A well designed logo combined with a company's branding is arguably one of the most important factors in an organisation's marketing in today's society. If you love logo design as much as me, then you'll want to do it properly, and I'm sure you will find the advice below helpful and enjoyable.
Concepts, research, and more concepts
Somewhere out there is the perfect logo for your company - the difficulty comes in trying to find it. Research is the best way to understand what your competitors are doing and generate concept ideas. Use the internet to gather this information, then brainstorm. Remember, if you have any good ideas write them down, the last thing you want to do is forget them.
What do you want your logo to do?
It's a good idea to understand in what context your logo will be seen. The best logos work well across different environments such as billboard advertising, stationery, websites, business cards etc.
The power of sketching
Many designers will often go straight for the computer and start designing a logo. Whilst this is not wrong, I prefer to go back to basics and start sketching out logo concepts. By doing this I can quickly create many concepts and variations of these concepts to see what works and what doesn't. The larger logo design houses tend to work this way, as starting off straight at the computer can slow the process down. Initial sketching of designs keeps the creativity flowing and can streamline the initial stages of the design process.
Test the logo at different sizes
Your logo will be seen in many sizes through its lifetime. When you have some concepts you like, test them by printing them out at various sizes to see how they look.
Keep it simple
The best logos work because people are able to remember them and interpret what they stand for. Logos that are over complicated run the risk of detracting from what you stand for and can become meaningless at small sizes.
Use a professional program
Many people make the mistake of designing a logo in photoshop. If you are serious about your logo design you should use Illustrator or a similar program that is able to output vectors. This means if your logo is scaled up it will not become fussy or lose quality.
Test in many colours
If your primary logo is dark in colour then you will want to create a reversed logo that can be seen on dark backgrounds. Also test the logo in a variety of printing methods, such as one colour, two colour, four colour and so on.
Test your logo next to text
Most logos will normally be seen next to text and not on their own. Test your logo with a tag line, justify the logo and text to the left, to the right and centred to see how it looks.
