“Umm I don’t know what I want. But I want to see something simple yet elegant and professional logo design”
– Every Other Client
Content
Topic 1:
How To Create a Logo With Awesome Design
Who all can relate to the above scenario?
I bet a lot.
Those who don’t know about it, well this is what the client’s expectations are from you when you hand over a logo design.
Since this article would solely focus on how to create a logo for client or for yourself, let’s dive right in.
Beginners guide to logo design contains all the information about what you need to know before starting with your creation. If you know it, that’s great. If not, go check it out.
For instance, let’s take Instagram logo, it looks super simple. Just a gradient background with the camera icon on top. But logo itself speaks for Instagram.
The gradient indicates the variety of creative content Instagram showcases in the profiles. And the camera depicts the mode(of course) of taking the content.
That’s what we will understand today, together, about creating your own logo.
Factors that make a Logo Design Awesome!
Professional teachers from CCSD1 have created a great rule to remember the 3 major factors to create a logo.
The F3 Rule:
- Form i.e the look of your logo
- Feeling i.e the logo passes the desired message
- Function i.e the logo design fulfills the purpose or objective of the brand
Now you can remember this or create a quick abbreviation of your own. I created mine as the CEO.
- Composition
- Effect
- Objective
Look at these designs and try to answer the CEO for each one of them. At the end of these designs, those are mentioned for you to cross check if you thought them right.
Logo Design: OPPOSITE
C: Since the word itself says “Opposite”, the composition of this logo includes the clear meaning of it.
E: Two sides of faces is the exact meaning of being opposite and that’s why the effect is quite visible for the brand.
O: Having products for opposite point of views and different kinds of people is what this brand is all about and that’s what they are displaying in their logo.
Logo Design: FEATHERS FASHION
C: The composition is so clear as they have used a feather in place of letter “F”
E: The feather means the material for apparels and the letter F is for the brand’s name.
O: Objective is to combine the two elements to showcase what the brand is all about i.e Fashion which uses different types of material to make the clothes.
Logo Design: NATURAL DAY
C: They have used leaf which defines the Nature clearly as composition.
E: Using color combinations of green with leafs defines the brand’s identity and voice
O: Objective of showcasing their natural products is so prominent as they have used the nature’s flow, green color to resemble it and the leaves to give a nature’s touch.
Logo Design: NOT FOUND
C: For the composition, they have used a block typography that shows a heavy object to hide behind.
E: The last letter D has some extra elements that gives an illusion as if someone is hiding behind it. So the effect is very clear for this logo design.
O: Objective was to display the hidden meaning in terms of the actual word and that has been exhibited flawlessly.
Were you right?
Great.
There are 50 more of these logo designs provided by SpeckyBoy. Go check them out!
Quick Read:
Create A Logo But Avoid These Mistakes [11min]
Creative market explain what to keep in mind while creating a logo. [10 min]
Topic 2:
Layout & Composition
Design layout and composition is nothing but how all the elements of your design are placed or arranged.
Now the 3 major factors of layout and composition are:
- White Space or Negative Space
- Alignment
- Gridlines
White Space or Negative Space
Grouping together the similar content can have a visual appearance of great proximity.
Why do we have to do this?
Well, firstly it enables you to skim read easily. And the content explains the services more clearly.
Would you rather read a long paragraph or the same content split in 4 small paragraphs. Sounds comforting right?
This is what a negative space does to your design.
Now it does not mean a literal white space when it is required. The negative space is often considered white space as the area around it is blank and thus white.
So don’t get confused.
Look at this design:
How about this:
Nice, Right?
I like them too. The way they have used negative space is wonderful.
Now as I mentioned in my other blog, Statista showed that more than 60% of people today are on smartphones. And that’s the reason why millions of dollars are being spent on mobile advertisements by the brands.
Now let’s look at the above two logos again but in a mobile device resolution:
While you can read USA Network easily, the LandFit white space is a bit hard to understand.
So make sure to keep the negative space in your logo but excess of it can cause confusion in responsive design.
Have a look at below desktop vs mobile logo designs:
Quick Read:
99designs showcase the what and why of responsive logo [10 min]
Topic 3:
Logo Alignment
Have you ever noticed some logos that seems a bit off in terms of alignment.
Event though they are aligned correctly, human beings have view those alignments optically and that’s why, even the technically right aligned logo can look very bad sometimes.
Let’s find out why.
Let me show you a few examples first.
Digital Synopsis has explained the alignment of this logo design wonderfully. Sometimes the optical centre point is different than the measurements or the actual center point as per software. So which one should you follow?
Definitely the Optical one wherever necessary.
Source : KeyShot has explained its entire logo alignment in a single picture. This would help you understand how to align objects for your own logo.
Golden Number has not only explained the Google Logo alignment but also the entire brand’s alignment wherever the logo is used or a standalone icon is used. It’s worth a read.
Alignment is the organizing your logo elements with lines and margins. Now how to do that?
You don’t have to create a literal line in your logo(of course).
There are two types of alignments: Edge and Center.
Edge Alignment as the name suggests would alignment all your elements to one edge. Like FedEx Logo
Center Alignment would align the elements to the center of each element. Like the KeyShot logo.
Imagine having Edge alignment applied to the KeyShot logo. It would have lost its meaning or the logo would not have looked good to the eyes.
Alignment can be categorized in 3 types:
With Asymmetric Alignment
Create A Logo With Symmetric Alignment
Lastly, with Radial Alignment
What the lesson here is, pick your alignment style wisely. It should go with your brand’s purpose and the services you provide to people.
Major key points to take from here are:
- Make sure to follow at least one of the three alignment types.
- Be consistent with the spaces used in the logo.
- The width of all your font letters should be equal in order to represent the consistency
- If you have a graphic and typography, make sure to align them in center if the icon is in any shape but sharp edges.
- Optical center always supersedes software measurements.
Topic 4:
Use Gridlines To Create A Logo That’s Perfect
Logo grids are nothing but a tool used by many designers to create geometric lines around the logo in order to ensure the alignment and shape of the logo are correct.
Remember back in the school days, if you would have to cut a piece of paper in equal parts, you would fold it once for two equal parts, twice for four equal parts and so on.
In a similar fashion, just not the cutting, design softwares allow you to create Square grid lines on the canvas in order for you to work more efficiently.
See those light pink lines above? Those are grid lines.
Design Shack elaborates the common design grid styles that are worth a read.[10 min]
Having grids can help you keep your logo design:
- Consistent
- Organised
- Properly Aligned
- Even Spaced
- Equally distant
Have a look at below logo designs using grids and decide for yourself.
Conclusion
Well if you are directly here, you missed out on the F3 rule. But if you read it all, great job done!
Let’s summarize the main points below on how to create a logo which is just perfect:
- Before creating any logo design, make sure to keep in mind the three things: How it should look, what reaction you are expecting and the purpose of your brand.
- Just as the organized room looks great, so is the logo design. You should know how to put your layout and composition in place to arrange your design elements accordingly.
- Three main alignment styles are: Symmetric, Asymmetric and Radial. Make sure whatever you design, it follows any one of them. A misaligned design is not something a vast audience would like to see as a brand not unless you are selling kids toys.
- Always use Grid lines to keep your focal point aligned where it should be. The more organized your design looks, the more people would remember it.
Keep it simple but elegant.
Tell me in the comments if you have your own set of tips on how to create a logo that you would like to share with the world!
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