A Step-by-Step Guide on How to Design the Perfect Logo for Your Company

Step One: Research

You probably didn’t think that this was going to be the very first step, did you? But research is a vital part of putting together a logo that works well for you and stands out from the competition. Just like researching for small business ideas to make money, logo design ideas also come from extensive research.

The last thing you want is for your potential customers to get you mixed up with someone else, and buy from your competitor!

Step Three: Choose A Color Palette

This is technically something that can be done later on during this process, but I like to have my basic palette in mind before I get too far in creating my logo.

Color might seem like a secondary consideration for a logo, but it's actually one of the more vital components of your design. The reason for this has a lot to do with the psychology of logo color.

Though the rules are not hard and fast, and what works for one person won't always work for everyone else, the basics remain the same: we tend to respond in a certain way to a certain color.

Blue, for example, is a soothing color for bank logos.

Yellow can be warm and friendly, ideal for communication and media logos.

Red can have a negative connotation of anger, but can also be the most highly motivating color, to the point that seeing it is like a call to action.

That's one of the reasons why a whopping 95 percent of the top brands out there today use only one or two colors in their logo.

These are all things to take into account when choosing your palette.

For the purposes of this article, I'm creating a logo for a board game company called Reyquake (fake). I want to think outside the box, so rather than stick with the bright colors commonly used for these types of game logos, or going with the default suggested by the name (yellow and purple), I’m choosing teal blues and greens, with a light yellow for accent.

Step Five: Digitize

There are several different methods of digitizing a drawing, and it really comes down to your style and how you like to work.

• You can draw out a more refined version of an idea, and either scan it into your computer or take a picture.
• From there, you can use the drawing as an outline and create the lines of your vector logo over the original sketch.
• Or, you can run a vectorization tool over the drawing itself and render it as a vector, able to be scaled up and down without losing integrity.

Or, rather than doing any of those things, you can start from scratch in your program and just use your sketch as a basic guide to the digital version.

In this case, for Reyquake, I chose to do the second one. I chose this because the sketch that I ended up using as my logo inspiration was quite simple, and I felt that the “genre” the company belonged to would benefit from straight lines and sharp edges.

I’ve used several different softwares, but for this logo I used Gravit Designer which is versatile, relatively easy to use, and gloriously free.

I opened up a new file and set the canvas to unlimited. (Gravit Designer does have several pre-set templates and sizes that you can use for creating custom graphic design for specific platforms, like Facebook.)

Since my logo is going to be quite simple and not require a great deal of adjustments or layers, I just started with the line tool.

Other options, like the shape tool and the pen tool, are also easy to use. But I wanted to create my own shape logo, and the line tool gives you guidelines, which made it easy to connect the lines.

A word of caution about the line tool in this particular software — your lines look connected, but you won’t be able to use the fill tool unless you take the extra step of connecting the lines as paths.

I'll show you how to do that when we get to that point. But it’s worth noting ahead of time to save yourself some frustration.

As I put my lines together, I turned on a blue drop shadow for each one to create a fuller effect to the lines.

After a few adjustments, my jagged crown logo was complete, blue drop shadows and all. Now, I wanted to give it a little extra dimension, so I used "select all" and grouped it, connecting each element into one shape.

Then I used "duplicate" to give myself an identical copy of the shape, and moved it slightly to the left to give it dimension.

I adjusted the colors on the drop shadows for the second crown outline, using one of the fill options, to help the dimension stand out a little bit more.

The next step was to fill in the color that I wanted, but before I could do that I had to ungroup both layers and use the path tool as shown below.

I selected all and then chose "connect path lines" to create an entire closed shape. It did look like it was closed before, but appearances are deceiving.

But now my crown is a whole shape! Which means it is fillable!

The path connected the lines and also created a diagonal line from side to side, top to bottom, which was ideal for my choice of fill, so I left it was it was.

Then selected the second layer and filled in with a slightly darker, more opaque shade of the same teal. With the echoing colors and the blue drop shadows, I've got my color palette that I had in mind before I even started using the software.

I made a slight adjustment to the lines at this point, and moved on to the text.

Gravit Designer has several fonts to choose from, so I chose a fun, well-defined font with a lot of impact behind it. (I'm also in favor of checking out new fonts that don’t come standard with programs, such as some available on Behance.)

After my final few adjustments, I used the shape tool with a gradient fill to give my company logo design a background, to give it an extra layer of definition that will help it to stand out when it is used on marketing materials and packaging

Step Seven: Check For Scalability And Adaptability

Now that your logo is "finalized" (in quotation marks because sometimes there are several finalizations required) and joined together as one graphic, take some time to check on the scalability.

Scalability is vital for a logo. Think about all the different places that your logo will be used. From things like business cards and other marketing materials, to product packaging, to your website, to social media platforms, to — who knows? — billboards and the sides of busses.

istock.com/milindri

Obviously there's an incredible range of sizes covered in all of those platforms.

So a scalable marketing logo is one that will not lose its integrity when it is either shrunk in size or blown up. It means that it won’t get fuzzy, distorted, and look poorly rendered just because it isn’t shown in its original designed size.

This is important for several reasons:

• Poorly rendered logos are often difficult to read and decipher, causing confusion among your audience.
• A confused audience is less likely to even try to decipher a logo, because they don’t see the benefit of it.
• Unscalable logos reflect badly on your company.
• A logo may be the most beautifully designed piece of graphic art in existence, but if it renders poorly and is unscalable, it doesn’t matter a bit.

Try your logo in several different sizes, possibly even printing it out, to ensure that it is scalable.

Of course, if you’ve followed the steps above you’ll have a vector image, which is ideal for scalability. Vectors can be scaled without losing their integrity, but raster images are based on pixels, which is why they get fuzzy when their size is changed.

Your logo also needs to be adaptable. Since it’s going to be used in so many different places, in so many different mediums, it’s a good idea to test a few variants out. Your logo should show in black and white well like this scissors logo, and in one color. You should also have variants without text, if text is included in your original logo.

Step Nine: Final Tweaks

With all that feedback under your belt, it’s back to the software..

Open up the copy you saved prior to grouping. Each element can be edited as necessary. Add to, take away from, adjust colors and sizing and spacing.