The Ultimate Guide to Designing Advertising Logos

The Advertising Logo Design Process — Step By Step

The basics of logo design are the perfect place to start. After all, whether you’re creating a logo for a general advertising company, or whether you need one for a specific niche — a television advertising logo, for example,— the general process boils down to the same steps, often adapted but never forgotten.

And here they are, in a handy ten-step program for logo development.

Step 1: Know your brand. This is the first step for a reason: the brand personality should set the tone for every creative decision you make when designing your advertising logo.

Step 2: Research the competition. This is important, because creating a unique logo is vital not only for internal branding, but for proving your advertising abilities to your potential customers. You don’t want to end up with a copycat advertising icon, so don’t just type “ads logo png” into Google and then run with it! Take pride in the design process.

Step 3: Brainstorm ideas. A great way to do this is to really focus on the traits that identify the brand, and that your brand has in common with other things, like animals. This is an excellent way to identify a potential “mascot” for your brand. For instance, if your brand is “playful,” a potential mascot could be an otter. It really depends on the specifics of the brand, but that should give you an idea of what to look for. Write down three or four “personality traits” that belong to your brand. What do those personality traits make you think of?

Step 4: Sketch it out. Even in this digital age, many designers like to work with pen, pencil, and paper when they’re in the brainstorming stage. Using the ideas you’ve already noted, fill an entire page with logo ideas. Don’t like any of them enough to develop them further? Fill another page. Give yourself time, and remember to go back to the inspiration behind the brand itself if you feel like you’ve hit a wall. As web designer Dainis Graveris says:

“Sketching helps to evolve your imagination. Once you understand it, you will always start from just white paper.”

Step 5: Pick a few sketches to concentrate on, and work on refining them into an actual logo. For example if you are sketching a logo for a creative director, then narrow down to a few sketches with a variety of concepts like a film production logo, play icon or similar. Try to stick with two or three, to keep from getting overwhelmed. Analyze what you like about them, why they speak to you, and how they relate back to the brand. Are they a good representative of your company?

Step 6: Develop the logo using your software of choice. There are tons of programs to choose from, including free software like Inkscape, paid programs like Adobe Illustrator, and helpful logo design software like logodesign.net. The plus with this last option is that it makes it easier to pinpoint advertising symbols that might commonly be used, if you’re missing anything in your brainstorming session.

Step 7: Choose color and typeface based on your brand. Colors and fonts are important factors — even if you decide to go with a black and white scheme, and even if you choose to use an advertising icon logo instead of a combination or text-based logo. Those are still valid creative decisions that need attention.

Step 8: Adjust spacing and layout and tweak the details. Put your elements together and create a prototype.

Step 9: Get some feedback. If you’re designing for your own advertising company, ask other employees or outsiders whether they think the logo fits your brand. If you’re designing for a client, now’s the time to show the logo off and get their viewpoint.

Step 10: Make final adjustments based on feedback, and launch your logo.

As you go through these steps, remember to keep things as simple as possible. As graphic designer and logo design expert Tyler Littwin says, logo design is ultimately about:

“...Solving for a problem. You're trying to convey something simply that gets across the core tenets of an organization and what that organization does.”

Simplicity is the key.

These ten steps can be followed to design a logo for any market or business. To really up your design game for an advertising logo design, however, it’s smart to take a look at what makes advertising logos unique.

Entertainment And Music Promotion Logo

This particular subset is easy to pinpoint examples for. Any advertising symbol that links back to these areas would make a good logo.

Consider these possibilities for inspiration

• Camera logo
• Old fashioned film reel icon (perfect for an advertising company that promotes films)
• Microphone
• Record player
• Stereo
• Radio
• Star
• Music note
• Sheet music

As is the case with most advertising logo inspirations, it’s really easy to trace ideas for entertainment logos or music video production logos back to a specific reason why they fit the niche well. These ideas don’t take a lot of explanation, which means that the logo design will be easy for your viewer to understand.

A good example is this simple logo design for digital marketing agency Mechanix, which uses simply a stylized computer or TV screen with a cog silhouette.

At the same time, you run a bigger risk of creating a logo that is too generic or which doesn’t stand out. So crafting a great design requires balance and forethought, as well as making sure that you follow through on step nine of the ten-step design process we outlined earlier.

Communication And Media Advertising Logo

Every time we turn around, it seems as though there’s another source of media or social media platform. Communication, especially in our digital age, is a big deal and a fast-growing market. So there are more advertising companies focused on communication and media advertising than ever before, as well.

Some great communication and media logo inspiration sources for this type of advertising company include:

• Globe symbol
• Play icon
• Mailbox
• Envelope
• Pen or pencil
• Lightbulb
• Megaphone
• Banner
• Star

It’s easy to see how these inspiration ideas could lend themselves to even more specific sub-genres within this type of advertising company. For a news media logo, for example, designers will often use a globe shape in order to reflect a worldwide view or with a combination of TV icons to denote TV broadcast media logos. For digital marketing logo design, drawing on common icons like an envelope or mailbox helps the audience to know what to expect.

Social media company logos, on the other hand, often walk the line between traditional advertising symbols and unique inspiration. YouTube uses a simple play icon; Instagram uses a camera; but Twitter and Snapchat, for example, have highly-unique iconic logos with stories behind them.

The Hub Strategy and Communication Agency, meanwhile, uses a simple star or asterisk-inspired symbol logo, adding in a vintage feel and a rich color palette.

The point is that the symbols draw attention, just like your marketing campaigns will, and reflect the idea of communication.

They’re all good examples of how you can draw on traditional inspiration for your advertising logo, but choose a unique design that makes your company stand out.

It’s probably obvious by now that there is potentially a lot of crossover within advertising niches, as well. Don’t feel that you need to stick to music-related icons just because your advertising business focuses on promoting musicians, for example; the best rock band logos intrigue the audience and make them want to know more about the thought processes behind them. That’s part of what makes a good logo so memorable.

How To Pick A Color For Advertising Logos

Color choice is one of those basic fundamentals for any graphic design, but it’s especially important for logo design because your logo needs to pack a punch in such a small area.

Logos are typically shown as only a few inches wide by a few inches high. Not a lot of real estate, which means that colors are unlikely to be overwhelming, but can easily be underutilized.

Choosing your logo color palette is about more than just the colors you happen to like, of course. There’s an entire area of research behind the idea of the psychology of logo color, which is based on how we tend to react to certain colors. Those reactions suggest that certain colors carry inherent traits that influence how we perceive them, and this inherent attribution of traits can be used to your benefit in logo design.

For example, yellow and orange tones communicate warmth, vitality, friendliness, and cheer, and are preferred by advertising and communication companies. Red is bold, dramatic, and can be a warning color. Blue carries the feeling of trust, calmness, and tradition.

Banking on those color psychology tendencies gives you a shorthand to use in communicating with your audience. Choose colors that convey the message you want to send for your brand.

At the same time, advertising is about, well, advertising — so you’ll likely want to use colors that draw the eye and get attention. There’s a reason why warm colors, especially yellow and orange, are frequently used within call to action buttons in website design — they grab attention, and are more likely to incite the viewer to action.

If that’s a valuable lesson for you as an advertising specialist, it’s also a valuable lesson for your branding and logo design.

How To Pick A Font For Advertising Logos

It probably won’t surprise you to learn that fonts, too, carry inherent traits and are the subject of the “psychology of fonts,” just like colors.

Fonts may be a little bit trickier, however. It’s easier to relate or identify with a color than it is with a typeface. We tend to think of fonts as just being utilitarian: their only job is to be legible, and beyond that, does it really matter?

Well, yes, it does, as a matter of fact. Certain fonts are more apt to be paid attention to, for one thing. A heavy, bold font is likely to draw the eye, whereas a light, thin font may easily be ignored. Script fonts are also less likely to keep attention — we like fonts that are easy to read, right off the bat.

Here is a very basic breakdown of the three major font types and what they evoke:

• Serif fonts. These are more formal, and tend to promote a feeling of trust and tradition.
• Sans-serif fonts. These are informal, modern, and more likely to be seen as straightforward and no-nonsense.
• Script fonts. These are elegant and creative, but often carry less of an impact than their straightlaced cousins.

Again, the choice you make will depend heavily on the brand personality that you are trying to promote. Is your advertising company a straightforward, traditional heavy-hitter? Think about a serif font. Is it a creative, quirky, out-of-the-box-thinker? Consider a script font.

The most important thing in choosing a font is to ensure that it is user-friendly, and make your text logo design readable. Don’t opt for a font so far off the beaten path that it renders your logo impossible to read. Memorability = usability.

What Type Of Logo Should You Choose?

Along with the color and font choice, there’s another heavy-hitter to consider: what type of logo are you going to design to begin with?

You have some options:

• Mascot — this type of logo uses a mascot, such as an animal, as its main focal point.
• Lettermark, wordmark, or monogram — this type of logo is heavily type-based.
• Iconic — this type of logo uses a stylized representation of an actual object.
• Symbol — a symbol icon is representative of an idea, and can be abstract.
• Combination — combination marks use a graphic as well as type.

Within these basic logo types, there are a lot of smaller subsets that include different details and creative decisions. Each of them deserve consideration, but some lend themselves more easily to an advertising logo.

Let’s take a look at these, and why.

Using Your Logo To Brand Your Advertising Company

Branding pioneer and unarguable expert Walter Landor famously said,

“Products are made in the factory, but brands are created in the mind.”

Branding is so tied into reputation, into what the customers think about the company, that the truth of that statement is obvious.

Whether you have a new company or an established name, branding is everything for company growth! That’s because your brand is about more than just the visual components — it’s about how your audience views you, your reputation, and how you interact with others.

But the visual component, admittedly, is what most people think of when they consider branding.

Your logo is probably the first and foremost example of your branding. It’ll be the most commonly-seen visual representation of your brand, and it will act as a shorthand to connect with your customers. When they see your logo, they will think of your brand as a whole, and react accordingly.

For this reason, it’s hard to overuse a good logo. Your logo should be used in your website design — on every page, in fact — in your paper and print marketing, on your social media accounts, in your emails, on your business cards and promotional items — your logo is like a signature. It’s what stamps a product as belonging to your brand.

And remember, proving that you can effectively brand a product is some of the best PR you can get, as an advertising company! So don’t leave your audience in doubt. Brand everything.

Creating An Advertising Logo That Works As An Advertisement

To create the ultimate advertising logo that is the perfect fit for your company, remember to follow the ten steps we outlined above. On top of that, research the trends for your specific company niche, and understand why they’re popular. Take the time to look at the psychologies of color and font, specifically, and don’t forget to look at effective existing logos for some inspiration. Think about what you like about them, and why.

The best logo for an advertising company should be memorable, unique, and effective. It should showcase your skills at grabbing attention — and keeping it. It should send the right message, reflect your brand personality, and stand the test of time.

In short, a great advertising logo has a heavy weight on its shoulders!

But by following the plan outlined here, the greatest advertising logo can be yours.

Written by Zaheer Dodhia, CEO and Founder of LogoDesign.net