7 Helpful Tips On Designing A Logo To Improve Its Power

Create a moodboard:

A moodboard is a great way to visually organize all of your thoughts and ideas about your brand or logo. It is an essential part of the design process and can help you better express what you want to convey with your logo and branding in the earliest stages of development. A moodboard is an effective tool for keeping track of a broad range of designs and design elements that are important to you in one place. Colors, words that encapsulate the brand, fonts that you are debating, line art, design styles, symbols, inspirations, can all be helpful to best capture the life of your brand.

Brainstorm ideas:

There are no wrong ideas when brainstorming concepts, designing a logo can be fun. This is a great time for designers to just let their creative juices flow. At this stage, get your ideas out without worrying about the details. Whatever comes to mind put it on paper. After brainstorming, you can work on sketching more refined versions with multiple comps. Take a few pieces of paper and draw as many ideas that you can think of for your first stage of brainstorming ideas. Working with font ideas, line work, iconography, converge your ideas developed working on your moodboard.

Sketch some comps:

Take your best brainstorming ideas and refine them on paper. Sketching comps for logo designs is a good way to convey your ideas before moving to the computer. Refine as many ideas as you need to get to something you are happy with. Ideally, create a few comps that you can refine digitally.

Rough draft on design software:

Now that you have a comp this is the time to create your rough draft on the computer. Ideally you are using a vector format program to design your logo, e.g. Illustrator, Corel Draw, etc. So your logo will remain vector for best output for your designs at any size. Scan your best refined sketches from brainstorming ideas and make them a locked background on your design software. Create the unique elements per logo so you can swap elements if you need to in order to create variations for review. Then you can play with typography, color, styling and composition easily and your designs will be vector and easy to update if needed.

Review:

Once you have a few designs you are happy with, put them on a single art board/page and label them for easy reference (i.e. numbers, letters, etc.). If you are working on this for yourself, sleep on it, then review them after a break. If you pass these off to a client, communicate your thoughts and don’t take it personally if they have a critique or two of your logos.

Final comp:

Now with some sleep or feedback from your client, you are ready to take your logos to the last stage, the final comp. Take your approved logo and move to its own file. Make any changes you need to make to complete the logo and make sure to save it. Now combine any shape elements that are the same level and color. Make your fonts outlines. Remove any unnecessary layers or elements that won’t be in the final logo. Don’t save this over your original version, the one with editable type.

Output the different types of logos:

Now that you are outputting files make sure to label them for easy reference. I like to put OL (if fonts are outlines), color mode (RGB, CMYK, Pantone, BnW, BnW_Reverse, etc.), and size once you are outputting the raster versions of your logos for web or video. A file example would be: Logo_OL_BnW_1200w.jpg or Logo_OL_CMYK.eps. Make sure you output all the files that you may need and for easy retrieval when needed, organize them in folders. Don’t forget to output any icons if you need them too.

File Structure Example:
• Root Folder: Main Logo Files, Sketches, Moodboard etc.
• EPS Folder: Different color modes, and any icons or other outputs I may need, all OL and vector.
• SVG Folder: Same as above, if needed.
• PDF Folder: Same as above, if needed.
• JPG Folder: Different sizes that are needed for web or video (i.e. Extra Large, Large, Medium, Small (but readable), Square (may need to adjust negative space and sizing), the different color types (color, black and white, reverse black and white, and any solid color versions you may use, etc.). Compress them for web in most cases.
• GIF Folder: Same as above, but with a transparent background.
• PNG Folder: Same as above.

Every designer has their particular way to organize their files, so do what is easy for you to remember. Once you zip up your output files for your client, you can put a readme file in the zip folder for their reference as to the different uses of the files. Anything to help people understand your file structure and logo usage helps.

1. Define Your Brand:

Your brand is your reputation. It’s how your customers and target audience perceive your company, your products, and your services. It’s the feeling that is left in their minds when you’ve left the room. It’s how you want your customers to feel when they’re interacting with your brand.

2. Make It Simple:

Unless you are going for a certain style that reflects your brand, simplicity will help keep your logo memorable. Having a logo that is easy to remember and is readable small or far away is always a plus. You can put it on a vehicle wrap or sign and see it from a distance, or you can put it on business cards, pens or t-shirts and it will still be readable.

3. Colors Are Important:

While you can make a logo without understanding color theory, have as much meaning without taking the time to learn what colors look best together and how they relate to each other, your logo color, and brand. The science of colors and how they are applied can convey so much more than just a simple choice from the color palette. A logo designer has to consider what a color might mean to the company it represents, what it will look like on a variety of different mediums, the psychology of the colors used, and the science behind colors. The choice of colors isn’t one to rush, although if your client or brand is already using certain colors, that may be something you have to work with.

4. No Color Can Be Just As Important:

As powerful as colors are for a brand, making a logo that can convert to a black and white logo without losing its details is important.

5. Keep In Mind The Negative Space:

When designing a logo, the negative space can be used as something to create or draw the eye. A classic example is the FedEx logo, with the arrow in the negative space. You may not see it at first, but as a secondary element of the logo it is simple but creative. Brands that use negative space well can convey more than just what is obvious with their logo design.

6. Choose Your Fonts Thoughtfully:

When creating a logo design the readability and style can be made or broken with the font choice. Whether you go for formal and professional, or artsy and hand-drawn the font choice for a logo can really set the tone for the brand. You wouldn’t see a Microsoft with a bubbly hand-drawn gimmicky fonts, and it is unlikely you would see a kid’s cereal with a boring san-serif and no additional styling font. A logo’s typography is as important as its iconography and color theory. Logos convey so much and should capture the brand, the typography, although simple must be thought out.

7. Vector, vector, vector:

With a logo creating it in vector is so important. A logo may need to be scaled up; for a vehicle wrap, signage, billboards, etc. and in those cases a web file just won’t do. A vector file is created with math, whereas a bitmap (raster) file is created with pixels. So when sizing a bitmap file up they will lose quality. A vector logo on the other hand will look the same at any size, which is beautiful when printing in a large format. Designers should work in vector for things that need to be scaled up and utilized in many ways.