How to Build a Great Logo: 5 Things to Consider

After you've named your band or business (or child, car, sock collection, etc.) it's time to come up with the logo. The beginnings of both naming and logo design are extremely frustrating and difficult, even for experienced designers and highly creative people but there are some hacks to both of them that can make the process a bit less painful.


Why is a logo so important?

Your logo is your face. Especially for Internet companies, or artists promoting recorded music, it's probably the only face some of your fans or customers may ever see. Even for physical products, it creates an icon that distinguishes you from everyone else, even if only at a glance.

A logo creates a brand, and a brand is what helps people separate what's worthwhile and what's a waste of their time. Most times, again especially on the Internet, this can happen in under a second. So, even if you've already come up with an awesome name there's still a lot of pressure to create a great logo.

I'm not "artsy." What should I do?

If you're designing it yourself, or someone else on your team is, get out your sketch pad. If you're paying a professional designer, get out your sketch pad.

If you want your logo to come out great, then you're going to have to be involved the whole way through the process, even if you have no artistic ability. I have terrible handwriting- I was the only kid to get a "C" in 3rd grade Penmanship- and I can barely draw a stick figure. I was still involved the entire way through our logo design process and I'm highly involved in all of our web design activities.

When someone else is designing something for one of your ideas, you need to act like a movie director and ensure that the final product comes out how you envisioned, or better than you imagined.

Things to think about.

Get studying. Learn from the greats- what's popular right now, what logos do you recognize and like, what competitors in your industry are doing with logos. Here is a good starting point for some of the most famous logos.

1. Feel. Playful and upbeat, or serious and professional? The next few elements are subsets of 'feel,' but you need to write down what you want to achieve before you can pick them. Think about the 1 short phrase you want people to think of when they see your logo, then make every decision based on that.
   
2. Text, image or both? As you'll note from the examples in the 'most famous logos' link above, it's not very clear-cut. Companies like Apple are able to get away with just using an image, whereas Coca-Cola is entirely composed of text. Don't get carried away if you decide to use images- note that the image you use should be easily printed at low resolution and should easily remembered to be sketch-able for a person of average artistic skill. You should also keep in mind that most of the best logos are painfully simple; too many elements just cause confusion and clutter- check the famous logos link again if you don't believe me.
   
3. Color scheme. The colors have to look good together, but there are other factors to think about as well. Printing costs go up when you have to use more than 2 or 3 colors, and at low resolutions some colors don't show up well. In grayscale, some colors don't show up at all.
   
4. Font type. This will say the an incredible amount about you and your band or company, so choose wisely. You'll want to see what's out there, and a good way to do that is try your company name in a few sites such as DaFont. You can type your text in directly and compare fonts side by side. The most important thing to remember here is that it should be simple and easy to read and recognize.
   
5. Image type/placement/size. If you decided that you're going to use an image, you need to decide what it will be. Are you going to do something like Monster.com and create a mascot? This one is tough. Are you going to do something like Apple and choose an image that reminds people of your company's name? This works pretty well. Are you going to do something like the NBA and choose an icon that reminds people what your company is about? This works, too.
   

More to consider...

Your logo may look great when it's full-screen on a hi-resolution widescreen Apple Cinema Display being viewed in Adobe Creative Suite 3, but how about on a fax cover sheet? I guarantee more people will see it printed in black and white, or at a low resolution than at its finest quality as you're viewing it while it's being created. Be especially wary of this if someone else is designing for you because it's in their best interest to show you the logo at its best. Stress that you want to see it at its worst.

It's also important that you don't settle for the first thing that comes up- try as many different things as possible. Most won't work, but some will. Save all the ones that don't work, and later on you'll be able to write a blog post about the evolution of a logo so other people can see.

Oh, now that you're wondering, here's the evolution of our logo.