Why branding matters?
Brand identity is your visual way of interacting with the rest of the world. An effective brand creates feelings and perceptions in people about your organization, specifically about your image, core values and personality, the quality of your services, your professionalism and trustworthiness.
2. Research: Learn about the industry and competitors.
3. Brainstorm: develop ideas and decide on art direction.
4. Sketch: Create logo concepts based on strategy.
5. Design:Select the best logos and execute them digitally.
6. Present: Show logo concepts & get the client’s approval.
7. Deliver: Export logo files and create a style guide.
Appropriate means that the logo is relevant in form and concept to the client and its industry. For example, if you’re designing for a fashion brand, then the logo needs to be elegant; if you’re designing for a sports brand, then the logo probably needs to be bold and dynamic.
Is it simple?
Simple means that a logo has to be focused on a single story, and in most cases, it must be uncomplicated in form. A logo must be simple so it can work effectively and flexibly in a wide range of sizes and media, e.g. in small size on a business card and in big size, such as on signage.
Is it memorable?
Memorable means that while the form must be simple, it must also be distinctive enough to be easily remembered. Of course, the simpler the form is, the less special it tends to become, so the challenge is to keep it simple while making it distinctive enough so it can be remembered. OK, so without further ado, let’s jump right into the first step of my logo design process, which is the discovery phase.
Every designer will have a slightly different approach, but most would certainly agree that running a discovery phase and developing some sort of brand strategy is an absolute must. Discovery is about getting to know the client’s business, its history, industry, competitors, and audience. And this is because logo design is not art, so we shouldn’t just start coming up with logo ideas out of thin air, relying purely on our sense of aesthetics.
2. Conduct research on the industry and its competitors.
Now, in the second step, I take all the information from the discovery phase and conduct further research to draw insights that will serve me later on in the ideation phase. Research is all about analyzing the industry in more detail, conducting visual research and drawing conclusions. Researching the industry helps you, as a designer, get a sense of the environment the logo’s going to live in.
3. Brainstorm: Generate new ideas and map out your next steps.
In the brainstorming step, based on the discovery and research performed, I simply start outlining my strategy for generating logo ideas. Brainstorming is about thinking through all possible design directions that would steer creativity in the right direction. So here is where I seek out a look or a style that could convey my client’s brand persona (the third part of my strategy framework).
Our logo design process
Our comprehensive logo design strategy ensures a perfectly crafted logo for your business.
Discover
Every designer will have a slightly different approach, but most would certainly agree that running a discovery phase and developing some sort of brand strategy is an absolute must. Discovery is about getting to know the client’s business, its history, industry, competitors, and audience. And this is because logo design is not art, so we shouldn’t just start coming up with logo ideas out of thin air, relying purely on our sense of aesthetics. You see, a logo should serve a specific business objective, so you need to stay objective in the process in order to design something that is appropriate. A logo is the centrepiece of all brand communication—it’s literally everywhere—so it should stand the test of time. We naturally don't want to redesign that logo in the foreseeable future, so we want to give ourselves the best possible chance at designing a logo that will endure. Before you actually open up the Illustrator and start playing with type, color, and shape, you must first brief the client and create a foundation for your creative exploration. Different designers will go to different extents with the discovery phase. Some designers will just send a branding questionnaire or have a more informal discovery phone call. However, I use my proprietary brand strategy framework that I run with my clients prior to embarking on any design work. So I run the strategy workshop with my client, and during that session we go through a series of branding exercises that help me extract all the necessary information about the project.
Brainstorming
In the brainstorming step, based on the discovery and research performed, I simply start outlining my strategy for generating logo ideas. Brainstorming is about thinking through all possible design directions that would steer creativity in the right direction. So here is where I seek out a look or a style that could convey my client’s brand persona (the third part of my strategy framework). I use the brand's personality and tone of voice exercises to help me brainstorm ideas and create moodboards. And here I also use the mind map (9th exercise of my strategy framework) to start searching for a visual representation of the most important keywords distilled from previous steps. As a result, I put together three different mood boards that are basically a collection of visuals that capture the strategic insights. I simply look at the strategy to distil some keywords and then I browse websites like Behance, Dribble, or Pinterest to find some visuals that would make for a great art direction. I search for the font, color, style, etc. and consider all aspects of visual language that would embody our brand strategy. For Medihuanna, I created three mood boards: credible, innovative (below), and natural, and then I reviewed them together with my client. Next, we discuss those possible solutions and make some decisions on what direction we should proceed with. By narrowing our focus with mood boards, we try to stay objective, so that we can base our sketches in the next phase on solid strategic understanding.
Sketch
Obviously, when sketching logos is where real creativity comes into play, but since I’ve done my homework, I’m able to judge my sketches against clearly defined criteria. The goal of sketching is to find a connection between an idea and the creation of a form. Some designers use a sketchbook while others start right away on the computer, but most professional logo designers sketch logos by hand, using pen on paper. This is because sketching by hand gives you an immediacy of artistic expression, and I believe that every logo designer should absolutely start this way. It's also important to decide whether we need a symbol or simply a memorable typographic treatment of the brand name (wordmark). In the case of my client, the name Medihuanna is pretty self-explanatory (Medical + Marijuana), so we’ve decided to go on with a distinctive wordmark. We also decided that we needed a symbol that could act as a visual shorthand, so that it could be used in small sizes where the full name would become illegible. Now, sketching logos might be time-consuming, so it’s important to take breaks and let your ideas mature and develop in the back of your head. so that when you get back to your project after a break, you can have a fresh look and renewed enthusiasm, and therefore be much more effective. You’ve probably also heard about the fact that the best ideas usually come about at the least expected moments. While your conscious mind is consumed by other tasks (like driving a car or exercising), your unconscious comes up with some really great ideas. That’s why I always recommend designers to carry something that you can sketch on. This step usually takes a few days as you really need to go for quantity here and sketch a tonne of logos. And this is because we need to have many great ideas so that in the next step we can pick a few strong ones and execute them digitally on a computer.
Digitally Implement
So once you have a tonne of sketches, then you can judge them against the strategy and select the most promising concepts to execute digitally. Now, the design part is all about translating your sketches into digital form and then further testing the viability of each concept. So don’t rush here to execute every single logo idea that you have, but rather focus only on concepts that you think can work effectively for your client. By now, you should have a lot of criteria for what could and could not work for your client. If you feel like all of your sketches are weak, then you can go back and forth between sketching and designing until you get some pretty exciting logo concepts. Once you have a few strong logo ideas, then you just need to use Adobe Illustrator to design vector graphics. Here I simply recreate those sketches on the computer and then design multiple variations of each idea in order to arrive at the best option. The design part can take a very long time (a few days to a few weeks) before you actually execute your ideas in a way that is aesthetically pleasing. I tweak the designs and test different colors, fonts, spacing, alignment, and so on—always making a new copy so that I can always go back to the previous version of my logo. This step is simply about testing many different ways in which you can execute your logo sketches in order to arrive at the best aesthetic. If you do this the right way (and don’t rush this step), your logo concepts will improve and become stronger very quickly.