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.

Bored? Draw a stickman!

Draw a stickman is a website where you can have fun drawing stickmen! no seriously...

you start of by selecting an episode and then you draw your stickman. As the episode plays you are prompted to draw a variety of other items such as balloons and a sword so that your stickman can progress through the story.

It's a bit of fun if you need to waste a bit of time.

Visit Draw a stickman here!

Scribbler Too

This is a fun little website if you are looking for a fun way to kill some time. The website adds a cobweb like effect to any drawing that you do.

visit scribblertoo here!

Inspiration # 13 - Jan Tschichold

Jan Tschichold was a typographer, book designer, teacher and writer. He is known for creating the Sabon, Zeus, Saskia and Transit typefaces and for his iconic design for penguin books. Just like all other examples of  modernist design the work of Tschichold is simplistic and follows a simple grid system which gives his work a sense of uniformity and symmetry.

 

Llama Font!?

This post is purely for a bit of fun

I found a website whilst looking for some typefaces and I cam across Llama font, yes you heard me right Llama font. On the website you just type in anything you want into the box and it will appear below in the llama font.

visit the website here!

Inspiration # 11 - Adolphe Mouron Cassandre

I was introduce to the work of Adolphe Mouron Cassandre back when I was in school, I found his work in an art deco book and instantly loved his work. His work is very much simplistic but bold and colourful enough that it catches your eye, his work also consists of geometric shapes that help with the simplicity of the design and is a prime example of the style of work that was produced during the art deco period. I also find some aspects of his work resembles the style of  swiss graphic design. 

inspiration # 9 - Josef Muller Brockman

I know its a bit cliché but I do really love the work of Joseph Muller Brockman, every piece of work he design was created using a grid structure, in turn everything has it's own place on the page and nothing seems to be squeezed or over designed. He is best known for his simplistic designs and his use of clean typography. His work was one of my many inspirations throughout uni and it still remains my top source of inspiration. 

A Couple More Books for my Collection

I recently purchased 2 more design books from The Works to add to my growing collection of design books.

The first book is Grids, Creative Solutions for Graphic Designers

The other book is The Complete Guide to Digital Illustration 

Both of these books I would rccommend looking at as they have some very useful information and tutorials.

Magawebzine

As you can probably tell from the previous post I have just recently finished a project in uni.

This project was called Magawebzine, for the project I had to produce a magazine called Nibbles, with the theme entrances and exits. I chose the theme of modern retro living showing how certain products such as the kitchenaid food mixer have stood the test of time are still popular with people today, also how the overall design and and technology has changed very little over the years.

Here is my final printed magazine below

If you want to see more of this project head over to my other blog at helenjtaylordesign.wordpress.com