the logo
- They are as unique as the company
Steps to Logo Design
- Research
- competitors, client brief, client interview, study industry, determine demographics, find unique selling point
- Finding direction
- brand boards, mood boards
- Brainstorming & Sketching
- word mapping, word association, rough sketches
- Concept Refinement & Selection
- refine, narrow down selection & present to client
- Developing a System
- font choice, digital vs. print items, color choices, different sizes
- Creating a Presentation & Deliverables
- create a portfolio presentation
- Bonus - Create a Brand Guidelines Manual
Mood Boards
What are mood boards?
Mood boards are beautiful collections of photography, textures, photos, and color palettes.
- Before you start designing a logo, picking out typography, and choosing your heading photography, you should create a mood board because they are a good way to source all of your inspirations and ideas for your brand.
- Is there a plant, a product, a pillow, etc. that help inspire your brand?
- Are there any textures, colors, or patterns that inspire you?
- You want to get into the mindset of the customer for that brand. Who are they? What are their interests? What sort of things do they like? What kind of hotel do they like to stay in? What kind of architecture do they like? Collect these ideas into a mood board to help you focus your branding ideas.
- Include multiple images that inspire you, add a color palette to the same document (hopefully pulling the colors from your images), and then work on your fonts on the same board as well.
How to create a mood board?
Canva.com
- Canva.com is a simple, free online platform to create a mood board. There are free templates you can use where you drag and drop photos into an already created page to help get your ideas together quickly and easily.
Adobe Color
- This website allows you to create color palettes based off of a color wheel, but also lets you extract colors/themes and gradients from your own images.
Pinterest.com
- Search for "mood boards" on Pinterest and you will have lots of different ideas and inspiration to create your own.
Logo Requirements
Different format requirements for logos
- Square format
- Facebook profile, Instagram story highlight icon
- Horizontal format
- Vertical format
- Digital icons
- Social media posts
- Large banners
Lockup
A lockup is a term used to describe the spacing between elements in a logo design
- When considering the spacing between the logo and the name, one possible way to determine the lockup is to turn on the grid and measure the width of the first letter of the name. Add the same size spacing between the logo and the name to add some consistency.
Color Requirements
- Logos should first be designed in black and white with a white background
- Once you have it a few different ideas, try it out as white text on a black background
When to Present to Client
- Once you have narowed your designs to four different ideas (along with only a few font choices), now it is time to present them to the client for feedback.
- You want to explain your thought process, possibly show your word map or different steps in your thinking.
- At this point you want to narrow it down to one or two (at max) choices using the client's feedback.
- Instead of completely deleting the ideas your client does not want to use, keep them in a file to be used later.
