How To Make A Legendary Business Logo In 7 Steps
If you care about branding and are looking to learn how to make a business logo—no—how to make a legendary logo, then you have the right intentions.
But whether you’re a startup or the operator of a successful business looking to take your branding to the next level, designing a new logo can be as challenging as it is important.
Sure, designing something passable isn’t necessarily too difficult. Though it’s likely your business aspires to something greater than the bare minimum.
You want to create a logo that represents all the glory of your business. Something that catches eyes, wows clients, and stands alone in your industry. You want your logo to be truly legendary.
For those that are willing to undertake the effort and think deeply about their business and how it relates to the wide world of brand aesthetics, legendary logo design is absolutely accomplishable. In fact, it can even be as straightforward as seven (admittedly pretty detailed) steps.
From approaching the problem to business logo inspiration to finalizing your best possible logo, this guide will walk you through the mentality we use at Robben Media to help customers transform their brands into something truly spectacular.
By following these steps, you’ll be able to put your absolute best foot forward. And you’ll ground your logo design in the core of what makes your brand relevant as you approach logo design the right way.
Steps To Make A Business Logo
1. Understand Your Audience
From a potential customer’s first impression to the opinion of your most devout repeat consumers, your logo is the definitive visual embodiment of your company. In a very literal sense, it will come to represent your company and the work that it does to the people that matter the most: your clients.
That’s why it’s so critical to take the time to deeply understand who your audience is and why they are choosing to invest time, money, and energy into doing business with you long before you move on to the design phase of creating your new logo. (Really, as a business leader, this is something you should deeply understand for plenty of reasons, but it’s important in logo design as well.)
In the same way that your business model is intentionally crafted to respond to the needs of your consumers, every element of your visual branding should respond to the desires of your consumers.
Let’s say, for example, you’re opening a restaurant that serves inexpensive, healthy food. Your value proposition is clear, but the ways to communicate that value proposition can change whether or not customers relate with you. Do your consumers connect more to a restaurant that embraces a naturalistic, environmentally-conscious, health-driven energy? Or one that focuses more on the simplicity and convenience of affordable, quality food?
Deciding how your brand communicates its value proposition can literally determine whether or not that proposition carries any value. As a wise man once said, the medium is the message.
To tailor your message to your audience as specifically as possible, I recommend sketching out rough “profiles” for every type of consumer you’re trying to target.
Include information like what existing brands they already like, what kinds of things turn them off of a brand, why they are driven to use your service/buy your products over others.
These profiles are useful for all sorts of things, but especially for developing branding.
2. Understand Your Brand
Once you’ve developed a clear understanding of who your audience is, what they’re looking for, and what they’re not looking for, it’s time to apply that to your company.
It might seem tempting at first, but it’s not enough to simply try to be whoever your consumers might want you to be. It’s critical to find the intersection of what your consumers want and who you authentically are.
And your brand should be an authentic reflection of your personality and your values. Not only are people getting better and better at sniffing out and rejecting inauthentic branding. If you’re not feeling passionate about the brand you create, it’s much harder to convince other people to be passionate about it.
Think about the desires and needs of your consumer base as a conversation to which you and your brand are contributing.
- What can your unique personality bring to the table?
- How can you meet consumers where they are in a way that connects with your passions and values?
- What would be a really inauthentic way to try to pander to your consumers?
Write detailed answers to these questions down, discuss them with your team members, and refine a few key insights from these conversations (descriptions of your brand’s personality, core values, tone of brand communications, things your brand doesn’t do) into a brief code of brand conduct.
By viewing your personality and your values through the lens of your consumers’ needs, you’ll be building a subtle strategic differentiator into your branded communications that comes across completely naturally.
3. Get Inspired
At this point, if you’ve followed this list, you’ll find that the hardest parts of branding are actually already out of the way.
Even though you don’t have an official logo or typeface quite yet, the core of your brand — the things those signifiers are meant to embody and represent — is documented extensively.
You have a keen understanding of your brand’s personality, the relationship it has (and does not have) with consumer groups, and the distinctive value that it brings to the table compared to other brands.
Your brand, though still a bit abstract, really already exists. Now it’s just a matter of finding aesthetics that appropriately embody the work you’ve already done.
And thankfully, there’s a pretty solid chance that someone has tried to embody at least someone of the same brand characteristics you’re working with.
Getting a little business logo inspiration from other successful brands that relate to consumers in a similar way is an amazing way to start down the path of designing your logo.
Even if these brands don’t immediately spring to mind, finding them can be as simple as running a few Google searches using the list of brand descriptors you’ve already generated.
- What general similarities might you be able to draw between logos from these brands?
- Do they all use sans serif typefaces?
- A certain color palate?
- What do you like (or dislike) about these logos?
- What makes them successful?
It might also be useful to simply find examples of aesthetics that you find personally pleasing. Be sure to save your favorite examples for future reference. I’d even recommend making a Tumblr or are.na account and following some users that post things in line with your interests.
Once you’ve done a fair amount of aesthetic research, you should hopefully be able to find a number of specific design elements — fonts, colors, iconography — that you know fit your brand.
These can be as contradictory and all over the place as you like. It’s better to have as many good options as possible now so that you have more to work with when it comes time to experiment and refine later.
These become the raw building blocks you’ll eventually use to sculpt your final logo.
4. Build Your Toolset
At this point, you know exactly how interactions with your brand should feel to consumers. And you have plenty of aesthetic options you can mix and match until that feeling comes across in your design.
But how you mix and match is important as well: it’s time to gather the professional-grade tools you’ll need to design your final logo.
There are lots of design programs to choose from, but I’d recommend Adobe’s Creative Cloud suite: the fact of the matter is that it’s the de facto standard for design professionals for a very good reason.
If you aren’t super familiar with these tools, developing a working familiarity is worth the struggle. And there are plenty of great resources available online to help you get started.
Personally, I tend to start a lot of design experimentation in Photoshop because it’s the program with which I have the most experience. But your final logos should absolutely be finalized as vector images in Illustrator.
What’s a vector, and why should you care about them? Good question — essentially, two common methods of storing images digitally are rasterization and vectorization. Rasterized images are composed of a finite number of pixels, whereas vector images instead store the lines and shapes needed to redraw the image at any size.
If you only have rasterized logos, your logo will have a firm maximum display size. This can result in a very blurry logo in tons of use cases and can also cause problems when trying to get professional prints featuring your logo made. (Professional printers tend to strongly prefer vectors whenever possible.). With a vector logo, you can be confident that your logo will look sharp at any size and in any use case.
Onto some more general logo design tips: in almost every case, you’ll need premium typefaces when composing a logo, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that they have to be costly. Many Creative Cloud subscriptions come with access to Adobe’s TypeKit, which is an outstanding typeface resource, but for those looking to brand effectively on a smaller budget, FontSquirrel aggregates tons of amazing fonts that are absolutely free for commercial use.
Alternatively, if you have something more specific in mind and don’t mind dropping some cash, there are plenty of exceptional type foundries to purchase from. My favorite is probably Klim Type Foundary, but Lineto is another classic.
One thing not to do is download a random typeface from the Internet and assume that it’s okay to use in your logo: you’ll probably find yourself in violation of copyright law.
Finally, a color palate: I typically find that I refer to my folder of inspiration images when identifying and selecting colors for logo designs that I’ve worked on, but for more general color inspiration, Google has an amazing and very detailed color palate that I refer to often.
(An aside: unless you have at least some design experience, if you’re looking to compose a logo that isn’t simply typographical, I’d recommend getting in touch with a professional designer when designing your logo. Exploring even the fundamentals of good design would require an article much longer than this one. And your logo is too important to entrust to your favorite nephew or some random on Fiverr. Whatever it costs to look professional will be worth it, trust me.)
5. Make Tons of Mistakes
Okay, it’s finally time. You’ve thought deeply about your brand’s personality and your consumers’ needs. You’ve downloaded tons of great inspiration, and set up a formidable professional workspace.
It’s time to start making some horrible mistakes.
The process of finding a logo that works is often one of gradually experiencing fewer and fewer failures. By finding out early and often what type and color combinations don’t work, you can refine those that do.
Word of advice: Please do not get discouraged at this stage.
In my experience, if I keep banging my head against even the most confounding of design problems, enough experimentation and failure usually eventually results in a breakthrough.
The goal with this section is not to create a polished, perfect, finalized logo design. The urge to jump right to completion can be really tempting here, especially when you see something you really like, but the name of the game at this stage is variety and experimentation.
Try to create at least five (but hopefully more) different potential versions of your logo. This will give you a sense of what options are possible.
These different versions can be as different or as similar as you feel is right. Even something as simple as changing a secondary typeface or a color combination can constitute a “new” version at this stage.
Another important thing to consider is how your logo will eventually be displayed.
If you’ve finished your five (or more!) different logo versions, modify them for display on a black background and include those in your folder of potential logo options.
If you’re using any iconography, try a version with just that on its own, or paired up with your brand name in multiple different configurations.
What paragraph text would you pair with the logo? How might it look next to logos from potential partner companies? How would it look on your website?
The more variety, experimentation, and trial-and-error you can extract out of this phase of your design process, the better. Especially after a logo has been implemented, changing it can be costly, time-consuming, and stressful: it’s far better to think about the logo from every possible angle at this stage than to try and make corrections once problems arise.
6. Get Tons of Feedback (From the Right People)
By now you’ve created multiple different potential logo designs (and a ton of different variations). It’s time to narrow it down and decide which of the variations you’ve created are the most successful.
You’re almost ready to finalize your logo design. All that’s left is the process of editing your work down to something truly singular.
If you’re working with a team, this is a great time to bring them into the discussion. After all, this logo is going to represent all of you. If you know people who might fit into one of your audience segments, get their perspective to validate your research.
- Which of these options makes the strongest impression?
- Which best represents your brand?
- Are there any foreseeable contexts which might limit the usefulness of this logo?
As you’re getting feedback and planning out final iterations here in the home stretch of your design process, the temptation to allow for design by committee will arise. Especially when multiple people have strong opinions about the direction a design should take, trying to compromise and please everyone might at first seem like a good way to move forward.
However, letting everyone have a say at this stage in the design process has the potential to water down designs that would otherwise be pretty powerful. After all, your logo isn’t supposed to please everyone. It’s purpose is to communicate your brand’s personality and offerings to a specific group of people.
When accepting feedback, you should absolutely make sure you’re all working from the same perspective.
When communicating with your team, for example, it might be a good idea to start by introducing the code of brand conduct and the specific market you’re trying to target before introducing the designs.
Hashing out different opinions about a design can refine and improve it. But making sure that everyone is approaching that refinement process with the same end goal in mind is critical to deliver a final product that faithfully delivers on the brand’s vision.
Ultimately, at the end of this revision process, you should have a clear idea of your finalized logo. It’s finally time to lock it down.
7. Finalize Your Logo
Now’s the time to nail the details. Create the final graphics. And, if you’re replacing an existing logo, start thinking about a rollout strategy.
Don’t skimp out on the detail-oriented thinking at this critical last stage: even something as seemingly minute as analyzing the individual spaces between each letter in your brand name can make a difference!
Hopefully, at the end of this process, you will design a logo that’s deeply rooted in the core of what makes your brand valuable. You should also feel good about using it to make positive first impressions for years to come.
In designing it, you’ve gone beyond simple trend hopping and aspired for something greater than simply looking professional. You’ve created a brand identity that’s distinctive and striking while also building on contemporary brand design for your industry.
You’ve created a logo for your business that is truly legendary, and have developed an aesthetic sensibility for your brand that can be extrapolated out in all sorts of ways to give you a truly holistic brand image.
Need a helping hand as you craft your new logo? We’re happy to help. Fill out this form and we’ll get back to you ASAP for all of your branding needs.