Logo design is a crucial part of any business strategy and is one of the first things you should consider when laying out your plan for web domination. A good logo can help a company to truly thrive and there are countless examples of businesses and brands that have succeeded at least partly thanks to a great logo. FedEx, Coca-cola, Nike, Adidas, McDonalds, Apple, Virgin, BP and Windows to name a few.

In this post we will be looking at everything you need to know to start creating your own stunning business logo designs. This will cover every stage from the initial planning and design to the process of creating high quality images that you can publish and share across your marketing efforts.

What’s the Difference Between a Brand and a Logo?

Before you get started, it’s important to understand the difference between a logo design and a brand. Put simply, your brand is the overall image you are creating for your business with the logo simply being a part of that.

Other important aspects of a brand include your ‘mission statement’, your color scheme, any design language you might use throughout your products, services and marketing – maybe even a jingle you could use in your advertising.

The purpose of a brand is to give you more ways to market yourself as well as to help consist a consistent thread throughout your products. This way, customers know what to expect when they deal with you and will be more likely to seek you out in future. Your logo meanwhile acts almost like a ‘calling card’ for your brand so that you need only that single image to represent your business and all the ways that you are unique.

How to Come Up With Ideas for Your Logo Design

The first stage in creating a logo is always the initial idea generation. The objective here is to come up with ideas that will be representative of your company while at the same time being simple and easy to recreate. Simple business logos work best as they are the most versatile and can thus be used in the widest variety of marketing materials, products and packaging. At the same time, simpler logos will usually be more iconic and recognizable.

A good place to start with your business logo design is with a ‘moodboard’. A moodboard is essentially a collage of images that you collect as inspiration for a project. In the case of a logo, this moodboard might consist of logos that you like from other brands, images of your own products and images of things that relate to the name of your brand. In our case – a ‘whistle’ makes a lot of sense because the name is ‘ColorWhistle’.

Once you have a selection of images that inspire you for your design, you should then find your moodboard is able to give you an idea for the general ‘direction’, ‘theme’ or color scheme of your logo. You can then try combining your company name (written with unique fonts) along with different images to come up with some potential business logo designs.

Note while doing this you should try to avoid ‘clichéd’ ideas when choosing your design. That means avoiding things that are used too frequently in other logos and thus won’t be unique or appear creative and thoughtful. Globes, ticks and speech bubbles are all over done and should thus be avoided.

How to Create Your Business Logo

Once you have an idea for a logo design, the next thing to do is to actually start creating it. Of course this requires a more measured approach than other aspects of design. Remember: this is going to be used on your websites, packaging, advertising and more and will become an ambassador for your business. In other words, the quality needs to reflect the quality of your business and thus should be flawless.

As such, logos should be created with vector software. This works differently than paint software as it doesn’t simply save the pixels but rather the angles, the lengths, the curves and the coordinates of each line and color. In other words, vector software provides the mathematical algorithm necessary to reproduce your image perfectly. In turn, this means that it can be blown up to any size or edited in any way with no loss of quality. This is crucial in case you someday need to blow your logo up to fit on a billboard or in case you want to reproduce it in blue or in another language.

The best known vector software is Adobe Illustrator and this is pretty much the industry standard when it comes to logo design. At ColorWhistle, we are also have expertise in CorelDraw. This is another popular vector program that is perfect for making beautiful logos and other designs.

Working with a Logo Designer

If you don’t feel 100% confident in creating your own logo design, then you will likely need to outsource the process to a professional service that can handle it for you. Understanding the process of business logo design, this means you need to make sure they fully understand your company including your mission statement and the look and feel of your products and packaging. This is what will allow them to properly handle the moodboard/idea generation process. Pointing them in the direction of logos and fonts you like can be a great help.

Ultimately, you should then receive not only an AI (Adobe Illustrator) file but also PNGs and JPEGs if you requested them. They may also provide you with multiple versions of your logo so that you can do some market research to help choose the best one.

At ColorWhistle we do all this and more. If you’re looking for a beautiful business logo that will represent the very best of your business then Get in touch today!

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