Designing your business logo is a big undertaking, given that logos are essential to your business’s brand and your website’s overall design. This process can be intimidating if it’s your first time designing a logo.
If you’re looking to design a logo using a free logo maker, you’ve come to the right place. Ahead is a step-by-step guide to designing a typical logo. Each step gives a detailed insight into how to think outside the box when designing your logo. It also breaks down how small business owners can use a free logo maker when designing their business logo.
Essential Steps to Designing a Logo
1. Understand Why You Need a Logo
Business is like dating—you are attempting to appeal to the right audience and make them fall head over heels in love with your brand. As such, you can think of your logo as your dating profile. It is what makes people take an interest and yearn to learn more about your business (or leave your site because you’re not for them) so you need to create something appealing.
Your logo will impact how customers perceive your business. It will give customers information about your brand and convince them that you’re the best choice for them.
Since your logo is such an important part of your brand, you want to make sure that it’s designed in the best way possible. An excellent logo design not only has the power to communicate what you stand for, but it also makes a great first impression and helps you stand out from your competition in a good way.
2. Define Your Brand Identity
Your logo should portray the personality of your brand and for it to do that, you need to understand your brand’s core personality. Once you have a clear picture of what your brand represents and what makes you unique, you’ll have a much easier time making design choices that complement and mirror that picture.
Here are some questions you should ask yourself to get a clear picture of what your brand identity is:
- What was the reason for starting your business?
- What makes you better than everyone else?
- What values and beliefs does your business subscribe to?
- What makes you unique?
- What three words would you use to describe your brand?
- What three words would you want your customers to use to describe you?
3. Find Inspiration for Your Design
Designing a logo becomes much simpler if you’ve taken the time to find inspiration before starting the process. This way, you’ll know more clearly which ideas appeal to you and which ones don’t. Finding inspiration for your design will give you a better feel for how your logo should look. Below are three essential steps that will help you get the best creative logo ideas:
- Heed the rules of brainstorming: Brainstorming involves getting all the ideas out and jotting them down, including the horrible ones. You never know! Even an idea that seems horrible could spark a conversation that brings forth a genius solution.
- Think like your audience: Create a list of words that describe your brand and how you want people to perceive it. Think like someone in your target demographic, and always keep in mind what would be important to them.
- Everyone should be involved: While one-person brainstorming is okay, only diversity can spark magic. Include people from various departments or even business partners and friends.
Think outside the box when brainstorming logo ideas. Don’t be afraid to be a little different. A logo can cleverly incorporate ideas that you wouldn’t necessarily associate with one another. Such logos exude originality, making them stand out from others.
4. Check Out What Your Competition Is Doing
One of the best places to borrow ideas is from your competition. Check out what already exists, what resonates well with your audience, and what you should steer clear of. When examining other businesses, try to find out what makes them different and how you can emphasize these differences in your logo design.
That said, ensure that you set yourself apart from your competition. If everyone is going modern, it may be prudent to bring out that forgotten yet unique traditional design to attract attention.
5. Pick Your Design Style
Now that you’re feeling inspired after researching the best logo design ideas, it’s time to translate that into your design. There are plenty of different elements that come into play here, including colors, graphics, topography, and shapes. Isolating each component and how it can be added to your logo design will help you take things one step at a time, rather than getting overwhelmed with the entire design at once. Some design styles you could pick include classic, vintage, minimalist, fun and quirky, and handcrafted. Of course, these styles aren’t mutually exclusive, you can opt to mix things up.
6. Find the Right Logo Type
Besides the overall style, there are seven types of logos that you can choose from when designing your logo. You can pick one that suits your business name or overall aesthetic beat. Alternatively, you can combine them to create a unique design. The seven main logotypes you can choose from include lettermarks, wordmarks, pictorial marks, abstract logo marks, mascots, combination marks, and emblem.
7. Pay Close Attention to Color
Color plays a critical function in a human’s life. Artfully using appropriate colors influences the personality of the visual logo significantly. Different colors have various influences on the human subconscious. For this reason, when designing a logo, the artfulness of colors reveals information about the product and also manifests the aim of a certain business or an individual in the market. In short, you should understand the psychological impact when choosing colors.
8. Pick the Right Font or Topography
You should pick a font that not only complements but completes your logo. The four types of fonts that you can work with to make your logo unique are Serif fonts, San serif fonts, Script fonts, and Display fonts. You can create a really powerful topography by mixing up different logo fonts.
Use NameSilo’s Free Logo Maker to Create a Unique Logo
Our free logo maker gives you not just a unique logo file, but also the same logo in different colors, including all-white, all black, an inverted variation, as well as a transparent background. It’s also a paste and design tool, so it’s super easy to use. Contact us for help if you have any questions about this great design tool.