When creating your first logo, it is very common to not know exactly where to start. There are several steps that need to be considered when designing a logo, as well as using the right tools. Find out how to carry out an effective logo design process.

Brainstorm

As a creative, your head can be full of ideas and hard to pinpoint the best ones. When given a brief, the best thing to do is get your ideas down on paper. The best method to use is a semantic tree. This allows you to branch out your ideas and develop them further, enabling greater exploration on each possible thought. For example, if the brief is a logo design for a food delivery business, you may begin with the word in the middle and branch out each word.

Sketch first

Sketching allows you to develop all your ideas, aswell as those in your semantic tree. By freely drawing out your ideas on to paper, you are not limited to tools available such as if you were to use a program on the computer. When sketching, create all possible logos (as sketches) which also allows you to carry out a process of elimination before digitalising. As a result, you may get the best possible outcome on the last design as fewer logos can be focused on.

Use Adobe Illustrator

Typically, people open up a pixel based program such as ‘paint’ or ‘Photoshop’. Dont use either. By using these programs, your logo is likely to look tacky as you will be encouraged to use many effects. Additionally, pixels aren’t able to be scaled properly as they will loose their quality when scaled to a larger size. Adobe illustrator is a vector based program which means the logo will always look the same regardless on what size. The logo will also look a lot more professional due to the simple features and high resolution vector quality Illustrator offers.

Use geometric shapes

To have a successful logo, it needs to be simple, memorable and appropriate. The best way to ensure the simplicity and memorability of a logo is use geometric shapes. Simplicity is the best way to tell a story through logo design which will ensure that the target audience gets the message. Use simple shapes to digitalise your sketch such as circles, triangles squares, rectangles etc.

Dont add colour

It is important to focus on the shapes that are used to form a logo, to ensure there is functionality every where it is used. It is vital that you create logos in black and white. Using colours when designing takes the focus off solving the problem. An appropriate colour scheme should only be applied at the end of the creative process.

Find a great typeface

After creating a timeless logo with a unique colour scheme, the last element to add is the typeface. assuming your logo is a symbol and not a word mark, an appropriate type face needs to be applied. There are only a handful of fonts that are actually good, find below a list of fonts to be used, recommended by The Futur:

Akzidenz Grotesque
Avenir
Avant Garde
Bell Gothic
Bodoni
Bembo
Caslon
Clarendon
Courier
Din Mittelschrift
Franklin Gothic
Frutiger
Futura
Garamond
Gill Sans
Gotham
Helvetica
Letter Gothic
Memphis
Meta
OCRB
Rockwell
Sabon
Trade Gothic
Trajan
Univers

Overall, everyone has a different logo design process but will have similar steps when carrying them out. The examples listed above will certainly help those who are starting out logo design aswell as those who feel as if they need a solid design process. Following these steps, you will discover finding the right solution at the end of the process due to exploring many options. The most important factor that needs to be considered is using adobe illustrator (or other vector based programmes). This is the industry standard program and if logos are done in other programmes that are not vector based, your work may not look professional but rather tacky.

If you would like to take your logo design journey further, please feel free to watch this video:

How to create a logo