How to Make a Stunning Logo for Your Business
Apple, Tesla, Bank of America, when you imagine any company with any kind of market presence, be it local or international, you will picture its logo. Even businesses as small as one person need a logo because it is an easy way for your current and potential customers to remember who you are. Having a logo is easy, but the designing logo can be a difficult journey, filled with miscommunication, bad artists, and impaired vision. Luckily, Fotor is here to help walk you through the steps of logo design that you can be proud of! Because Fotor is a powerful online logo maker!
6 Common Types of Logos
First, we need to go over the different types of logo design to help break down and figure out which design is best for you. It will also help you convey to others what you want accurately. So, let’s get started:
Lettermark Logos
These logo design primarily consist of abbreviated company names, represented by letters and symbols, supplemented by colors and some shapes. Whitespace is great for hidden pictures and text, but, as a beginner, we’ll only focus on some of the simpler logos here. You can see that these logo design not only work in their colored iterations but also in black and white. They are easy to imbed on pages, brochures, magazines, or any other publications materials and will be easily spotted thanks to their bold fonts and simple design. It’s a great place to start a logo design from.
Wordmark Logos
Wordmarks are a step above Lettermarks in that they are a custom design of the brand name. It primarily consists of a font, color, spacing, and arrangement of the name of the company. This type of logo design is also called logotype.
What’s great about this time of logo is that your company name is front center, making it easy for anyone to quickly google the name and find your website. It’s great for any small organization that doesn’t have a large following since it’s such a direct connection. It may be a hindrance if your name is particularly long or hard to pronounce. Some of my clients include Chinese names, and you wouldn’t believe how far the attempts are from the actual pronunciation.
Brandmark Logos
Now, these are the kinds of logos that believe a picture is bolder and more viral than words. These are the iconic symbols that you see gracing the advertising landscape all around the world. Even from a young age, we can recognize and even differentiate these types of logos.
Also known as iconic logos or logomarks, can also be a weapon in your advertising arsenal, no matter the size or following. They’re great because they use up less space and are subtler than other more aggressive forms of advertising.
Mascot
Anyone who has been to professional sporting events knows these quite fondly. Whether your team is a braying blue-tick hound named Smokey or some neon green alien that for some reason joined up with a team whose primary color is red, mascots are an extremely effective way to bring character to your brand and help reflect your values to your customers and followers, thus solidifying the relationship you share with them. They can also help to enhance your brand. Some good examples include KFC’s founder and mascot, The Colonel, who is known the world over and gives the brand a stronger pull towards its Southern roots. The Monopoly man has won the hearts of many even though his board game has incited fights at game nights all around the world.
Mascots are an excellent way to put a face to the name of your company and can even double as the logo of your company, which simplifies and directs your advertising efforts even more effectively.
Emblems
These are simply an abstract or representational pictorial image that represents something. Let me introduce you to some iconic emblems:
These are similar to logos but have an even deeper ethos or pathos in regards to a certain concept, so, maybe one day yours can become an emblem for something, like “truth, justice, and the American way”, but for now, think of this as a goal for your logo to reach for and not something you really need to concern yourself with in the beginning.
Combination Logo
A combination mark is where you take your Brandmark, Wordmark, and/or Lettermark and let their powers combine into an all-encompassing logo that both puts an image to a name and vice-versa. Businesses often use these lockup logos as their primary identifying logo, breaking it apart as needed for different uses and scenarios.
What is most important for any logo design is finding the best blend of visual appeal and clarity for whatever situation presents itself. Sometimes, a Lettermark is great; sometimes a Brandmark speaks more than a Wordmark can; but sometimes a Wordmark is exactly what you need. It’s good to find a representation for each.
Parts of a Logo
Now, we will walk you through designing your own logo. We will use a Lettermark to simplify the approach and not make it too complicated.
Font
The typeface is more important than many give it credit for. It can help your brand stick out from others if custom designed and keep it distinct with a copyright on the said font. You can convey a lot with the font as well. Below are 4 common fonts.
A font with a serif, or little “feet”, on the ends of letters will make your brand feel more traditional and formal. They also don’t translate well to pixel-based displays, which are how most logos are displayed. Text in an article loves to have their feet because it makes it easier to stay on the same line when reading and delineates the rows of text. But logos are not text; they are a design.
– Sans-Serif
These are letters without the little “feet”, which makes your logo look more modern and streamlined. These are the fonts you see more in designs because minimalistic designs are trending now and that means as little feet as possible. Like they say in China, don’t draw legs on a snake!
– Script
These are fundamentally calligraphy or cursive scripts. Think of Coca-Cola or General Electric for logos that fit the bill. Careful with these logos because readability is the most important, and folks who didn’t grow up with English will find this hard to decipher. Print may be the superior choice.
– Geographic
This is a more elegant and sophisticated font type It’s great for logos, titles, and a bunch of other roles where style is more important than readability.
Most importantly of all, make sure your font is readable! That’s the most important thing to remember no matter what your final goal is. Make the style match your typeface, but make sure your customers can read it, otherwise, you’re going to have a bad time.
Color
Graphics
When choosing what graphic format to use for your logo, what you should do is stick to vector formatting because it is a lossless format, which means if you want to expand the vector, it’ll still keep its sharpness and still look professional, while choosing things like .jpg will lead to your logo looking pixelated and blurry!
Step-by-step Tutorial: How to design a logo
If you want to see a thorough explanation, please check the following content. Now, let’s try our hand at designing a logo. First, let’s jump over to online design maker www.fotor.com and use our online design tools to create the perfect logo! First, go to the Design page.
Any kind of mascot, emblem, or logo you want to use, you want to make sure it’s simple because you want it to be easily recognized and be able to convert over to a black and white color scheme without losing too much of its flavor.
1. Pick a Design
Open Fotor logo templates to pick a favorite design to get started.
You can see here on the left side resides a plethora of templates you can use to help you start your design process. I’m a gamer, so I want to open a gaming company. I see a perfect template to begin with right here.
2. Change the Font
When you click on the font, you can see all the different functions available to you, like resize, color change, type change, and many, many more. You can also edit the font like any normal photo editing tool.
Here, you can see the program also helps you center different pieces in different shapes to make it easier, no matter your hand-eye coordination.
Not only do these dotted lines guide your placement, but it even has sticky locking, so you won’t have to strain your eyes and hands trying to get it JUST right!
3. Change the Color
Enough fooling around! Let’s design our own logo now with this template! I honestly don’t like the blue and yellow, so let’s play around with that now. I clicked on the little yellow box, and the top bar popped up and let me change the color with a couple of clicks. I did the same for the blue background.
As you can see, as soon as you choose a selection, the appropriate color square appears in the upper right for your convenience.
After I got some colors that I liked, which made my logo look much more royal. Then you can download your design logo.
Conclusion
Once we got down to it, wasn’t that easy?? The hardest part about logo designing really is the first step. But once you finally put that metaphorical pencil to paper, the ideas will flow, and you’ll end up with a logo that will work. Don’t worry, you have the rest of your business’ lifetime to come up with cooler ideas, so don’t worry about it getting it perfect the first time, just right, so start with something manageable and update it as great ideas come to you. These tips you’ve read in our article will certainly help you more smoothly reach your end goal of a usable logo. So, log on to online graphic designer fotor.com now and make that logo!
