Logo Creation

Process

Logo design is more of a creative element, which can hardly be broken down into simple steps. However, a logo can be an integral part of all templates. It can act as a mark of ownership, and also add a nice finishing touch of class. Logos can be designed in many ways ranging from drawing and scanning upto photoshop. If you completely lack artistic talents, like I do, you can even create it on a powerpoint. Aside from the artistic element of logo design, there are a few simple checklist items that can be looked at to ensure that your logo is usable and useful.

1. Dimensions

One of the easiest wins is ensuring that the designed logo fits easily into different dimensions and shapes. Some of the shapes that you will commonly have to fit your logo into are square, rectangular (longer horizontal & vertical both) (aim for a golden rectangle) and circular. Each of these logo shapes might require the icons/images in the logo and the text in the logo to be arranged/included differently. But it is useful to have multiple versions of different dimensions for each of these.

2. Colours

The logo colours should ideally be selected from within the colour palette. Alternately, one may use colours which match well with the colour palette, however, this could lead to a very colourful and finally jarring look, which is to be avoided. Multiple variants of the logo, in different colour combinations (from within the colour palette) should be created. Multiple variants of the logo with different backgrounds (at least a dark one and a light one) should also be created.

3. Formats

Each of the logo variants (dimensions & colours) should be saved in multiple image formats. Ensure that popularly used image formats are necessarily covered. .jpeg/.jpg, .png are important formats to cover. One could also go the extra mile and create a small animated logo in .gif format.

4. Text content

The text content, if any, used in a logo variant should be limited to the brand name and a tag line. If text content is being added in a variant, it is important to ensure that an identical variant exists within the text content as well. The text should ideally be in the same font as designed for the template, and text colour should also be from within the colour palette. Multiple variants can also be created just to change the text colour and dimensions.

5. Symbolism

While designing the logo, it is useful to ensure that there is some meaning or symbolism within the logo. The process of logo design is incrmental, and therefore a logo is likely to keep evolving and even change drastically at times. Ensuring that there is some fundamental symbolism or message being communicated increases the likelihood of evolving logos bearing some similarity to each other, and brand recognition being higher.
The story behind Pepsi's golden ration based logo might spark some interesting ideas on this note.

pepsi’s logo

My own repository of personal logos is available in the following google drive folder: personal logos