Design Process: How I Design a Logo

A logo is considered to be the most important part of your businesses identity, it the first aspect of your business that the customer sees and it's the one thing that people will think of when it comes to your business.

Designing a logo can be a bit of long process and doesn't happen over night. The length of time depends on the amount of concepts the client wishes to see and the amount of revisions that need to be done (and also the amount of work/projects that the designer is currently working on).

So what goes into designing a logo? well firstly there's research, before I can start designing a logo I need to know everything about your business from what you do, your products, who you want to attract with the logo (i.e a certain age demographic), what you want the logo to say about you, even down to colours and fonts. Once I have all this information I can move onto the next stage.

Thumbnail concepts, these are quick little ideas that I sketch down either in a sketchbook or in Illustrator. In this stage I may sketch out as many as 20 ideas and from the thumbnails I then chose the concepts that I feel work the best, this may be as little as 4 or as much as 8 concepts. I then send these over to the client to look through and chose the ones that they like the most.

Once the client has come back to me on which logo they would prefer I then start the revisions. The revision stage is different in each project, for example some clients can't decide on a logo and would rather a mix of a couple of different concept put together or they will decide on a concept and will be happy with that. Normally though the revision stage involves changing the font size or style, tweaking the colours or changing up the colours altogether and altering the size of the design.

Also during the revision stage I will make sure that logo will work in black and white. This is usually because in some instances your colour choice may not work on a certain background colour, for example a white logo works better on a black background over a navy blue logo.

There is a of back and forth with the client during this stage to make sure that logo meets their expectations.

Once the final logo has been decided the next stage is to export the logo out into the file formats that the client require (usually .jpg, .png, .pdf etc).

*just to note that this is the process that I use to design a logo, other designers may use a different process. the images in this blog post are a show a selection of work from a university project.