No matter how large your business is or what industry you operate in, a great logo is an essential ingredient to success. Today, logos serve a number of important roles, from acting as a common design element that you can use across your website and product packaging to a recognizable marketing tool that can be used to promote brand awareness.
Of course, designing an effective logo that will be able to serve your business for years to come is often easier said than done. To help you out, we’ll take a comprehensive look at the logo design process, detailing step by step the things required to design an exceptional new logo for your brand.
Getting Started: How to Find Inspiration for Your Logo Design
All great logo designs start with a basic idea and vision. In fact, many companies will brainstorm a number of logo ideas before whittling their choices down to a single design. Coming up with ideas for your logo, though, is often the most challenging part of the logo design process.
A great place to start if you are looking for inspiration for your logo design is by researching the logos that your competitors use. Researching the logos used by other companies in your industry will help you highlight effective design elements that you might want to use in your own logo as well as help you better understand what customers are likely to expect from a logo within your industry.
Once you have a thorough feel for the type of logos that are common among your competitors, you can then start brainstorming ideas for your own logo that stand out from the competition while still exhibiting similarities that customers will be able to recognize and associate with your industry.
The Important of Choosing the Right Color Scheme
After you’ve decided on the basic design for your logo and the images that you would like for it to include, the next step is the choose your logo’s color scheme – and the color scheme that you select is a critical decision for two key reasons.
To start, there’s the obvious reason that some color schemes are attractive and eye-catching while other color schemes clash, creating a design that is unappealing and difficult to look at. Thankfully, you don’t necessarily need an art degree to understand which colors will blend well together and which ones won’t.
There’s a second, less-obvious yet arguably even more important reason why it’s so essential to choose the right color scheme for your logo, though, and this reason centers around the various meanings that different colors can convey.
Whether we actively realize it or not, human beings associate color with meaning. Red, for example, is a bold and attention-grabbing color that can convey messages of passion, anger, or danger. Blue, on the other hand, is a more calming color that is often associated with tranquility or intelligence.
When selecting a color scheme for your logo, it is your job to choose colors that are both easy on the eye as well as colors that convey the right message about your brand. If you own a natural health company, for example, green and white is one great color scheme to consider. The two colors work well together in an artistic sense while also broadcasting beneficial messages about your brand (purity and cleanliness in the case of white, all-natural and healthy in the case of green).
Whatever industry your company might operate in, research color theory before deciding on a color scheme in order to choose colors that look attractive and accomplish an important purpose.
Creating the Text for Your Logo
After choosing the right color scheme for your logo, the next step in the logo design process is to decide on the text that your logo will include, if it will include any text at all.
When choosing the text for your logo, you have three basic choices: The name of your company, the name of your company as well as a tagline, or no text at all. In the case of new startups, you are likely better off going with one of the first two options. Textless logos are fine for immediately recognizable and well-known brands such as Apple, but new companies are typically better served taking advantage of every possible opportunity to raise brand awareness and inform customers about who they are and the products/services that they offer.
Once you’ve decided what the text that you will include with your logo will say, you will then want to choose the right font to employ. Like colors, fonts can convey important messages about your brand. A frilly, cursive font, for example, is likely to be a much better font choice for a women’s clothing brand than it is a sporting goods brand, which is likely better served by a bolder and more straightforward font choice.
Choose text that represents and markets your brand in the best possible way along with a font that strikes the right tone and you will have finalized an important design element of your logo.
Getting the Technical Details Right
If you plan on designing a logo yourself rather than hiring a designer to do it for you, you’ll want to make sure you get the technical elements of your logo right in addition to its design elements.
To start, a logo design needs to be scalable so that it looks great at all sizes. After all, the same logo that you use as a tiny thumbnail on your website may someday be used as a massive image on a billboard. Likewise, a good logo needs to look great both in print and digital format.
Detailing how to go about ensuring that your logo is scalable and looks the same in a range of sizes and mediums is largely beyond the scope of this article. Just know that if you do intend to design a logo yourself without relying on an effective DIY logo creator that will take care of these technical details for you, you’ll want to spend some time learning some graphic design basics first.
Creating Your Logo: Two Great Options to Explore
If creating a logo design without any help sounds like something outside the realm of your abilities, don’t worry; there are two great options for designing a logo that make it easier than ever before to create an exceptional logo for your brand regardless of your artistic or graphic design skills.
The first of these options is to create a logo design contest on LogoMyWay. When you create a logo design contest on LogoMyWay, your contest will be made available to hundreds of talented designers all over the world. These designers will then submit entries into your contest that are sent straight to your inbox. You are then able to review the submitted designs, request revisions to any design that you see promise in, and ultimately choose the design that you like best.
Starting a logo design contest on LogoMyWay means that you will have dozens if not hundreds of designs to choose from, increasing the likelihood that you will find the perfect design. Receiving a wide range of designs to choose from also allows you to explore different ideas that you might have not otherwise considered.
While this approach to creating a logo design offers plenty of noteworthy advantages, it isn’t the perfect choice for everyone. For those who prefer a more DIY approach, making use of LogoMyWay’s online logo maker is an ideal choice.
LogoMyWay’s online logo maker empowers business owners to design their own professional-looking logos regardless of their graphic design experience. You start by choosing a template for your logo from the exhaustive library of hand-designed templates that we offer. Next, you will choose a color scheme for your logo, then the text that it will include, and finally the text’s font in order to create a one-of-kind logo design. This DIY logo maker is incredibly easy to use and enables you to design a great logo for your company in only a matter of minutes.
Let LogoMyWay Help You Create the Perfect Logo for Your Brand
Whether you are creating a logo design contest that will allow you to receive submissions from hundreds of talented designers located all over the world or you are taking advantage of our innovative online logo maker, we at LogoMyWay are excited to help you create the perfect logo for your brand.
At LogoMyWay, exceptional logos are our passion, and making it easier and more affordable than ever before for business owners to acquire a great logo is our company’s mission. If you would like to learn more about starting a logo design contest on LogoMyWay, would like to learn more about our renowned online logo maker, or have any other questions about how the logo design experts at LogoMyWay are able to help you create the perfect logo for your brand, feel free to contact us today!
