Logo Design Process

Posted by Plato Design Agency - Scott on 26 November 2010 | 1 Comments

Tags: Graphic Design, Logos, Branding

One of the areas there was a lot of work in for me this week was branding and logo design, which got me thinking some of you might find it interesting to see an example of the processes we go through before you receive your shiny new designs.

One of the first things we do is to set up a meeting between and account manager and yourself, this is discuss what you want, how much it will cost etc. It is also an opportunity for us to understand you and your business, who your target market is, who are your competitors, how do you want to be perceived, and any design ideas you may have yourself (we do listen to those!)

After this the designer (in this case me) goes through the information and forms an idea of who you want to be, i personally think very visually, so i’ve usually already got a pretty good idea at this early stage of fonts, colours, style etc, although i do also need to take into account how the logo will be used, a great logo can become very average very quickly when its applied badly to a business card or website due to a lack of forethought from the designer.

I then start to research ideas, getting inspiration from a variety of online sources and sketching out rough ideas as they come to me, these don’t have to be detailed, the idea is more in my head than on the page, they’re really there just to guide me during the next steps.

Once i have a few solid options down i scan in the pages and open them in Adobe Illustrator. I then lay out your company name and start trawling through the many fonts we have on file, looking for styles and shapes that project the company image you want the public to see, this is an important part of the process, and can be quite time consuming as there is quite an art to understanding what the general public will feel when they see a shape or style of lettering. I then adjust the letter spacing, font sizes and colours as well as any other tweaks to the letter and word shape i think will make it stronger.

I won’t go into the technical details, but i then digitally recreate the options i had put onto paper earlier and arrange then with the relevant fonts, adjusting scale and positioning until i find an option that is both pleasing to the eye in terms of balance and composition, but is also going to have proportions that are easily useable over a range of media.

Ill play around with colour options, and much like with the fonts there’s a lot of thought that needs to go into this as colour psychology has a major influence on public perception. A lot of the time we will have a bit of guidance here from you already, you may have existing company colours to match to, or simply a preference or idea in your head, so we start with those and try to stick as close to them as possible, but sometimes there is no pre-conceived ideas here, or we feel there could be a better option available and we will put together some options showing these as well.

We’ll then tidy everything up, lay up the best options, and before you know it you’ll have them sitting in front of you ready for your appraisal!

So that’s basically my logo process, sometimes the ideas come easy, sometimes they don’t, and most of the time the client is happy with the options presented with only minimal tweaking, which is great as it means we’ve  gotten onto the same page at that early meeting stage, and we’re doing our job right!