Many times when business owners start the process to design their logo, they make the mistake of thinking it should be fast and cheap to construct. This leads them to making basic logo design mistakes, hiring a cheap, but an amateur logo designer, or creating a logo that is inappropriate without realizing it.
It takes time and money to design an effective and timeless logo for your business. You want your logo to last for years with only small changes being made to the design to update it occasionally. When you create your logo, there are five basic stages you need to go through to create a simple, classy, and timeless logo.
1. Brainstorming
The first step to any project is to brainstorm. This stage is the most fun. You get to create the craziest, wildest, most boring, and weirdest designs you can think of. After brainstorming, look for strong themes in each design you create. Start pulling those themes together into a clean and simple logo.
If your logo design becomes too complex, it will become outdated quickly, which means you have to start the strenuous and expensive logo design process all over again. When you keep your logo simple and stately, not only will it last for years, but it will also bring focus and impact that are easily recognizable with your brand.
2. Lettering
There are hundreds upon hundreds of amazing lettering options available when you are choosing the font for your logo. It is easy to get overwhelmed and also scarily easy to pick a loud and trendy font that will make you cringe in a few years’ time. Carefully consider all your font options and rule out any that are not classic and well-crafted. Decorative fonts will only backfire in a few years. Remember the power of bold, italicizing, shadowing, and more. These font effects can do wonders transforming a plain typography into something memorable.
3. Designing
Now that you have the elements of your logo and the typography you want to use nailed down, it is time to put it all together in the design stage. In this stage, you will need to determine how the icon and text will sit together to create the overall shape of the logo. There are so many options here that will boggle your mind. The text can sit around an icon, cut through it, be separated from it, hide behind it, swerve in at an intense angle, and so on. What you choose is important because it dictates how well your logo will be remembered and received by your audience.
4. Coloring
The reason you choose your coloring after designing the structure of your logo is to figure out what colors complement the logo package. It is fun to pick colors before, but once you are designing you might find they don’t go together or you have too many colors you are trying to cram into a logo. Once you have the logo designed, you can apply colors to various elements to find an aesthetic that blends perfectly with your brand.
To start, find a small palette of one main color with a minor secondary color. Explore all the different shades of your main color until you find one you like. If you settle on a bright color, try to mute it slightly so the logo is more evergreen. Even if you like hot pink, the boldness of the color can turn people off. Tint it with other color shades and you can create a muted version of your favorite color that looks professional and resonates for you personally.
You also want to choose a neutral color, such as cream, beige, gray, white, or black, to supplement places with your logo where your main colors don’t flow well. My tip – make sure you don’t choose 100% white or black. The two extremes of the color spectrum can put people off, so you want to lessen the severity of the shade by at least 2%.
5. Accessibility
Now that you have all the elements of your logo designed, it is time to evaluate how your audience will respond and view your logo. Look at every element of your logo that you have created up until this point and make sure they all complement each other. The wording, lettering, design, and colors should blend seamlessly in a memorable fashion.
However, your logo should not simply be eye-catching. You want to make sure every aspect of your logo is clearly readable and versatile. You want to be able to use your logo everywhere, including signs, business cards, trucks, stickers, key chains, and trucks. The logo should be able to shrink and grow without altering the visual design. Your business name should be simple to read no matter what material the logo is placed on.
When all of your elements from the five stages are in sync, your business logo can be effective, powerful, and timeless. However, it is easy to get one of these stages wrong. Make sure you don’t get too attached to the creative process of your logo. Not allowing room for change or growth in your design can be detrimental to the longevity and accessibility of your design. Work with an experienced logo designer to perfect your logo and use these five stages as a guide for your own creativity and decision making process when settling on the future of your brand.
For more information on what makes a great logo, checkout this logo design article on the Four Fundamentals of a Great Logo Design.