A logo is more than a simple image, which is why I have made this tutorial.
After reading all through, you will comprehend every aspect of logo design, and you can start designing your very own logo!
I'll try to keep everything as simple as possible
What is a logo?
A logo represents a company's identity. When people see that big mcdonalds "M" for example, they don't think "Wow that's one round big M!", they think "Hey, that's mcdonalds!"
What do you think when you see a profound transformers logo? The movie comes to your mind for sure!
On the internet, a logo plays an even more vital role, as it's often displayed in the header/banner, and thus viewable on every page.
Where do I start?
The first question you will need to ask yourself is "What does the company I make this for represent?" For example, a company that delivers mail might want to express speed, where other companies want to express reliability or style. There are a lot of different ways to go.
Let's first decide the general lines of our logo.
There are three options at hand:
- illustrative (clearly illustrating what the company does)
- graphic (usually a logo including an abstract graphic, slightly illustrating what the company does but not as obvious as an illustrative logo)
- font-based (a logo with text only)
As an example, I will pick a mail company like I just mentioned. Let's call the company "cheetah". Cheetah is a mail company that especially focuses on being fast.
I chose to do a graphic logo for this example.
Now, unless you have chosen to do a font based logo, you'll now have to brainstorm about what the company represents. Just write down the company name, what it does, and brainstorm on from there.
Like this:
Cheetah (company) -> Fast, precise/exact, reliable, etc.
Mail -> Personal, communication, social, etc.
Try to think of as many things as possible! You can always narrow down and scrap things afterwards, it's best to have more to choose from.
Form
What is the main form of the graphic going to be?
Well most of the time it's pretty obvious. Apple's logo is an apple, and book-publishers naturally want a book in their logo.
But it's not always this clear. Sometimes you have no leads to go on. In that case, go for something abstract. Try to create something unusual, something that catches the eye. Remember that we are only just making the form! Effects do not matter at this point, only think of the form like I did with my cheetah:
I made the cheetah jump upwards on purpose, as my company strives to become better, jump higher, for a brighter future.
As you can see this is just the basic form, and nothing more. This does not express the speed of my company at all.
Fonts
The text is of course very important. It has to be both readable and catchy. You have two options:
- incorporate your font with the graphic
- set the text apart from the graphic, eg: beneath it.
It is often the best choice to do all letters in either in lowercase or uppercase.
Why? Because if you'd drag a box around it:
If all letters were upper- or lowercase only the text will fit perfectly in the box, where if one or two letters were uppercase, there would be a lot of unused space above the lowercase letters.
Now on to picking your font. There really isn't much advice I can give you here, it's almost impossible to explain what a font needs to be "good".
What you need to keep an eye on is that you'll be original. Don't use an very overused/whored font!
Finish (1)
It's time to incorporate the font with the graphic, and enhance the form further. Like I mentioned before, try to make it catch the eye.
Color
Make sure you pick the right color! Most companies have their own corporation's style in everything. For example, in a walmart, every employee has a blue vest (not that I know about this, I've never been there )
The color has to fit the rest of the company. Or the rest of the website, incase you're making this logo for a website.
I chose brown as my company's color, even though that's not common at all XD
Finish (2)
This is the final finishing up! Double check everything and see if you're happy with the result.
Here is my colored and finished image.
As you can see I added lines to, even more, point out that this company wants to be fast.
It might not look much like a logo for a mail company, but that's because I chose for a graphic logo and not an illustrative one.
Once this logo is displayed on a mail-delivery van, it'll look slick.
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