Logo design tips
I always pay close attention to logos designed by other people. I must say that most of the logos I’ve seen lately have been way below par. By no means am I the only person that thinks that way, nor do I profess to be the best logo designer out there, however, I have a few suggestions on how to make a good logo for a client.
First and foremost, find out what your client’s budget is. I don’t mean find out what your client is willing to pay you, I mean how much they are willing to spend on their printing. If a client comes to you and wants a galaxy with a shooting star in full colour, he / she better have some cash to fork out on the commercial printing. Most new clients don’t understand about such things and it is your job to inform them.
The next step is to find out how many colours they can afford to print. Find out what they plan to print the logo on in the immediate future, and suggest to them one to two colours if they plan on printing the logo on a large amount of items e.g. stationery, vehicles, signage, merchandise etc.
Most large companies, have a one colour logo, so they can print it on everything they want to. If you have a five colour logo, you can’t really afford to pay that much unless you’re a million dollar industry. The next time you buy something in a box at the grocery store, take a look at the folds of the box (cases of beer are the easiest to find). You’ll usually find a CMYK registration along the folds, along with spot colour additions.
A quick lesson on colours. Spot colour is when part of the logo uses an exact ink color that you specify (sometimes called a Pantone) Each colour must have an exact colour number to be printed. Printers will have books of colours that you can specify what ones you want to use. The printer will create a plate for that colour and other plates for other colours. So, each colour you choose will be a plate. The other way to print something is process. CMYK, cyan, magenta, yellow and black. That is four plates and things like photographs and complex colours are printed in CMYK. They make up the entire spectrum except metallics. The colours are not as true as spot colours and you can always mix the two.
Once you find out what you have to work with most people will want a one or two colour logo. The easiest way to make sure your client is concentrating on the design and not the colours, is to design the logo in grayscale. I use Adobe Illustrator to create the logo, then I open it in Photoshop, convert the file to grayscale and send it to the client. I use variations of grays for each colour so that the client knows that it’s actually multi-coloured. Give your client a few variations of each design. This will show them that you have the ability manipulate the design you have created.
Make sure that you know what you are doing before you take on this kind of project. Ask around before diving into print and corporate identity – unless you are doing it free of charge and don’t mind arguing with printers for long hours. Try taking charge and finding a printer that you can work with on the project. They may be able to help you avoid mistakes.
Remember, keep the design simple, make sure it can be resized to around one inch without losing clarity and legibility. Print it out on a laser printer and make sure it is clean and not pixellated. You also want to make sure it isn’t cluttered. Look at the logos of large corporations such as Microsoft, Samsung, Adobe, BBC etc. Their logos are quite simple and they can be recognised easier because of it.
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Great tips for someone as un-aesthetic as me! I generally hire all of the logo work out, even though I would love to get to know Photoshop a bit better. I am about as creative, graphically, as a rock!
Photoshop is a great tool for raster images. When it comes to logos you’ll find that any designer worth their reputation will create them as a vector file using Adobe Illustrator.
Raster graphics cannot be scaled to a higher resolution without loss of apparent quality. This is in contrast to vector graphics, which easily scale to the quality of the device on which they are rendered. Raster graphics are more practical than vector graphics for photographs and photo-realistic images, while vector graphics are often more practical for typesetting or graphic design.
Rock on!
I’m quite familiar with Photoshop and Illustrator, but when it comes to designing logos, I always run out of creative ideas. When I hire someone, he designs logos which doesn’t suite my taste.
Maybe, I need to focus more on tutorials like this.
Great advice! Thanks for this. Another suggestion would be to be mindful of how the font used “reads”. I’ve seen some great fonts used for logos, but aren’t necessarily the right choice in that case because of the text. i.e: an LI ends up looking like a U, or a V ends up looking like a U etc. Although you and the client may know the name of the company - a first time reader of it may have some problems figuring it out.
Useful tips! Simplicity is key to a good logo design. Just have a look at the logo of Nike..its plain and simple but has worked wonders. Complex logos are difficult to interpret. Company Logo Design