Creating A Logo Design In 3 Easy Steps

So you have an awesome idea, company name, and business plan, but you don’t have any sort of branding or logo design. You need something good, but also fast because you want to get the business moving. Great! Here are the three steps you need to take to get there:

Step 1: Plan it out

Set time aside to do this. The last thing you want to do is go with your first choice. The majority of the time (like 99 percent), the logo you end up with comes only after making tons of iterations of your initial idea. A simple plan should be 20 napkin sketches where you create several vastly different ideas, choosing three out of the 20 and doing 5-10 versions of each. Then, choosing one out of that batch of logos, doing 5-10 variations of that one, choosing your logo design, and finally doing a round of color options for yourself until you get a scheme you like. This whole process can take a few hours, but remember this is the face of your company moving forward. You don’t want to skimp out on the process and have a logo you’re not excited to show off to potential clients.

Step 2: Follow Your Inspiration

Even if you’re not a designer by trade, you know what you like and don’t like; go with that. Open up Google images, Pinterest, and Instagram and find what inspires you. If it’s a color scheme, a shape, or even some text, find it and try to work with it. Think of it as gathering colors for a painting, get your paints together. When you’re making your 15-20 logo design concepts, try to incorporate what you like. Then, put a twist on it. Make it bigger, smaller, twist it, play with the opacity, see if you can connect it with another shape to create something entirely different. This is where you can go wild and come up with anything—good, bad, and ugly. Nobody will see it so design like nobody’s watching.

Step 3: Keep It Simple

The temptation when creating a logo is to make a complex graphic or almost even a full-blown illustration, but the best logos are simple and not even necessarily symbolic. They can be an extension or modified version of a single font letter, or even just shapes of color overlayed on top of each other. Minimalist geometric logos are the trend of the last two years, so working with even basic shapes and shape outlines will take you far. Even if you do want to work with an illustration, try to break it down to it’s most basic elements and see if you can use even just a few of those elements to create your logo. Remember less is more. Now that you have your three steps, it’s time to get started on your logo design!