Learn how to design a logo that stands the test of time and helps your client connect with their target audience.
A logo is the face of any company or organization. Well-considered, skillfully executed logos make a good first impression. They build trust with potential customers and create lasting recognizability. Depending on your level of design skill, quality of tools, trend awareness, and overall sense of aesthetics, designing your own logo can be like cutting your own bangs—results may vary.
When the stakes are just too high to DIY, it’s best to seek a professional with more training and experience. But, every designer has to start somewhere!
If you are just beginning your design career and aiming to improve your design process, follow this guide for design tips to create a logo that will help your client connect with their target audience.
Why Is Your Logo Important?
It’s impossible to conduct business without a logo to identify your product, service, or organization. A logo is just one part of a larger visual identity system that’s typically composed of a color palette, typographic style, and standards for other visual elements like photography, illustration, or icons.
All of these components work together to create visual branding that helps attract and retain your ideal customer. It’s important to consider all of these variables when designing the logo before you start designing marketing materials like business cards, websites, social media assets, etc.
Think of your logo and its supporting design system as a roadmap for every touch point of your brand.
License the above image via Jorm Sangsorn.
Fundamental Principles of Logo Design
The main difference between a graphic designer and a lay person is the logo creation process. A professional graphic designer, whether traditionally trained or self-taught, will begin with research. Learn everything you can about your client, their industry, and their audience. Research their competition. Collect examples of designs that inspire you. Observe trends in the industry.
Use this knowledge to fuel your brainstorming before jumping into any design software. Work through the problem on paper first, creating word lists, mind-maps, and other methods to help you come up with visual hooks that could lead to preliminary ideas for your logo.
Don’t settle on the first idea that comes into your head! Empty your brain on paper, trying to combine different ideas in unexpected ways.
1. Remember: Simple Is Good
When designing a logo, remember that you are providing a service to help the client communicate to a specific audience. Leave your personal design aesthetics at home.
A simple logo design is the goal, but don’t expect the process to be easy. It takes many rounds of iteration to boil a design down to its essence. Resist the urge to over-engineer, over-decorate, or over-complicate the logo. The best logos are flexible and work just as well at very small scales as they do in large sizes.
For example, the ubiquitous Nike swoosh is just as recognizable on the side of a shoe as it is on the side of a building. If your design has too many tiny details, try to simplify it, keeping in mind that every logo will likely have to exist in the small confines of a social media profile picture.
Choosing Colors
Even if you strike gold with an elegant, minimalist concept sketch, it’s easy to miss your mark (pun intended) with the wrong color combinations. In your research, you may have encountered popular color schemes within your industry, which can be a great starting point whether you want to blend in or pivot.
Be curious about color. Don’t be afraid to break out your color wheel, experiment, and take risks with color, especially if you have a conceptual reason for a more elaborate scheme.
But, remember—simple is often best. You don’t have to apply all of the planned brand colors to the logo itself. Often, the main brand color(s) are applied to the logo and supported by secondary colors in the identity system, which are applied to other supporting elements or used as background colors.
Choosing the Perfect Font
Think about typography early and often. Sometimes, the most appropriate logo for your client is purely typographic, and every typeface has its own unique personality and history.
There are many professionally designed free fonts available, just make sure that you can use them commercially for your client. Google Fonts is just one example of an open source font library that you can use without any restrictions. Adobe Fonts also has a plethora of typefaces for Creative Cloud subscribers that can be used in logo designs.
If you’re new to typography, try to stick to one preferred font family that has many weights (thin, light, medium, bold, etc.) to give you variety without appearing too chaotic or unprofessional.
Speaking of unprofessional, overly decorative fonts are a slippery slope; they may be difficult to read and not convey the personality you desire. For example, a script (cursive) font can be beautiful and elegant—or it can just look, you know, messy.
2. Stay True to Your Brand
Every design decision you make should be informed by the research you conducted at the beginning of the project. Any strong brand identity system that we are familiar with as consumers—Starbucks, Target, McDonalds, and the like—is bolstered by an equally strong connection to their audience. Just as you should leave your personal taste behind when designing a logo, the same goes for business owners, who are crucial partners in this process.
However, your client is usually not the target audience, and should help act as a spokesperson to their customer base so that by working together, you can translate their goals into impactful visuals. It’s vital to ask opinions and collaborate with your team to strengthen the work.
It’s an acquired skill to interpret those opinions as your own informed design decisions without allowing the client design from the back seat.
3. Strive for Long-Term Relevance
As you are researching types of logos and sketching through ideas on paper, always keep your broader audience in mind to avoid falling victim to short-lived design trends.
Remember a few years ago when it felt like every logo was in some kind of hipster style? Can you name a single company that made that work in the long run? Neither can we.
You want your logo to be both fashionable and stand the test of time. Resources like Logo Lounge publish annual trend reports that help professional designers stay in the know and ride the waves (or even embrace) design trends and fads.
4. Seek Uniqueness and Originality
As you are working through ideas on paper, or even before, it’s helpful to put together a mood board to nail down the aesthetic direction. Mood boards are extremely helpful tools to get buy-in from business owners before you spend too much time on a design.
It can save you many wasted hours if you end up going in a direction that your client disagrees with. And, if you are your own client, it keeps you focused on the overall look and feel to make more intentional design decisions.
However, after all of your research and creative effort, the last thing you want to do is end up looking like everyone else! Part of your design process must include identifying your key competition and differentiating from their brand identity.
Look at the type of logo they use—are they using an icon, word mark, some combination, or something else like a monogram or emblem? Take note of their primary and secondary colors, their typography, and other visual elements.
Perhaps these competitors end up on your mood board, or perhaps your mood board is a master plan to make your logo stand out from the crowd.
5. Balance Technology and Old-School Techniques
Depending on your drawing ability, you may be able to work through all the quirks on paper and simply scan in your drawing and pen tool over it in Adobe Illustrator. Of course, that is much easier said than done.
If you did choose to create a more detailed design, or one with a high degree of symmetry, then this is the time to start working in your design software.
Again, sketching your ideas out on paper is an essential part of design and will help strengthen your understanding of basic design principles. Starting on your computer or tablet too early in the process can become a crutch and limit your creativity.
6. Ensure Versatility and Usefulness in All Forms
As you are refining your design digitally, frequently test it at different scales and in color schemes. Watch out for anything that becomes illegible or muddled at a small size. Have a plan for potentially trickier logo applications such as social media images and business cards.
Do you need to have a separate icon or orientation of the logo? An inverted version for dark backgrounds? Can you anticipate any instances where your logo will be produced using more limited processes that require just one or two colors, like screen-printed or embroidered swag? If your logo uses many colors or gradients, then that could be an issue.
Try to account for all the potential use cases, and create secondary versions of the logo to address them. When you hand over the logo files to your client, make sure to create a brand-standards document in the form of a PDF file that specifies the dos/don’ts of their new identity system.
Common client logo crimes include stretching the logo to make it fit in odd places, recoloring the logo, and changing the brand typeface. This creates inconsistency in the identity system and gives the impression of a less professional operation.
Assure your client that you have it all figured out for them, and you’re there for any future needs when you hand over their suite of vector files.
Designing a Logo on Any Platform
Adobe Illustrator is the industry standard for professional graphic designers. It’s a vector graphics editor that allows you to most effectively execute your original designs.
The latest version of Illustrator even includes artificial intelligence tools for those curious to experiment with generative text prompts to create vector graphics or recolor existing artwork.
Avoid misusing other Adobe products like Photoshop, which are better suited for editing raster imagery and not vector logos.
If you aren’t in a position to invest in a Creative Cloud subscription, there are free design tools out there that can get you started. Adobe Maker is a free browser-based logo creator that offers customizable logo templates and stock illustrations.
Canva is another online tool used by amateur designers, which is quite popular for its user-friendly interface. Just keep in mind the potential drawbacks of using a template if your goal is to stand out from the crowd.
Considering a Stock Icon/Illustration?
Sometimes, you need to put together graphics quickly, which makes the templated logo solutions mentioned above much more appealing. Those services make use of a library of free icons that do not require special licensing to use commercially. Understanding the legal limitations of using stock imagery will keep you and your client in the clear.
Shutterstock has a plethora of vector images available for download, but keep in mind that high quality stock images require an exclusive buyout of the image to avoid copyright issues.
Though stock images can be a time saver in a designer’s daily work, the creation of a logo from scratch can often be the least complicated solution if you intend to use the logo commercially.
If you are interested in a new design that you can trademark and own completely, work with a professional graphic designer in your area, or reach out to Shutterstock Studios.
Tips for Taking Your Logo Design to the Next Level
If you haven’t picked up on it by now, minimalist design styles tend to stand the test of time and are a safe bet for logo designs. Though beautiful templates, both paid and free, are out there, be mindful that anyone can use them and dilute the recognizability (or reputation) of your brand.
It’s much more difficult to create a logo from scratch, digging into the research and iterating on paper before relying on software. When you get discouraged, remember that this is how the greatest graphic designers of our time approached their work. Your design ability is like a muscle—the more you use it, the stronger you’ll get. Put in your reps!
As the prolific graphic designer Milton Glaser once said, “The real issue is not talent as an independent element, but talent in relationship to will, desire, and persistence. Talent without these things vanishes and even modest talent with those characteristics grows.”
Inspiration: Well-Known Brand Logos
The best logos aren’t designed in a vacuum. It’s vital to have awareness of the design culture you live and work in. Having a roster of contemporary professional designers that you admire and follow can help train your eye and inform your future design decisions.
It’s also important to appreciate graphic design history for inspiration through the ages. Try to understand the story of why the logo came to be, rather than just focusing on appearances.
Here are just a few examples of well-known logos and their origin stories:
- Speaking of Milton Glaser, his I Love New York logo became a cultural landmark, despite him anticipating it to be a short-lived campaign.
- The iconic Starbucks siren has been on a 50+ year journey to become the modern mark we all know and love.
- FedEx’s wildly successful 1994 logo contains a hidden arrow in the negative space between the E and the x, delighting observant viewers and cementing its place in the annals of logo design fame.
Now it’s time for you to apply your new-found knowledge and inspiration to your next project. You never know when you could be working on the next big thing in logo design! Keeping these guiding principles in mind will keep you on the right track.
Most importantly, remember to put your client and their audience first and foremost.
Take Your Logo to the Next Level with Shutterstock
Need eye-catching imagery to form the foundation of your logo? We’ve got you covered. With Shutterstock, you’ll have all-in-one access to our massive library, plus the flexibility you need to select the perfect mix of assets every time.
License this cover image via Jorm Sangsorn, Jorm Sangsorn, and Anastasiia Gevko.
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