Designing a logo can actually be an incredibly stressful process if you’re starting a company or any other kind of venture. It’s exciting, to be sure. You get to create a symbol of some sort that represents what your venture is all about. But it’s difficult for the same exact reason. Trying to sum up the look, feel, and purpose of a company in a single logo is tricky, and you want be sure you’re conveying the right idea.
If you have some artistic savvy, you might be best served just going for it. You can use programs like Adobe and Canva to make your own logo from scratch, and there are services for assisted logo design online as well. Diving right into any of these can help you get started if you have an idea in mind already. But if you don’t, you’ll need to start looking for inspiration.
One way to do this is to look at other designs that go beyond logos. You’ll be tempted to simply start Googling major brands and checking out what makes their logos recognizable, and this is certainly a worthwhile step. But start bigger. Seek out print designs done by expert graphic designers, and take a look at what catches your attention, be it a given color combination, a specific type of font, an artistic style, etc. Particularly if you don’t have much of an art background, this is a nice way to determine in a broader sense what sort of designs appeal to you. You can jot down some notes or save some examples and use them later on to filter through logo options or come up with your own creation.
Before you move on to the aforementioned step of seeking out famous brand logos, you might also consider thinking through some particularly competitive industries in which two competing products might seem to be similar. For instance, think about toiletry products, craft beers, or nutritional supplements, to name a few ideas. In each of these categories it can be hard to identify the difference between one company and the next – and because of this, presentation and logos can make an enormous difference. If you identify a few categories in which this appears to be the situation, try to figure out which products are most successful, and see what about those products’ appearances might be attracting more customers. Write down any such observations as further information to factor in once you start designing.
Finally, when you’ve done some creative digging like this, you should take a look at major companies, or perhaps the biggest names in whatever industry you’re looking to compete in. Imitation is okay, so long as you aren’t directly copying anyone’s design, and you’re still able to stand out. Find some logos that are both generally successful and appealing to you personally, and use them as your most direct inspiration.
These are just a few suggestions as you start the process. In a far simpler sense, it all comes down to being observant. You’ll notice which logos appeal to people and which ones don’t. But if you don’t have a naturally artistic eye, you might need to think more specifically about where you look for influences. These ideas should help, and from there it’s on to the design process and beyond!
