So below I'm going to talk you through the steps a professional logo designer takes to get a finished design. This is NOT a tutorial, it's a guide, something to help you as a prospect client or designer see what it takes to brand a company.
I'll also add do's and dont's as I go along for designers or people planning on making their own logo for their business, the last thing you want is to have an amateurish logo represent you and your business, so read on!
First off, usually after accepting a project a designer is sent a project brief. Now it's important that a client sends a detailed brief, and equally as important for the designer to understand and carefully read the brief.
A logo design brief usually includes the following (or at least should include the following):- description of the message you want the logo to send
- your target market, age, gender, lifestyle, etc
- the company history, a little background info is useful
- your budget - never low ball a designer, he'll tell you to piss off (remember, for the most part, you're not paying for a professional designers 'time' you're paying them for their skill. BIG difference, and remember, you get what you pay for, always.)
- time frame in which you want the logo done, be reasonable, nothing is going to be finished in 24hours, obviously.
So lets start with a made up brief, like the one below for example (it's rough so don't pay it too much attention).
Mock up brief:
We're opening a new restaurant called FireTree Grille. The restaurant is targeted for people aged 25+ both genders. We want to target the higher middle class part of society.
FireTree is owned by me and my wife and we want to bring something new to the Manhattan nightlife scene, something classy but alive. The logo should give an Upscale Rustic feel, stylish but subtle. We want the mark itself to stand alone so we can print it on our dinner wear and so on.
Our budget is $1,000-$1,500 and we have around a week before we need to start using it in the restaurant and advertisements.
------------------------------------------------------------
------------------------------------------------------------
At this point you'll ask them some questions to get more details, what colors are they into, how many colors they want in their logo, what text would they like placed within the design and so on. Ask them some other general questions, anything that helps you get a better idea of what they want, if they can provide you a sketch of what they have in mind that's a plus but never force them to do that, some clients have NO idea what it is they want, so be nice
Ok, now that we have enough info to start designing, we STOP. Yep, we print out the brief and all details then switch off the PC/Laptop and sit down with a pencil and some paper. yep, just for a bit, sketch the first few things that come into your head even if you can't sketch, just do it. (so no1 feels bad i did what i call rough blindfolded sketches...yeah it's a technique i have where i just doodle random things that come to mind by looking at a set of words I write on the page) In this case, they're Classy, Rustic, Stylish and Subtle...nothing subtle about my damn sketches, but anyway, im a digital artist so don't hate!
I'm sure you guys might do this a different way, im just talking you through my process, this part is rough, fast and shouldn't ever take longer than 2minutes. just doodle without even looking at the page, who cares how bad this is, it's just filtering your thoughts in terms of those keywords i have before me you know? Just get it on the page as fast as you can before your rational thinking kicks in and restricts you from being insanely creative or just plain crap in my case here, ahaha.
What i do then is circle the ones that i think have potential, now I know, you're looking at the sketches thinking what the hell can bring the potential out of any of these...well, it's not that hard to see, just imagine it being refined, tweaked, circle ones you like or thing can combine to come up with one ro 2 solid concepts. Now go back to the PC/Laptop and research.
Research about the company, the industry, restaurants and Manhattan. Collect your thoughts, things you collected during research and if you must, take a swing at sketching again, if you're ready get designing...i sketched again because this is actually (day 2 of me writing this post) lol.
Now some tips, don't ever use photoshop to design a professional logo. Here's why. See, Industry standards are important, and scalability is VERY important, you cant give a client some amazing looking 400pxl by 400pxl logo, that's useless even as a transparent png, because they can't scale it bigger for print. So learn how to use Illustrator, understand what DPI is, and learn to design without color, B/W basically, my motto is if it looks good in B/W it'll look great with a bit of color. Or if you must, use just 2 colors when designing, a BG color and something for the type/mark.
Using illustrator is the only way to go about designing logos in specific because the resulting product is in vector format, can be scaled for use on anything, side of a boat, or a business card, or on a website, and it'll be the same exact quality.
So I open up Illustrator and get down to it, first thing is work on the mark itself, then work around it and play around with the type once it's refined.
So here's what i start off with, mutated stag/crab fire tree...a no no, but an attempt none the less:
And then with a little tweaking and playing around with other sketches i
had and refining I end up with something like this:
Looking better, Now to slap some type on it and see what that looks like:
Now here's a couple do's and dont's to help some of you out:
DO: design a one-color version first, always, you have to. ok?
DO: design the mark first and find type later (if doing a mark)
DO: check the logo for scalability, some marks when scaled way down become unrecognizable.
DO: make sure you've got some good music on while you're designing, no Britney Spears crap or Spice girls or Timberlake. Ok?
DONT: dont add clipart into your logo, or photography, that's so 1932! yes 1932, not a typo...
DONT: dont use registered trademarks, obviously.
DONT: dont use that damn swoosh.
DONT: generally dont mix serif and sans serif fonts
Anyway so now that I look at the mark a little, I don't like the font much, it
could do with tweaking:
Nice, I like it, slap it on witht he mark and make
some final tweaks to give it that classy, rustic feel:
Quote:
|
Signed, sealed and delicious... if i do say so myself
|
Linear Mode
