A logo is one of the most important aspects of branding, as this is the visual aspect that individuals will attach to your company. Everyone is familiar with the golden arches of McDonald’s and Apple’s fruity logo regardless of where they are in the world. Any successful company has an instantly recognizable logo, and it plays a huge role in sales and customer engagement. Despite this, creating a unique logo that represents your business is no easy feat, and there are many steps that need to be taken to reach the desired appearance. You’ll have to sift through thousands of prototypes before you make your way to the printing services, but it’s all worth it once the logo of your dreams is sat in front of you.
Create a Design Brief
First thing’s first, you need to create a detailed design brief for yourself, as this will enable you to create a foundation to build your logo upon. The brief should include the company name, what the company does, color schemes, shape ideas, and fonts. Without this, you will have far too much spec to work from and it’ll become impossible to narrow down any design ideas. Although you’ll still have a lot of variation in designs once your brief narrows down the possibilities, you won’t feel completely overwhelmed by what can be done.
Research the Industry
Next, you’ll need to familiarize yourself with the existing competition to see what’s working for them. Although you won’t want to directly copy the competition, it’s a good idea to take inspiration from them. This is because your customer base will associate your services to theirs, making it clear what you’re offering. For instance, both McDonald’s and Burger King use yellow and red, and each of these colors are associated with fast food as a result. The key is using existing premises and making them unique to your brand.
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Reference Current Design Trends
As you observe you competitors, you also want to pay attention to current design trends. As with fashion, graphic design also goes through various trends, and it’s important to keep up with these to maintain the interest of your customers. A lot of logo design is based around color psychology, meaning it’s important that this is considered alongside the current trends. You want to ensure that your customers are able to make positive emotional associations with your company in order to invite customer interaction.
Sketch Your Idea
This is one of the most important aspects of designing a logo, as this is the time in which you’ll be able to physically visualize your logo. Bear in mind, you won’t create your desired logo upon the first sketch so don’t settle for the first one. Experiment as much as you can because you could well draw a thousand logos before you find one you like, and the one you like may not even be the last one you’ve drawn. Once you’ve decided on the shape, you can then trial a bunch of color combinations until you create a logo that represents your business.
Let the Idea Mature
Just like you won’t create your desired logo from the first sketch, it’s also likely that you won’t design the right logo in the first sketching session. Therefore, you should let your logo mature for a while, come back to it, and see what you think of it. You might decide that it’s perfect the way it is or that you can tweak a couple of things to bring it to perfection. Alternatively, you might completely scrap the idea and come up with something completely new. All of this is in the name of your perfect logo.
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