So you want to design your own logo.  Maybe you want to start a small business and have requested some logo design quotes, only to discover that professional graphic designers want hundreds or thousands of dollars to design your logo for you.  Maybe you just want to nurture the creative genius within yourself.  Whatever the reason, there are some simple tips you can follow to make sure your design looks like a professional-looking brand and not an amateur, “did-it-myself” piece of junk.

Make sure your logo communicates the purpose of your business, but not too literally.

The number one mistake amateur logo designers make when creating their own brand identity is visually interpreting the purpose of their business too literally.  For example, if you own a piano store, writing the name of your piano store and sticking a piano icon next to it screams amateur.

BAD:

This is too literal to look professional.  What’s more, it’s just bad clipart, available to anyone, anywhere.   It’s not even a unique graphic, which means you have not created a unique brand identity.  What’s worse, the piano clip art features a picture of a grand piano that opens to the left, when all actual grand pianos open to the right.

GOOD:

Notice how this professionally-designed logo incorporates the shape of a grand piano lid without actually sticking a grand piano next to the name of the business.  This is not so literal, but it still communicates “piano,”  which brings is to our second point.

Try to incorporate your graphic into your text.

In the logo above, notice how the graphic of the piano lid is incorporated into the text of the company name.   Any logo design which does this effectively will look more professional than a logo consisting of text and a separate, standalone graphic.

For example, in the Zensa Marketing logo, notice how the lotus blossom is incorporated into the text below it.  The stem of the “k” also doubles as a flower stem:

Which brings us to the third point:

Avoid websites that auto-generate logos for you.

These web sites are a waste of time and energy!  You cannot create an effective brand identity off a logo a machine pieced together for you.  These kinds of logos never look professional, because they never integrate the graphic element into your text.  They can’t.

You might be thinking. . . “But how can I design a logo that follows this rule without knowing how to use expensive design software like Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator?”  If you have a pencil and paper, sketch out some ideas until you find a concept you like.  When you decide on a final concept, take it to a graphic designer who will translate what you’ve drawn into digital art.  Most graphic designers can accomplish this task for you in less than an hour–much less time than it would take them to design a logo for you from scratch.  Hence, the price is significantly cheaper.  Zensa Marketing offers this service for $95.

Make sure you have designed a logo that will scale.

A professionally designed logo will always scale well, which means it will look just as good on a billboard as it will look on your business card.  Many amateur designers don’t take scalability into consideration and wind up designing a logo that is hard to read or interpret at small sizes.

Remember, your logo is the foundation for all your other marketing collateral.

Remember that the logo you design will be the foundation for all your other print collateral.  Your logo dictates which colors and typefaces will be appropriate to use in all your marketing collateral, such as your web site, business cards, letterhead, and brochures.  Therefore, when you design your logo, choose corporate colors you know you’d like to see on the web and in print.

These are the main points to remember.  Happy designing!

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