Designing a logo that represents your brand can help your brand grow, but getting it right is just as important. Here’s a step-by-step corporate logo design guide.
- Understand your brand.
- Brainstorm words to describe your brand.
- Sketch your ideas based on these words.
- Test your top sketches with buyer personas.
- Adjust the selected sketch.
- Develop your logo layout with our free design platform.
- Choose from a variety of color options.
- Select font.
- Ensure Scalability.
Corporate Logo Design Guide
1. Understand Your Brand.
The first step in a corporate logo design guide is understanding your brand. Before you even think about opening Canva or starting a sketch, you need to pinpoint your brand’s story and all the specific values and emotions you want your logo to convey. This process involves considering your target audience, your buyer personas, and, most importantly, how you want people to feel when they see your logo. It’s difficult to encapsulate a brand’s story in a logo, and you should be prepared for mistakes along the way. Don’t be afraid to experiment and then explore when designing a logo that fits your brand.
2. Brainstorm Words To Describe Your Brand.
Use tools like Thesaurus.com to find synonyms and other words that describe your brand’s core themes. Choose 5-10 words that best represent your brand’s ethos and also use them to guide your logo design. For example, if you are in the clothing industry, enter “Clothing.” You’ll be surprised how meaningful the synonyms used can be. You can also click on these results to start a new search and dig deeper, focusing on the words that best reflect your brand for the corporate logo design guide.
3. Create Some Sketches.
Now, create a rough sketch. Use your brand story and keywords to help you create your first logo idea. Please note that these are first drafts. The most important thing is to get the ideas in your head down to paper. So trust the process and let the ideas flow. You will have the opportunity to refine your ideas later. Keep the shape simple. Be strategic when using colors. Consider current color trends and colors that are popular in the industry. As a rule of thumb, don’t choose more than three colors. Choose a color or group of colors that set you apart from your competitors. But don’t use the whole rainbow because it’s more marketing-oriented.
4. Select The Sketch And Adjust It.
Now that you have several sketches, choose the one that appeals to you the most and use your thinking skills. Brainstorm words and brand stories and visualize your ideas. Invest your mental effort to refine your logo sketch into a meaningful, deep, and relatable design that connects to your brand’s core values. This is easier said than done, but here’s where it gets tough.
5. Develop Your Logo Layout With A Free Design Platform.
If you’ve been working on paper, transfer your design to your computer to create a layout. Logo layout is the way the individual elements of a logo are organized and placed about each other. Here are some of the free tools you can use to scan your sketches and start creating your corporate logo design guide. Correct logo orientation is here, Key. Your logo doesn’t have to be perfectly symmetrical, but it should appear visually balanced. Aim for a clean, balanced logo where everything feels like it’s in the right place. If your design looks really great in black and white, you know your logo is balanced.
6. Select A Color.
The color palette you choose for your logo says a lot about your brand. For example, blue represents reliability and maturity, while red represents passion and enthusiasm. When choosing colors for your logo, consider your brand’s story and the keywords you came up with earlier.
7. Select A Font.
Next, combine text and images. Consider the font to use for this text if the company name is displayed without a logo. Font selection becomes even more important if you choose words or letter marks instead of symbols. Believe it or not, your overall font choice can say a lot about your overall business. You can choose between serif (each letter has a stroke) or sans serif (no stroke) font. They are also called classic or modern, respectively. Avoid generic fonts that come standard with all word processing programs.
Examples of generic fonts include Times New Roman, Lucida Handwriting, and Comic Sans. These fonts will only hurt you and your business by making you less memorable.
8. Ensure Scalability.
As your business grows, logos are designed to help you represent your business across multiple platforms: in print, on your website, on your social media business pages, and across the Internet. I need a logo that can be scaled super large for billboards or scaled down to print on the side of a pen. All parts of the logo must be legible, regardless of its size.
9. Receive Feedback.
Once you feel your logo design is complete, consider sharing it with others to get constructive Feedback. Of course, you can ask for input at any point in the process, but there’s value in listening to people’s reactions to your realized vision and iterating from there. Huh, are you still together? It may seem a little difficult, but don’t rush; take your time. It’s better to follow the process through to completion and end up with a great logo than to start over months later because you made a design mistake or changed your mind.
Best Practices for Logo Design
1. Keep It Simple.
The Key to logo design is simplicity. Aim for a clean, uncluttered design that communicates your brand identity as directly as possible. The goal is for viewers to immediately recognize and understand your logo. Let’s take the Nike logo as an example. Its simplicity makes it iconic. There’s a reason it hasn’t been updated since 1995.
2. Prioritize Versatility.
Your logo should be very versatile enough to work with a variety of backgrounds and colors. Test your logo against a variety of backgrounds and media to ensure legibility and clarity in all possible scenarios. This means that you need to have alternative color palettes and logo orientations for each situation.
3. Design For Your Audience.
Your logo design should match your perception of your brand and your customers’ perception. You should research your target audience’s demographics and interests and consider their buyer profile. Only then can your design meet their expectations and needs.
4. Be Original.
It’s important to stand out from the crowd. Almost every market today is saturated with competition and choice. Logo design is just as important in developing your niche as creating a unique value proposition. Avoid the generic logo designs and routine symbols that are easily recognized elsewhere. For example, a globe-based logo costs about 10 cents:
5. Timeless.
Your logo should be iconic and timeless. Pretty simple, right? Groundbreaking logos like Coca-Cola’s are both important and rare, but that doesn’t mean you can’t aim for a timeless logo.
