8 Steps To Designing The Perfect Logo

One of the most important aspects of advertising your company is the company logo that you use. The main purpose of a company logo is to communicate to the viewer what your company is about and what do you deal with.

It is also important that your logo conveys a message through which faith and trust is generated in the viewer’s mind towards your company. It is important that we know what essentially a logo is before we go through the steps that will help you design the perfect logo.

A logo could be a symbol, a mark, a name or a professionally designed trademark which integrates text, images, objects of different shape and size that helps in recognising someone or something uniquely. Naturally it needs to be something that is catchy and should make people associate it with your company immediately. This article deals with 8 simple steps that would help you in designing the ideal logo for your company.

 

Step 1: The Brief

Once your client has decided to offer you work, the next step is to sit down with your client and collect all the initial requirements of the company. It is very important to gather proper information regarding the client’s requirements so that you can design the ideal logo which satisfies your client.

This initial information regarding the project can be collected through a personal interview, or through a questionnaire designed by you or asking the client to send a project brief with all their requirements in the form of a RFP (Request for Proposal). The most preferred way is through a personalised interview as this way the client is able to explain in a proper personal manner what exactly he wants.

As a designer you could sit there with a pencil and paper and even start making rough sketches, shapes and designs etc and show them to the client to tell them what kind of ideas are building up in your brain. At the end of the day, customer satisfaction is what it’s aall about.

 

Step 2: Research

After the initial meeting with the client regarding the product comes the gathering of information about the product or the company that the logo you are designing is going to endorse. If you are dealing with a company, then find out what do they specialise in and what their potential customers would be looking for in their logo which would immediately help in making the viewer realise what the company deals with.

For example if you are working for a sports shoes company then an obvious thing that could be included in the logo is an image of shoes which tells the viewer that the logo belongs to a shoe making company. It is important that you collect as much information as possible as that would give you a wide array of objects and ideas that you could integrate into the logo.

Sometimes the name of the company can also lead to a brilliant logo design. For example suppose there is a company called Rockland Industries, in this case the logo could have a rocky background with the name in the front.

 

Step 3: Visual Research

This deals with the actual research into the style of logo that you are looking to design. This is where the actual designing part starts. You research on the various logo designs around you to decide what pattern of style, shape, and attitude you are going to follow while designing the logo.

A good way of doing this is by researching on logos used by companies working in the same sector as your client and assessing the quality of logos used by them. It is good to look out for the new types of styles that are being introduced in the designing world and it is important that you refurbish your existing expertise and ideas. This is a good way of establishing a better understanding of the market that you are dealing with so that you can stand out in the competition.

Often many designers avoid using this technique as they believe natural imagination provides them with better ideas though this many times results in restricting the quality of your logo design.

 

Step 4: Sketching & Conceptualising

This is where you start making rough sketches of your design. It is the phase where for the first time you have to work using your creativity. During this phase the designer draws the skeleton of the logo using all the research material that he has collected over a period of time. Some designers use a sketchbook for this purpose; some prefer napkins, while some simply straight away start using the computer.

Using a computer at first is not always the advisable thing to do. When the designer creates various sketches and thinks about various concepts that could be integrated into the design, a designer’s mind is almost never idle and hence the constant flurry of ideas continues all day long, and this will be a little hard to implement or take down on a computer. You could come up with designs anywhere, from professional studios to your favourite park or even a coffee shop.

Once you hit upon what exactly you are looking for, you will probably immediately realise that and this is just the right time to take a break.

 

Step 5: Reflection

It is important that you know exactly when you need to take a break from work and just relax for a while before you go back to work. Continuous work without breaks can lead to excessive boredom. This could lead to a stage where your creativity comes to an end and you get stuck up with your work. This is where a break would help in the rejuvenation of your ideas and would make you think straight again.

There are good chances that during the break you might spot a new source of inspiration hence further increasing the quality of your work. You come back to work fresh and full of enthusiasm looking forward to continuing the good work. It is also a good phase to ask others about what they think of your work so far. Getting feedback, whether positive or negative, is always a good idea since it helps in optimising your work.

 

Step 6: Finishing the logo designing

Once you have all your logo designs together and you are clear about the path that you are going to follow for finishing your logo designs, you set down on differentiating the good from the not so good from the bad. You choose the work that you think has the potential to please the customer and those designs make it to the final list while the other less desirable stuff is discarded.

A successful design is not necessarily one which is a feast to the eyes, you need to make sure that the designs you choose for presentation also successfully convey the message that the company wants to convey through their logo and help in providing the company with something unique through which the general public can easily recognise your client’s company.

 

Step 7: Presentation

Here the designer showcases his final work to his client. It is important that your presentation is highly professional and provides the client with all the details. It is your prerogative whether you want to showcase all the logo designs that you have developed or whether you want to just showcase the finalised designs that you had chosen.

You could even choose to give the client a brief on how you went through the whole process of logo designing. During the presentation you could choose to present yourself as a consultant and advice the company on which logo could prove to be the ideal choice or you could choose to simply show the company what you have designed and leave the final decision up to your client.

 

Step 8: Celebration

After long months of unending work filled with a lot of tension and stress, a celebration is very much deserved. It is good to move out of the small studios and away from the drawing boards and computer screens where you must have spent countless sleepless nights trying to come up with the perfect design. Different designers have different ways of celebrating.

Some like to go on a holiday on the weekend, or go to your favourite pub with a bunch of special friends or maybe just go for a movie followed by a candle night dinner with your significant other. Many like to keep it simple and choose to catch up with all the lost sleep. Not all designers can enjoy the luxury of celebrating, many designers work on multiple logos at the same time or have to immediately start with a new project the moment they are finished with one. My advice – spend some of the cold hard cash you earned. You know you deserve it.