6 Steps to Professional Logo Design
-Use a color scheme. If you use too many colors, typically your
designs will begin to look tacky and unprofessional. This does
somewhat depend on the business type, however. If you're
creating a logo for a toy store, this would be an exception. But
you'd definitely want to stick to only a couple colors if you're
designing for an insurance firm, for instance.
-Keep it simple. Try creating logos that convey as much
information as possible while also being as simple as possible.
This is the mark of a professional designer. Having a simple
logo will help in a number of ways, including the ease of
distribution. For instance, they are easy to place on letterhead
and business cards because they don't require much space to be
recognized and understood. If your logo is the Mona Lisa with
some text slapped on top of it, you would always need the logo
to be quite large just for people to be able to see what it is,
and this is the kind of thing you will want to avoid.
-Make it memorable. You want viewers to become used to a logo,
and they will do just that if you make it unforgettable. Think
outside of the box and try to create a unique quality that's
never been seen before. Making your logos memorable will, if you
are or wish to become a designer, help you in the same way it
helps the business it represents, with recognition. If your logo
is well-known, that's a great mark for the portfolio.
-Use a font that compliments the style of what it represents.
You aren't going to want to use an old-english type font for a
pet store logo, and you aren't going to want to use a child's
handwriting for a debt consolidation firm. Just use common sense
in this area. You can also search the web for free fonts if you
aren't quite happy with what you've got. There are a bunch of
websites out there that contain lots of great community-designed
fonts.
-Make your logo fit with different background colors. If you've
got black text and a black icon, they won't show up if you have
to place them on a black background, so create multiple versions
of your logos to accommodate for different background colors. If
it's imperative to stick to a certain color, then you might try
adding a stroke (border) to your design to make it show up
better, or perhaps placing the logo on top of a solid-colored
rectangle of inverse color. You always will want your logos to
be clearly visible so make every effort to keep them that way.
-Use vectors. Create your logos using vectors (paths) as opposed
to pixels if possible, so you will be able to scale them up at a
later date with no loss in quality. This way, you will not run
into any issues if you ever need to print out your logo that
you've created as a 200*100 pixel file onto a poster or banner.
Insufficient size when you're stuck with pixels just isn't very
easy to recover from. The only options you would have would be
to either ignore the problem and scale it up despite the bad
quality, or completely redesign the logo at a higher resolution,
and you're simply not going to want to do either of these.
If you stick to these guidelines your logos will start looking
very attractive, but don't take them all at face value; rules
are made to be broken!