Last week I talked about five tips for graphic designers to build awareness. One way to getting recognized is building a personal brand identity. This week we will take a look at the importance of crafting a company’s most personal, and yet often overlooked identity, its logo.
Designing a logo is arguably one of the most challenging projects to take on, but can also be among the most rewarding. Logos are everywhere; we see them on the sides of buildings, in the pages of magazines, and hovering over us on billboards. They flood the digital landscape in the form of television commercials, online ads and smartphone applications. According to CBS News, the average American is exposed to upwards of 5,000 logos a day. So how does one manage to design a logo that encompasses a company brand that is simple, memorable, versatile, appropriate, and stands the test of time?
My design process can be broken down into four easy steps: research, concept, execute, and evaluate. We’ll use an identity project I worked on during my time as an Art Director for the Tannery Communications as an example. Gift of Life is an international non-profit that deploys brigades of doctors around the world to perform life-saving heart surgeries on children in need. I was tasked to develop a new logo appropriate for multiple audiences, including businesses, citizen donors and medical professionals working in hospitals.
Research
STOP. Go directly to jail. Do not pass Go. Do not collect $200.
Before you do anything in the field of communications, you must always take the time to research. Research is the most valuable step on the path to creating a successful logo. Ask yourself: What is the client’s target audience? Who are the client’s chief competitors? What is the client’s marketing strategy and long-term goals? Always ask the client why they want a new logo and what they want the logo to accomplish.
Gift of Life was interested in promoting awareness and separating themselves from other children’s non-profits by targeting female donors with a feeling of warmth, community and compassion.
Concept
This is the brainstorming phase. This is the chance for you to get out all of those ideas and revelations that you gleaned from hours of research. Put in the hard work and do not jump straight onto the computer. Take the time to sketch out multiple concepts, write down keywords that matter to the brand, mind map, and pull inspiration from research imagery. This is where the magic happens and sometimes it isn’t always easy, especially when designing a logo. Be patient and push yourself to develop your ideas beyond the ordinary. Great logos are a labor of love.
I sketched more than 100 different logos for Gift of Life before arriving at my final design solution.
Execute
Take your revised sketches and scan them into a vector-based program such as Adobe Illustrator. 
This will allow your logo to be infinitely scalable up or down with no loss in quality. Choose the final concept(s) and trace it with the pen tool, or continue to develop it further. Print the logo at different sizes and test how it appears on different mediums. A strong logo will always work in black and white and will always make an impact. Decide on colors and typography carefully, and always have a rationale for every design decision.
Evaluate
Too many designers pop the champagne bottles after the logo is accepted by the client, hits the press, and goes live on the web. “My job’s done,” they say. If there’s one thing I’ve learned in public relations it’s no job is done until you’ve measured the outcome. This goes for graphic designers too.
After developing the Gift of Life logo, we tracked the number of increased traffic to the website, donation rate in our target audience, and the effects the new brand had on media outlets.
Do you find identity design difficult? What advice can you give readers on your own design process? If you are interested in logo design, visit LogoDesignLove, a wonderful blog devoted to all things logo.
DesignChamp 
As a student of design in the past, I can totally sympathize with you about the difficulties of creating the perfect logo. Your brand can literally live or die based on it’s logo and it’s important to establish one from the get go that will stick in the mind’s of consumers.
That being said, I think you are right with your four steps, with evaluation being the most important in my eyes. I think when you make a logo, it’s most important to test it out with consumers before you essentially “go live” with it.
The Big Ten learned this the hard way when they released their new logo last winter only to have it bashed completely by the media and fans alike. They ended up embarrassed and had to go back to the drawing board to create a symbol that would appeal to fans. The conference could have saved itself some trouble if they would have shown the original logo to a smaller “test group” and gotten approval before they tried to unveil it to the world.
As a design enthusiast/ part timer I know the struggle to find the perfect logo. Logos are one of my favorite items to create. It’s simple beauty. Logos must be not too complex or they will not look right when small. I have worked hours over the tiny little details of a logo, most things the average person wouldn’t notice, but as designers our attention to detail no matter how minor is what separates one from another. I really like how you broke it down into steps. The great part is that your steps got me thinking about my own steps in designing a logo and reanalyzing them. After all, design is very unique and so is the thought. One of the ways I have found to creating the perfect logo is always have a few options. Design three or more logos that you really like, and line them up next to each other. Which one wins? I’ll be checking your blog out more for design advice, thanks!
It need passion and inspiration to design a logo. I think just like writing poems or drawing pictures, if no enough inspiration and thoughts the logos could not come up in mind. But they are harder than writing or drawing while the logo is responsible for companies and pictures or poems are not. You mentioned it need patience to design a logo, and it could be rather said that designing logo is waiting, just like waiting for somebody to appear. I know from here that the designing is not such a easy stuff for designers, it’s really a difficulty process.
As a public relations student that plans on changing to advertising, this process of creating a logo proves to be very helpful for me. When it comes to creating a logo for a company, you aren’t just creating an ad that will run for a couple months and then create a new one. The logo you create, if done correctly, will be the representative for that company hopefully for years to come, if not for as long as the company is alive. But then I also must ask, after you track the success of the logo, what can be done if it doesn’t work out well, and there isn’t a great success rate with the new use of the logo? If asked to create a new logo for the company, how would you go about deciding to change it or would you just want to start anew with a clean slate?
I found this article to be very interesting. Part of having a successful business, is building upon your brand and your logo. You must have a logo that stands out to the consumer and makes them think about your product. In successful companies, a consumer can simply see the brand logo and know excactly what product it is and what the company is all about. I like how they talk about the steps to creating a logo. By using research, concept, execute, and evaluate these are very important steps to creating the logo you want. I like how they went into detail talking about how each of these steps needs to be apart of the process in order to have a successful logo. You need to research and see what has been big in the past and think how you want to incorporate these elements into your logo. You also need to execute this in a way it will relate to the consumer and evaluate how successful it is by seeing how recognizable it is to the consumer. Overall, I really liked this article and think it is very helpful to someone wanting to learn more about how to have a successful logo.
Your article, “Designing the Perfect Logo | Design Champ” was
in fact well worth commenting here! Basically wished to admit
u did a great work. Thank you -Luca
When I design a piece of art, I am not only aiming for a goal to achieve but to please an array of audiences.
Whilst the non-qualified company deigner will be fighting with
the programme, tryiing to implement in thee design work at all, the qualified designer will be concentrating on how to get a complicated brand message across in a simple visual way.
These aare designed to help graphic designers to
branch out into different disciplines and
increase their knowledge of these disciplines.