As sculpture carves clay, stone or marble with his vision of the future image. Same way professional creative agency should also imbibe companies mission, vision, values and culture when designing a logo. Designing of the constructive and meaningful logo requires a lot of effort. The logo should be simple and should be a representation of the entire organization.
The logo design acts as the face of your company, many forget company names, but they recall the logo and identify the brand. The logo is a small visual representation of an entire company, and if the process is correct, a logo can act as a useful marketing tool. Despite the simplicity and small size of the final product, designing a logo can be a surprisingly complex process.
In this article, DesignerPeople will break down the seven steps in the process and explain them in detail.
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Also Read: 9 Types of Logo Design and find which suits your business
1.DESIGN BRIEFING
The briefing is always a significant step, which involves the contribution of the client. The client has to throw light on the vision, mission, culture, values and work ethic of their brand. The project manager should be sharp enough to get all-important input from the client end. More information leads to more clarity and understanding of the brand. So answers for below questions should be obtained from client end such as:
What are the target audiences for their product or services?
Scalability of the brand and where will it be used as a logo on billboards, letterhead or business cards.
The logo should attract the correct demographic section and if rebranding, gathers information about which features clients want to sustain from his previous logo. So that it doesn’t hamper their established branding.
Weather, the client, is planning a new brand identity. To understand client psychology around his brand, a lot of design agency share forms with clients, which will consist of basic questions. Answers to them will help to get clarity and scope for improvement.
2.RESEARCH
Clients cannot visualize and verbalize precisely what they are expecting for the logo, so the designer must get the required quantity of information from the client. Relevant, the strategic output should help the client pass on any practical knowledge. Along with getting information from clients, which is just half story, professional branding agencies will conduct surveys. Scrutinize clients online and offline mediums to get a sense of the target customer’s vision of the company.
Competitor’s analysis helps to understand current trends and gain an overview to discover competitive advantages.
Industry research is also done to get strategic inputs, and hence similar profile brand history will help to understand reasons for failure or victory. Studying about the location is also essential as some logos subtly refer to the company’s geographic location.
3.BRAINSTORMING AND CONCEPTUALIZATION
Identifying correct keywords related to the company’s product or services is the common practice which implements at this step, which is known as the mind mapping concept. Mind mapping is a memory technique which will represent central ideas and thoughts diagrammatically. The idea here is to make illustrations of your fundamental beliefs, and then start making connections between them. The experience of executing a mind map should be a relaxed and free-flowing one, but it must focus on one central idea.
Words represent through sketching where ideas begin to flow in text, shapes and symbolic format.
Sketching of ideas on the paper is an essential step which will encourage the designer to understand and examine all possible angles and directions.
4.DRAFT PRODUCTION
Once the above process of researching and brainstorming done now the actual sketched design brought into life with draft production. Adobe Illustrator, vector-based drawings are designing tools. Now design will appear with exact colour, emotion, shape, style and with each detail.
There are various types of the logo such as word mark, letter mark so designer should be aware which logotype is most appropriate for the nature of business. Choosing the correct typeface will set an accurate tone of the logo.
5.STEP BACK AND TAKE BREAK
A lot of designers believe stepping back from the project for a brief time will encourage the flow of more creative ideas with a fresh perspective. This break will render ample of time to post logo designing on a various forum such as logo pond forum where unbiased feedback is obtained. Designing of the logo is a very critical job; hence, it’s always beneficial to gather additional insights from an extra pair of eyes. Then when you come back before final submission of designing various new inputs can do wonders.
6.CLIENT FEEDBACK AND REVIEW
Now once the final improvements have done, multiple design options are sent to the client with supporting text document. The document will be a brief explanation about the thought process gone into designing of the logo such as the relevancy of brand story, colour, shape, text and style used.
The client sends back feedback then the designer takes into consideration and gets it rectified — several rounds of modifications done before the customer is satisfied with the final output. Logo designing agency should never neglect or get frustrated due to frequent changes as this creates a negative impact on the client-side. The level of patience creative agency maintains when design changes occur, this creates a high level of trust and confidence among customers.
7.DELIVERY STAGE
Once the client is happy with the final product, then its job of the designing company has to submit various types of files that are used for different outputs. File types include AI, EPS, PDF, JPEG, GIF, PNG and whichever format client prefers such file is submitted. Some clients may ask for the black and white version of the final logo. A separate simple version needed in situations in which the full-size logo is highly detailed and does not scale down well.
Once delivery of the final files, now it is time to think about placing the logo on various marketing elements and promotional products. Many times the designer will continue working with the client to create a full brand identity system using the new logo.
CONCLUSION
Even if the logo is visually simple, its process of design development is complex and a lot of the effort and time consumed. LogoPeople is a professional creative agency who has a systematic and organized set of processes as above for designing a logo. We believe logo designing is a collaborative association between designer and client to get creative and practical inputs. The logo being a valuable asset of your company and hence, should be crafted systematically.
Hope this article has helped not only designers but also the business person who is looking out for creating a logo design.
Author
Being a strategist’s head and a long term visionary personality aims to achieve excellence in branding, packaging and digital marketing field. My 15 years of design experience and masters degree ais my strength which keeps me motivated and keep me going positively. I have participated in extensive branding design conquests in India, USA, Australia and New Zealand with winning zeal. My objective is to encourage start-ups and hence involves actively in the articles which will act as a productive intake of knowledge for them. Do connect me personally via my LinkedIn and I love to share my expertise with you.
