So you've decided to make your own logo
Author’s note: This article stems from a conversation I had with a recent LinkedIn connection who is attempting to create their own logo. I hope this guide helps!
First of all, I want to congratulate you on your willingness to step out of your comfort zone. It’s hard to take on a project you don’t have experience with. Kudos on your bravery, no sarcasm.
Second, I’ll tell you that you probably shouldn’t do this.
I know, of course the designer is going to say “go pay someone”, but there are many good reasons that you should pay someone to design your logo and branding. The technical knowledge that designers rely on alone represents hundreds upon hundreds of hours of time invested, not to mention the countless steps that it takes to develop an eye for design, conceptualisation skills, and the ability to translate your thoughts into a visual medium in a cohesive way.
But if you must do this, if you really can not afford to pay even a graduate designer, please follow these steps so you can get the best possible result.
Step 1 - Find inspiration
Professional designers, even those with years of experience, will first look for inspiration. It’s always a good idea to see what other people are doing, what we do and don’t like about existing logos and what might work for the logo we’re designing.
This is doubly important for someone in your position.
You don’t have years of experience to look back on. You don’t walk down the street and notice particularly nice font pairings or colour palettes and log them in your dumb ‘design memory bank’ that’s slowly encroaching on more important areas of your memory.
You don’t do these things because you haven’t trained yourself to think that way. That’s OK, you’re not a designer. There are probably a hundred things you think about daily that I don’t and never will think about.
Your way around this is to find TONNES of inspiration. Don’t stop at 5 and call it a day. Start a Figma or Pinterest board and start throwing examples in. Pick a stupid number, say 100, and get that many. Then find 10 more. Look for fonts, colours, styles and symbols you really like and save them all. Write down what you like about each one. Write down what you don’t like about each one. Try to be specific, e.g.
"I love how the purple and gold contrast but complement each other, but I hate that script font as it feels very 2010”
Since you probably don’t have time to go out and study graphic design after this first step, this library of images will have to serve as your design knowledge for now.
If you’re having trouble finding good examples, search “logo trends of current year”. You’ll find plenty of curated lists that, while often far from perfect, are a great source of good design examples in wildly varied styles.
Step 2 - Think about your brand
You’re swimming in design now. Up to your eyeballs in gradients and meaningless geometric shapes. Drowning in fonts.
Time to take a step back and breathe.
Try to think about your brand as if you are a potential customer. What do you want them to think and feel when they see your logo? Do you want them to think you’re fun or serious? Budget or pricey? Playful or professional? Retro or cutting edge? Somewhere in between?
Put as many adjectives together to describe your brand as you can.
Once you’ve exhausted your capacity for coming up with words to say you want your brand to look cool, you want to start whittling down your list to the most important ones. Try to get it down to 4 or 5 that are extremely important to you, the ones that you want your clients to think about the millisecond they see your logo.
The last thing to do before you start sketching is to look back at your inspiration and compare your list of important adjectives to each example. Do the logos you’ve saved communicate those concepts? Why or why not? Do some elements of the designs hit the mark and others fail? Why?
At the start of this process, you wanted to design a logo. Now you know exactly what kind of logo you want to design. You’ve got a clear goal.
Step 3 - Start ideating
This part is going to be a lot less fun than you thought it would be, especially if you don’t immediately have any ideas after the first two steps. You’re now going to start sketching some ideas to get as many good ones out of your head and onto the page as possible.
A good approach is to start with a logomark (if you intend to have one) and go from there. You’ve probably found many examples of icons, illustrations or symbols you liked while searching for inspiration. Start sketching your own versions of those things.
A quick thing to note here is that you don’t have to be M.C. Escher to design a logo. I am still terrible at drawing after 10 years in the industry. It doesn’t matter, this step is about coming up with an idea and translating it onto paper. You will not come up with a finished logo from this, so don’t go in with massive expectations of the perfect logo being sketched out.
Instead, think of this as an ideation process. You’re combining your design knowledge (step 1) and your clearly defined goal (step 2) into a physical form.
I honestly can’t give much more advice here as it varies so much for different industries, companies and people, but there are a few things you want to try to achieve here:
- Your logo should be easily recognisable, ideally at a glance
- Your logo should be comprised of as few elements as possible (this is a great way for amateur designers to avoid common mistakes)
- Your logo should communicate, even if it only does so vaguely, as many of the adjectives that you wrote down in step 2 (unless this encroaches on point 2)
- You should like your logo
At the end of this step, you want to have a few sketches that clearly define the directions you’re going. Not finished logos, not insanely detailed illustrations, just enough to know what you’re going to do before jumping into some design software.
If you have identified any complex elements that you do want to take further, it might be a good idea to do a more detailed sketch now before jumping into the software.
Step 4 - Are you still doing this? You might want to back out now
If I were a betting man, I would wager this step would be where most people drop out. This is where the rubber hits the road, and where your lack of design skills will really start to frustrate you. To get you through this step, I want to remind you of a very famous quote.
“Good artists copy, great artists steal”
Pablo Picasso (maybe)
If you’ve never understood this phrase, you probably don’t work in a creative field or are new to it. Or you can’t accept the truth.
The key here is that great artists don’t plagiarise. That is to say, they don’t steal one idea, they steal many, combine them together, then add their own flavour. We stand on the shoulders of giants, there is no such thing as a new idea, etc. The tricky part is to steal in a way that people don’t even recognise as stealing, because the stolen ideas plus your original input become something different entirely.
The reason I bring up all this talk of theft is because you’re going to rely on theft to get by here. You just don’t know enough about even the basics of design to do it any other way. Like a colour palette? Steal it and personalise it. Like the font someone used for their company name? Find a similar one.
Note: It’s important not to take things from direct competitors here, or even companies in adjacent industries. You probably won’t get in any trouble, but you don’t want to step on people’s toes here and you’ll struggle to differentiate yourself in the market.
With that extensive preamble out of the way, it’s time to snap a photo of your sketches and get it into a design program. Use whatever you’re most comfortable with, but the ideal program is anything that you can use to produce a vector logo (Figma is a great free online design program for this).
Your goal here is to make a cleaner, digital version of your sketches. That usually means 3 things: logomark, fonts and colours.
Logomark
This is the iconographic or illustrative part of a logo. Not all logos have them, but many do. Complexity will vary here, but digitising this can be done in a few ways. Unfortunately, you’re probably going to have to learn a few different tools.
I would recommend learning how to use the Pen tool (a common tool in various software), Adobe’s shape builder and the Pathfinder tool (also a common tool, though termed differently in different software). You can achieve most shapes with any of these three tools, or a combination of them.
Fonts
With your inspiration in hand, jump on to Google Fonts or Fontsquirrel and start finding similar fonts. Download a few options because you’re going to test all of them and find the best fit. It’s always good to test out your brand name in a bunch of different fonts, and sometimes you may be surprised by how well fonts you initially didn’t love can work.
There is another option here. You could make your logo from a custom font. I would only recommend this for very short brand names, and only for extremely stylised logos. Outside of those scenarios, a professionally developed font will always be preferable.
Avoid classic blunders like Comic Sans, Papyrus, Curlz, etc. Just say no.
Colours
Hopefully, your inspiration has given you a cool colour palette to use for your logo. If not, my advice with colour, as with everything else in your logo, is to keep it simple. Stick to one or two colours, or find something on Color Hunt and choose a couple of others from it.
Make sure your logomark and wordmark (the text of your logo) contrast enough from the background you’ve got them on. You can use this site to check the accessibility of your colours.
You’re not aiming for polished here. You want to end this step with 3 or 4 ideas that can be iterated upon.
Step 5 - Start iterating
Now we’re going to refine your ideas. You’ve got some digitised designs that you might be starting to grow attached to, but here’s your chance to start pulling them apart and reworking them.
Create 5 variations of each logo idea. Swap out fonts, change colours, adjust the spacing, change the arrangement of the elements, etc. Your goal here is to exhaust these ideas until you’ve nailed down which variation works best for you.
At this point, you’ll definitely have some favourites. Pick a max of 5 of your favourite logos from all these variations and start testing them with friends and family. Arrange them neatly on a clean page, present them to people and start asking for feedback.
As a short aside, it’s important to gear people up for the type of feedback you’re expecting or you’ll get a lot of “hmm, I like it” or “uhhhhh, I dunno”. Ask for specific feedback. “Does this logo make my business look quirky but professional? Is it clear what this symbol represents? If I stand a couple of meters away is this readable? Is there too much going on here?”. Ask for criticism, but don’t necessarily take each piece of criticism as gospel. Sit on that criticism and think about whether you agree with it or not, whether it’s just one person’s opinion or multiple people have raised it, and whether it conflicts with your goals before acting on it.
Now you’ll probably be at one of the following points:
- There is a clear favourite, with maybe some minor feedback to act on but mostly positive responses.
- There is no clear favourite, with lots of feedback and constructive criticism, and you’ll be feeling a bit lost.
Your next action depends on which of these describes you best. If you fit into A, you’ll want to keep iterating and getting feedback until you’re completely satisfied and ready to produce a final logo. This may be after one round of iteration, it may be after ten. It really depends on how well you executed your concept in the first place.
If you fit best into B, I’m afraid it might be time to go back to Step 2. If you’ve come through all of this and still have no clear ideas, you need to re-evaluate what you want your logo to represent, then move on to step 3 again and start the sketching process from scratch. This can be tough because you’re likely to fall back into sketching what you did the first time. You can try to avoid this by finding more inspiration.
So, all the B’s should go back to step 2 now, but A’s follow me as we head to the final step.
Step 6 - Create your finished logo
Congratulations! You’re almost there. The last step is to do the last pass of your logo and make sure everything is as good as it can be. You shouldn’t have any questions here about what your finished logo will look like. If you do, you’re still in the iteration process on Step 5.
This step is all about making sure everything lines up nicely, that you haven’t accidentally created awkward negative space between elements, that all the elements are scaled proportionally and that everything is working together.
You can also create variations of your logo in this step. As a rule of thumb, it’s always good to have at least normal and reversed versions of your logo (reversed in this case means negative). So if your logo is designed to be read on a white background, create a version that can be clearly read on a dark background. This can be as easy as changing black to white, or as difficult as re-colouring illustrated elements to increase clarity on a dark background.
Make sure all your fonts are outlined so that you won’t run into any font issues when sharing your logo.
Save multiple file versions of each logo. It’s always good to have JPEG, PNG, SVG and EPS versions of your logo. Ensure your PNG version has a transparent background (unless your logo sits in a coloured shape).
The end…?
So you did it. You successfully made your own logo. You still don’t have a brand though. You might not even be sure how you’re going to use the logo in different situations. You can continue working here and develop a brand but, let’s be honest, you’ve probably already spent way more time creating the logo than you wanted to.
Or, if this all seems a bit too exhausting for you, why not get in touch with us and we can have a chat about creating a logo for you?
