Picking a logo design can be tough. There are thousands upon thousands of font faces, color schemes and design styles to choose from, and it can be difficult to figure out which combination of these elements will create a winner. So where do you start?
I always recommend starting by finding some logo examples that you like. Regardless of the goals and style that your brand embodies, if you don’t love the logo, you won’t feel comfortable handing out your business card, driving past your sign, or branding company vehicles and clothing. There are a ton of great online resources for this, such as logopond.com. Browse through the website and pick out 3-10 logos that you really like, and try to identify what you like about them. Do you like the font? What about the color choices? Figuring this part out will help you establish a shared aesthetic with your logo designer and set the project on track for success.
Once you have identified the styles that fit your personal preference, it’s time to refer back to your mission statement to determine what message you would like your logo to convey. Your designer should be able to work through this process with you, which involves figuring out the four W’s of marketing; the “Who, What, Where, and Why” answers to questions that should be addressed as part of your marketing effort. Who will buy your products or services? What types of products or services will you be offering? Where do you expect to use your logo? What are your goals? Your logo needs to reflect your answers to these questions. For example, a logo for a motorcycle apparel company will likely be very different from a logo used by an online yoga channel for digital materials.
Once you have addressed the four W’s of marketing, its time to put your developer to work on creating concepts. They will use the information that you have provided during the previous steps to create a set of logo concepts that are meant to serve as the initial building blocks for the rest of the project. You might end up loving all of the designs, you might end up disliking all of them, but most of the time, you will end up liking some of the designs much more than others but will need to refine these concepts further. One important thing to remember is that this package will help to identify the winning logo design as much through the liked concepts as the disliked ones, as logo design can be very much a game of calculated deductive reasoning. I like to think of it as a competition among potential logo concepts to determine the winner.
This process reviewing batches of logo concepts will continue until you have found a logo that you love. Ideally, this only takes a few revisions but sometimes your designer will nail it right off the bat, and other times it will take a while. In my experience, the quality of the finished logo design isn’t affected by the number of iterations required to reach the finished product.