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Logo Design Tips
Need to create a logo on a deadline? Struggling to get started on a new brand identity project? Here we look at the three key logo design tips and tricks for creating logos in a short turnaround time. These tips are beloved by agency pros and experienced freelancers, and make a great checklist for tackling any logo design project with confidence.
Define Your Workflow
While not the most glamorous of design tips, it’s essential to have a plan in place when you have a deadline looming.
Designing a logo is for many designers the holy grail of creative projects. It can be tempting to dive in straightaway and start brainstorming and sketching ideas, but take just 10 minutes to draft out your design process and you’ll reap the benefits all day long.
Experienced designers will have a set-in-stone routine for putting together brand designs, and this is an often overlooked technique that can make the difference between simply producing a few good ideas and producing an actual, polished logo that the client loves.
This is a basic workflow that provides a solid structure for approaching the logo design process:
Step 1: Study the Brief
As soon as you’ve put the phone down or replied ‘YES’ to that client request email, you need to reflect on the brief. If the client provided you with a detailed brief, make sure you digest every inch of the document to get a strong sense of the client’s brand and creative request. Even if you feel confident about creating logos, your expertise means less if you don’t deliver on the client’s brief.
If you have the time, follow up your brief-reading with some online research about the client’s market and competition. Can you spot any similarities between brand designs in their sector? Make some mental notes about commonly used colors, symbols, and type styles.
Step 2: Get Inspired
Once you know everything there is about the brief and the brand it’s time to step away and find inspiration. Whether that’s through online browsing or by going for a walk outside, you should try to access the mental space where creative ideas flow freely. Once you have an idea, make a note of it, and then take your brain elsewhere. At this stage you want to generate lots of ideas and possibilities to explore, so making a long list of random ideas, or a mind map, is great practice.
Step 3: Sketch
Pull out a large sketchpad and pencil, and start sketching out lots of ideas, using your inspiration notes as a prompt. Don’t worry about refining your drawings, and don’t erase anything! Focus on drawing out as many ideas – and iterations of those ideas – as you can.
Step 4: Revise
Isolate three or four sketches that you feel have the most potential. You may want to refine these sketches further, drawing them out onto a clean sheet. If you’re tight for time, you may want to involve the client, as they can give you direction on which design(s) they prefer. This can save you time by avoiding the need to digitize a whole set of logos. With the client’s opinion in mind, narrow down to the strongest logo idea, and refine further. Sketch it out again, aiming to simplify any complex elements, and thinking about other details like color and texture, which may add to the overall look of the design.
Step 5: Vectorize
Now you’re ready to commit your logo design to the computer. Using a scanner or simply by uploading a high-quality photo from your cameraphone, upload up an image of your logo sketch to your computer. Open it up in a vector program like Adobe Illustrator, CorelDRAW or Inkscape, and using either the drawing tools or trace functions (if you’re especially short on time), vectorize your logo. You may want to create two or three versions in different colorways, to show the client some options.
Step 6: Finalize
Finally, send off the vectorized logo(s) to your client. Hopefully, if they gave the thumbs-up to your sketched version they should be very happy with the digitized result, and you may only have a few tweaks to do before submitting the final artwork to them. Make sure to provide all the files that the client would need to be able to put the logo into use, so include the native vector file, a swatch palette (Adobe Swatch Exchange [ASE] format is usually the most helpful) and any font files associated with the design if used.
This generalized workflow gives you an idea of how to organize your tasks when you have a logo project to do.
