In Tips Oct 2, 200923
Crucial Rules to Follow When Designing a Logo
Taking on the responsibility of designing a logo, is an important aspect of an entities ability to stand out. This skill shouldn’t be taken lightly, especially if the logo will define a company’s representation. Conceiving a logo design calls for great amounts of practice and hard earned experience. Once you find out how to bring your concept to life, everything will fall into place.
Along with much needed practice, there are a few crucial rules to take into account when aiming towards a design that will effectively portray your clients identity while structuring their brand(s). Below you’ll find yourself glaring at a few crucial rules to follow when designing an effective logo that will set your client’s business apart from the rest.
Artistic Side of Things
Sketches are increasingly vital to the designing of an effective logo, though many decide to skip this step and work directly with software such as Photoshop. No design process is precise, however beginning with a simple sketch will leave you ample amount of room to work with the creativity that’ll begin to indulge itself in a variety of forms.
By starting with a few sketches or ideas, you will begin to leave yourself open to several options that could bail you out from a monstrosity of a logo design. Designers that produce results spend a great deal of time bringing their original ideas to paper through sketches.
Does Size Really Matter?
As individuals we’re usually drawn to large quantities and anything that’s extravagant. However, when designing a logo this is not the case. An effective logo has to look good and be completely visible at all sizes. This is why it’s recommended to use vector files. If the logo you design cannot stand-out from the rest, calls for no attention, and is not legible in a variety of sizes then you’ve failed.
Thoroughly test your logo in different sizes, letterheads, and browsers. The smaller the logo, the harder it is to create a precise design. If you keep that in mind, then you’ll become a guru in no time.
Giving Your Design a Sense of Style
Design styles are dime a dozen when it comes to creating a logo. Choosing the correct one entitles you to conduct a corresponding amount of research on your client. As a designer you have to know who your clients are, what they represent, and at least an idea behind what group of people the company thrives to grab attention from. Your first few thoughts should include the motivation to get started on some research.
Making Your Logo Standout
When creating a logo you’re not only taking part in the graphic design process, you’re also building recognition. Making your logo standout involves the instant recognition of the brand it represents. As design trends evolve on a constant basis, it’s become more difficult to create recognizable logo’s such as Coca-Cola, Pepsi, McDonalds, and Nike anymore.
In recent times, we’ve begun to see the emphasis placed toward logo design for tech companies and Web 2.0 applications or websites. These sort of designs have noticeably difficult hurdles to tackle. If you wish to stand out within a large pool of graphic designers, you have to adapt to a distinct style that is unique in every way. Begin this process by breaking the rules of design, mixing traditional designs with current standards, combining various colors and more!
Typography & Color Combination’s
Picking the correct font and size is a difficult feat to overcome. Most logo designs include some form of text, as part of the tagline, or the main design. Try to take advantage of the large collections of free fonts found online ready to be downloaded. The combination of colors also plays a big roll in the effectiveness of typography in your design.
Designers must know that every color evokes a feeling or mood in design, just like red can represent a feeling of anger, passion, or strength. As you conduct your search for different color combination’s, remember to try and match up the “feeling” of the color with the overall design and concept of the logo. Here is one of our articles that go into great detail the importance of colors in design.
Finalizing Your Logo Designs
Taking shortcuts in your design, such as by using free vector graphics, is not a good practice to get used to, because it will affect the quality of your designs in the long run. You can however use these types of websites to help get ideas during the brainstorming part of the design process.
It’s extremely important that you’re able to send your client not only the best logos but logos that are in the best possible format. Sending them in the best file format eliminates the possibility of having to sacrifice pixels and details if the client decides to enlarge an area on the logos to view a certain element.
Your logos should first be sent in either PDF format or the exact format you saved the image after you were done working on it. If your design was created in Photoshop or Illustrator, try to set your minimum resolution to 200px, anything smaller then that can hinder the details of your graphics.
23 Comments
Oct 2, 2009
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Oct 2, 2009
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Oct 2, 2009
Good stuff! Timely for me, as I’ve been refining my logo design process lately.
(Pssst! Apostrophes aren’t generally used for pluralization. “Typography & Color Combination’s”)
Oct 2, 2009
Great article!
For me logo design can either be quick or time consuming. You’ll know when you have a good design. Branding is the most important aspect of any company, so I like to exhaust every idea I can before I show a client.
Whether it’s a name or an icon, the simpler it is the more memorable it will be. If you can brand yourself with an icon, like twitter’s blue bird for example, there’s a good chance people will remember it. We tend to forget company names but not their colors or icons for some reason. Today most Large corporations like you mentioned above have switched to their icons and have dropped the names. So even the big boys agree, the simpler the better.
Oct 2, 2009
[...] more here: Crucial Rules to Follow When Designing a Logo | Design Reviver :design-process, designing, effective-logo, few-sketches, several-options, simple-sketch, [...]
Oct 2, 2009
[...] New addition 10/2/09 – Crucial Rules to Follow When Designing a Logo [...]
Oct 2, 2009
Do you ever search through the USPTO for similar trademarked designs before submitting your designs to a client?
Oct 2, 2009
Nice tips on designing a logo. I will apply this on my Free Design Logo project.
Oct 2, 2009
Nice article. I find manipulating the size is very useful in the conception phase. For me the hardest part in logo design is choosing a path to go down! There are so many ways to go with any given logo…
-Don
Oct 2, 2009
[...] Crucial Rules to Follow When Designing a Logo | Design Reviver Taking on the responsibility of designing a logo, is an important aspect of an entities ability to stand out. This skill shouldn’t be taken lightly, especially if the logo will define a company’s representation. Conceiving a logo design calls for great amounts of practice and hard earned experience. Once you find out how to bring your concept to life, everything will fall into place. [...]
Oct 4, 2009
Decent advice for rookie graphic designers, but I’d recommend getting a copywriter to proofread your article before posting. There are so many writing errors in this article that, for me, it lost all credibility.
Oct 4, 2009
Thanks for the pointers. All good things to take in to consideration. I think designing a logo is one of the trickiest things as a graphic designer. Particularly finding an image that represents the whole of a company and gives a message about what the company is about and its hopes and aims.
Oct 5, 2009
I always like papers of of logo sketches. Its’ cool the see the different ideas and the design process.
Oct 5, 2009
Awesome logo design guide they should make students read this in school! Thanks
Oct 6, 2009
[...] Crucial Rules to Follow When Designing a Logo [...]
Oct 6, 2009
Great article. I can’t ever stress enough…designing a logo from scratch takes research! And forget about the fluff, a clean and simple logo not only looks better but is much more effective.
Oct 6, 2009
“As design trends evolve on a constant basis, it’s become more difficult to create recognizable logo’s such as Coca-Cola, Pepsi, McDonalds, and Nike anymore.”
I think Pepsi is the only one in there that has changed a ton but you still know its Pepsi… (even though the new mark is garbage)
Nike – still the swoosh as it has been very recognizable.
McDonalds – Golden Arch, even though it has changed a bit its still McDonalds through and through.
Coca Cola – As discussed here (along with pepsi) http://bit.ly/3c8P0 has changed but in my time ‘87-’09 hasn’t changed enough to loose its brand recognition.
Aside from that comment I think the post was worthwhile and had good content. I know what you were going for in that comment but, not quite hitting home.
Oct 7, 2009
Nice Post, great tips for designing a logo.
Thanks for sharing.
Oct 8, 2009
[...] Crucial Rules to Follow When Designing a Logo | Design Reviver (tags: logo Design tips) [...]
Oct 25, 2009
[...] Worst Client: You. – Gestión eficaz del tiempo – 10 Useful Usability Findings and Guidelines – Crucial Rules to Follow When Designing a Logo – How to stay motivated as Web Designer – Love Freelancing – What Every Graphic Designer Should Do [...]
Oct 26, 2009
Congratulations for the great blog dude… Btw, have you tried this for logo creation?
Nov 12, 2009
Great points.
This is very useful.
Thanks for sharing.
Dec 5, 2009
[...] Crucial Rules to Follow When Designing a Logo | Design Reviver [...]
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