Design your own logo

Posted on 12 Oct 2009 at 12:47

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Whether you're developing an existing business or just starting out, an eye-catching corporate identity is essential. Adam Banks explains the principles of logo design.

The job of a logo is to distinguish you from your competitors and define both who you are and what you do. As well as presenting a certain image to customers, it should provide your staff with a clear focus for what it is you're aiming to achieve.

What your logo conveys will depend on the nature of your business and the tone you want to set. Compare, say, the Innocent fruit drinks company and Barclays Bank. If you saw a poster for one of these in a foreign language, you'd know which it was by the use of colour, shapes, typefaces and graphics.

Two things every logo should convey are quality and strength. Quality indicates that you know what you're doing and that customers won't be disappointed in what they get from you. Strength indicates that you have a solid foundation and can be relied on to deliver. Don't lose sight of these crucial elements while trying to pack more specific meanings into your logo.

Words and pictures

A logo doesn't have to include any text or, as designers call it, type. It may consist purely of a graphical symbol, with your company name written beside or below it. This has the benefit of flexibility; a fixed mark that includes your company name may be unwieldy, especially if it's longer than a few letters. You should consider shortening the name for corporate identity purposes, or inventing a catchy trading name.

If your business name does lend itself to a typographic logo, playing with fonts is a great starting point for the design process. Many classic logos consist of a few characters cleverly arranged - think of the 'V&A' logo of the Victoria and Albert Museum (www.vam.ac.uk) or the simple 'ff' of Faber & Faber, both by the legendary Pentagram design partnership. Look for interesting shapes formed by the relevant characters in different fonts, and for any simple ways that they could interlock or mirror each other. Spend time looking at typefaces in context - on other companies' advertising and packaging - rather than just in the Font menu. Setting aside your likes and dislikes, assess the impression that different fonts create and consider what they remind you of.

In vector drawing and desktop-publishing programs such as CorelDraw, Xara Xtreme, Serif DrawPlus, Adobe InDesign and QuarkXPress, you can convert text to paths, turning the characters into shapes that you can edit point by point. This gives much greater scope for playing with type and creating neat fits, as long as you make only careful changes. For example, with the Direct Selection or Node Selection tool, you can select all the points that make up the end of an ascender or descender (the line that sticks up in a 'd' or down in a 'p'), then drag them to make the character shorter or taller. Steer clear of editing curves (this requires serious design skills) and don't squash or stretch characters.

Try cutting characters up and masking parts off using your software's path combination tools. Draw a filled rectangle over part of a character, select both, then use Subtract to delete that part or Intersect to turn it into a separate shape. Drill a hole in a character by drawing a circle on top and using Subtract, or use the same method to cut one character out of another. You may find it easier to experiment by overlaying white shapes, which can be moved around, but remember to cut them out properly when finishing your design or they'll show up when the logo is placed over a non-white background.