Logo design is a crucial element for every company as it’s the first thing the viewer sees about your brand and it will be a visual connection with the client is a great tool to transmit the brand message and connect with their target audience, and you might ask what makes a logo appealing or how to design a good logo?.
Creating a good logo design requires to have experience, knowledge, and good skills, but don’t worry, there are some golden rules and tips that can make your logo design process much easier and help you develop good logos by applying these design tips, let’s start with these useful design tips.
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To make a good logo design, the most important part of the process is to do the groundwork and research the market. Every client and industry is different and has its own themes and visual styles that you need to understand to create a timeless logo that stands out from the competitors.
To make good research you should know who are the competitors of your client, the main brand in the client industry and study their brand logos, which shapes, themes, and colors they use, and don’t be afraid to ask for more information to your client as they can provide you useful information that you can use to design their logo.
When you have recapped all the information the logo design process will be much easier as you already have a clear view of what you need to do and what don’t to make a memorable logo that stands out from other brands in the niche.
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Once you have made the groundwork and know more about your client’s industry, it’s time to chat with your client and learn more about their brand and their services or products, this will help to understand what makes their brand unique compared with their competitors and what elements to use to make their logo more appealing.
You can get this information by sending your client a creative brief with key questions to learn their brand personality, brand values, message, and their main goals, and what makes them unique, and use these answers to develop their logo design.
It’s time to start brainstorming and developing rough ideas of what will be the final version of the logo, and before you open Illustrator and start playing with shapes and fonts, a good tip is to use a pen and paper and start drawing the first sketches.
These first sketches don’t need to be perfect and take you much time, as the name suggests, these are only sketches and it helps to take ideas from your head and see them in a visual form, making it much easier to have a realistic view of your logo idea and compare it to other ideas.
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When you have a bunch of sketches and ideas ready and choose your favorites you can proceed with the next step and open Illustrator and develop those ideas, but a good logo tip is to start creating your logo design in black in white and ignore color on this part of the process to avoid distractions.
By designing your logo design in black and white it forces you to stay focused on the symbol or typography you are working on being really useful to create a memorable logo, as when people will think of your logo in most cases they will think of the shape or form of it firstly.
Think that a bad logo will not be fixed by a good color palette, and on other hand, a good logo design will stay good no matter the color.
Another great tip to design a memorable logo is to avoid being too literal and use the same fonts, colors, or symbols that other brands in the industry you want to make your logo design stand out from other brands in the industry so you should be more creative and make your logo stand out.
To understand this design tip better, let’s make an example, think that you are designing a logo for an airplane company, you might think that designing use an airplane might be a good idea as it shows what the company it’s about, but no, because this idea has already been had by many designers and companies, being a very lazy idea that doesn’t stand out from your competitors.
Instead, be creative and try to use the information you have from the research and what makes your client’s company unique and translate it to the brand logo.
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If you have read my post about color psychology you already know the importance of color in logo design as every color has its own meaning and can transmit different feelings to the viewer, that is why you should pay attention when choosing the color palette of your logo design and use color psychology to send a message to your potential clients.
For example, if your client company wants to get perceived as youthful or energetic you can use yellow as the primary color, or if your client wants to be perceived as cheerful and friendly you can use orange, also you can mix different colors to transmit different feelings but if you want to use multiple colors you should take into account color theory to create a harmonious color palette.
If the logo you are designing has the brand name or any text, you should pay attention to the font you want to use, as fonts have their personality and speak about the brand’s personality and how it talks to you.
To better understand it think about a lawyer or insurance company, you expect a formal look and serious tone, but if you see that they are using Comic Sans on their logo you can start distrusting them as it’s not the one you are looking for these types of companies, and this effects it’s due to font psychology.
Font psychology studies how people perceive different fonts and how they interact with them, in some way fonts are a visual way to speak with people, making really important to choose a good font that matches your brand’s tone, you can check my post about font psychology and discover how to use it in logo design.
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To design a good logo it’s important that your logo is legible and recognizable in every situation and placement, that is why a good logo design tip is to make oyur brand logo responsive and create different versions of it to ensure that your logo stills look good in every display or placement.
If you have plenty of space to place your brand logo you can use your primary logo, but sometimes you only have a small area to place the logo and if you use your primary logo some elements can look odd making it difficult to recognize it, a good tip is to design different logo variations reducing the elements of the main logo or rearrange them to make it easier to maintain recognizability.
One of the key logo design tips is that less is more as you want that your brand logo stays in the viewer’s mind easily, and if your logo design is too complicated or has too many elements, it can make it hard for the viewer to remember, also by keeping your logo design simple it’s more likely that it doesn’t require any rebranding for many years as simple logos are atemporal and don’t follow any design trend.
To recap you should create a logo design that’s easy to remember with simple and uncomplicated shapes, and when you finish your logo design you can check if you can remove any decorative element and only maintain those elements that have any purpose in the design and follow the motto function over visual from minimalist graphic design style.
Last but not least, when you have your logo design finished and followed all the previous logo tips you should take a second opinion to identify things that you have missed during the design process or if there is any cultural misunderstanding that can be fixed before releasing your logo design.
Remember that four eyes see more than two eyes, and by asking for a second opinion you can avoid any error or unfortunate shape that you have missed during the developing process.
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If you are a beginner graphic designer you might ask how you know if your logo is good or how to design a good logo, and as every profession to become a good graphic designer requires practice and experience, but there are some useful tips to make a good logo design that I showed in this post that will help you in your logo design process and to know what should be avoided when developing a logo.
Hope you find these tips useful to make your design process much easier and your final logo look more appealing to your client or audience, and if you want to master your logo design skills and discover the principles of logo design you can check my post about what makes a good logo design.
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If you found this post useful you might like to read these post about Graphic Design Inspiration.
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