How to Design a Logo from Scratch

If you're overwhelmed by the question: how to create a logo from scratch? Don't worry. The process is simpler than you might think. It involves understanding your brand, choosing a design style, brainstorming logo ideas, selecting colors and fonts, refining your final draft, and getting feedback.

Don't worry if that's a lot to take in. We'll explore each step in detail throughout this guide.

Designing a logo is an opportunity to distill your brand's essence into a single, iconic image that tells a story, evokes emotions, and is instantly recognizable.

Think about some of the most iconic logos on the planet -X, Miami Dolphins, Detroit Pistons, etc. Logos like these are simple yet bold enough to leave a lasting impression.

But how do you achieve that?

Stick with us as we answer that very question. This insider's guide reveals everything you need to know to craft a logo that truly stands out. The Logome team has created countless logos, so rest assured that you're in good hands.

With that said, are you ready to unleash your creativity and bring your vision for your logo to life? Let's dive in!

How to Design a Logo from Scratch: The Highlights

If you don't have time to read our complete logo design guide, here are the highlights:

What Is a Logo? A logo visually represents a company or organization, often including symbols, typography, and colors that distinguish a brand.

What Makes a Good Logo? Good logos are simple, memorable, unique, versatile, and relevant to the target market.

What Are the Most Common Types of Logos? Several types of logos are available for your designs, including emblems, pictorial marks, wordmarks, monogram logos, abstract logo marks, mascot logos, and combination marks.

How do I design a logo?

1. Get a concrete understanding of your brand
2. Brainstorm words that describe your brand
3. Choose colors for your logo
4. Select a font for your logo
5. Sketch your initial logo ideas
6. Refine your chosen sketch
7. Develop your logo's layout
8. Ensure scalability
9. Test logo sketches with your target audience

What Are the Best Logo Design Practices? There are several best logo design practices, most notably keeping designs simple and uncluttered, prioritizing versatility, designing your logo with your audience in mind, and aiming for originality and timelessness.

How to Design a Logo

Here are the steps you need to follow to design the perfect logo:

1. Get a concrete understanding of your brand
2. Brainstorm words that describe your brand
3. Choose colors for your logo
4. Select a font for your logo
5. Sketch your initial logo ideas
6. Refine your chosen sketch
7. Develop your logo's layout
8. Test logo sketches with your target audience
9. Ensure scalability

Don't worry, we're going to explore each of these in turn; let's get into it:

1. Get a Concrete Understanding of Your Brand

The first step in designing your logo is understanding your brand. Before you commit pen to paper and start sketching ideas, it's essential to pinpoint your brand’s story, values, and the emotions you want your logo to convey.

Many of us dread the research phase — why can't we just jump in already?! Yet, to create a successful, enduring logo, you need a solid foundation, and that starts with thorough research.

For starters, understanding your ideal customer and target market will clarify your messaging and logo vision. So ask yourself:

• Who is my ideal customer?
• What brands do they prefer?
• What age range does my target market fall into?
• Which social platforms do they frequent?
• What are their hobbies?
• What influences their purchasing decisions (price, quality, sustainability, etc.)?
• What challenges do they face?

If you already have customers or friends who match your target persona, don’t hesitate to call them to discuss their lifestyle, purchasing decisions, favorite brands, and insights about your product or service.

You'll also need to consider where your logo will appear the most. Needless to say, this will hugely impact your design.

For example, if you own a construction company, your logo might appear on T-shirts, truck decals, and signs. In contrast, if you're a consulting business, your logo might be used primarily online on your website, landing pages, and social media channels.

So, take some time to think about how you'll use your logo and what design will have the most impact. Below, we've listed just a few of the places where your logo might appear:

• Online: Website headers and favicons, email signatures, invoices, and receipts
• Social media: Profile photos, cover photos, image posts, and ads
• Print: Business cards, brochures, posters, car decals, clothing, and brand packaging

Compare Yourself To Competitors

Next, consider your competition. Analyzing your competitor's logos and websites can inspire your design. Break down their logos into styles you like and dislike.

Research competitors and create a moodboard of their logos to understand the colors, symbols, fonts, and layouts they use. This will help you visually stand out while remaining relevant to your industry.

Ask yourself:

• What font type is dominant in your industry?
• Which colors are most common?
• What symbols are used?
• Which layout is most prevalent?

2. Brainstorm Words That Describe Your Brand

Use resources such as Thesaurus.com to find synonyms and other words that encapsulate your brand's values, and list five to ten words that best represent your brand's ethos.

For instance, if you're selling beauty products, you could enter "beauty" to discover an array of descriptive synonyms. By clicking on these results, you'll initiate new searches, allowing you to delve deeper into words that most accurately reflect your brand.

During this exercise, ask yourself, what do you want your brand to be best known for? Here are a few examples:

• Innovative and easy-to-use
• Compassionate and customer-centric
• Professional and reliable
• Witty and clever

3. Choose Colors for Your Logo

Your logo's color palette communicates a lot about your brand's identity. So, when deciding your logo colors, reflect on your brand's story and the keywords you've brainstormed. For instance, blue signifies trustworthiness and maturity, while red conveys passion and excitement.

Selecting a color for your logo design involves more than just choosing what appeals to you personally. Consider how your target audience will perceive it and where it will be used. Your logo colors represent your brand across all business assets, so try to visualize how they'll appear in different contexts.

Be strategic when choosing logo colors. Analyze current color trends and those dominant in your industry. Aim to select a color or color scheme that distinguishes you from competitors without using too many colors.

Limiting your logo to no more than three colors is a good guideline. Most brands use 2-3 colors, with one often being black or white. It stands to reason that the simpler your logo, the more memorable and versatile it will be.

To assist your decision-making, here are some emotions and descriptors linked with colors commonly used in logo design:

• Black: Conveys power and sophistication, as well as elegance, formality, and mystery.
• Blue: Suggests professionalism and success. It's widely used in corporate logos but is versatile across industries.
• Orange: Evokes joy and optimism. It's associated with enthusiasm and excitement and is excellent for capturing attention.
• Green: Represents balance and serenity and is often used to highlight connections with nature, well-being, health, and calmness.
• Pink: Light shades can have a gentle, calming effect, while brighter shades are linked to love, flirting, and fun.
• Purple: Denotes royalty and spirituality. Historically regal, it's associated with wealth, nobility, and luxury.
• Red: Indicates confidence, ambition, and energy.
• Yellow: Signifies happiness and positivity and is bright and eye-catching.
• White: Symbolizes purity and simplicity, traditionally linked to cleanliness, innocence, and straightforwardness.
• Grey: Projects a classic and serious tone and is increasingly popular for achieving a mature and sophisticated look.

4. Select a Font for Your Logo

Now, it’s time to consider the typeface that will represent your company name. When doing this, have your brand's personality and values in mind to ensure the font aligns with these attributes. Choose a clear and legible font that's versatile across various media.

Like your logo's color palette, your font communicates a lot about your business, and it goes without saying that your choice is especially important if you opt for a wordmark or lettermark logo instead of a symbol.

With thousands of fonts available, choosing one for your logo can be daunting. So, with that said, here’s a quick look at different font types and what their visual characteristics mean for branding and communication:

Serif Fonts

Serif fonts feature small “feet” or lines at the ends of their characters. They're timeless, classic, and often associated with tradition. The most well-known serif font is Times New Roman. Its timeless appeal tends to attract a more mature demographic.

Sans-Serif Fonts

Sans-serif fonts lack the small feet seen in serif fonts, giving them a clean and modern appearance. They're easy to read and versatile across various mediums.

Modern Fonts

Modern fonts are a subset of sans-serif fonts that exude sophistication and starkness. They're particularly effective with younger audiences and popular among app and tech companies.

Script Fonts

Script fonts add a lot of personality to a logo, often appearing formal, elegant, and feminine. While they can be harder to read at a glance, script fonts can make your logo distinctive and iconic when used correctly.

Display Fonts

Display fonts encompass a wide range of unique styles that make a strong visual impact. They can be bubbly and fun or edgy and futuristic. However, be cautious of overly trendy display fonts that may not align with your brand personality.

Handwritten Fonts

Handwritten fonts mimic the look of actual handwriting, offering an organic, imperfect, and personal feel. They evoke creativity and exude a sense of informality, adding a human touch to digital designs and fostering a personal connection with your audience.

Monospaced Fonts

Monospaced, or typewriter fonts, have consistent spacing between characters. Unlike proportional fonts with varying character widths, each character occupies the same horizontal space, creating a uniform and structured appearance.

5. Sketch Your Initial Logo Ideas

With the groundwork laid, it's time to start creating some rough sketches. Let your brand story and keywords guide you as you brainstorm initial logo ideas. Remember, these are just first drafts. The goal is to transfer your thoughts onto paper, so trust the process and let your ideas flow freely. Refinement will come later.

Contrary to popular belief, designing your own logo is entirely possible! You don’t need sophisticated editing software or extensive design experience. In fact, plenty of logo makers like Logome will design a logo for you within seconds. Just answer a few questions to communicate your vision, and our AI will bring it to life! a

Alternatively, if you want to create your logo from scratch, here’s what you need to know to feel confident about the design process:

Logo Shapes and Layout Options

Shapes are crucial to your logo's aesthetic because they hold specific associations in the human brain. For example, circles represent unity, and squares can convey stability.

Shapes also function as both containers and symbols in logo design.

What’s a Container? A container confines your logo to a specific space, presenting it neatly for visual consumption. While containers add visual interest, they can sometimes be tricky to scale if the logo needs to fit into a smaller space.

Pro Tip: Double-check your company name remains legible within the container when scaled to different sizes.

In contrast, symbols in logo design are graphic elements that represent the brand's identity, values, and mission. They can be abstract (like hexagons or overlapping circles) or literal (such as animals or lightbulbs) and are designed to be instantly recognizable and memorable.

Choosing a symbol that won’t confuse or mislead your audience is crucial. For instance, using a grocery cart symbol in your logo wouldn’t make sense if you're a fitness coach. Instead, something like a heart rate line would more effectively communicate your services.

Additionally, ensure your symbol complements the style of your font. For example, pairing a modern sans-serif font with a hand-drawn, vintage-looking symbol wouldn’t be ideal.

With all that said, below, we've listed a few common logo shapes, their associated values, and design considerations:

• Circles: Represent unity, security, and protection. They work best for shorter brand names or monograms and should be paired with a strong typeface for legibility when scaled.

• Squares and rectangles: Convey feelings of stability and balance. This traditional shape suits longer names and is popular with enterprise corporations.
• Triangles: Seen as an aggressive shape associated with strength, conflict, and speed. They can represent direction and movement and be used as a substitute for the letters ‘A’ and ‘V.’
• Vertical/horizontal orientation: Vertical lines and shapes suggest aggression, strength, courage, and dominance, while horizontal shapes evoke a calm and tranquil feel.
• Organic shapes: These natural shapes exert warmth and comfort, which is difficult to achieve with other shapes.

Other Logo Layout Options

When designing your logo, there are several layout options to consider, for example, stacked text, symbol placement, and slogan placement; let's take a look at each in turn:

Stacked Text: Using stacked text can bring a fresh twist to a classic logo. By arranging words vertically, you create an eye-catching design. Combining this with horizontal text offers even more stylistic variety. This approach works best when the words in your logo are of similar length.

Symbol Placement: The position of a symbol can dramatically alter the appearance and impact of your logo. Consider whether the symbol is centered, placed to the side, positioned above the wordmark, or integrated into the wordmark itself. Experiment with various placements to determine what aligns best with your brand identity and intended logo usage.

Slogan Placement: If your logo includes a slogan, it usually appears below your company name. Decide whether the slogan will be centered or left-justified and if it will utilize a different typeface than your wordmark. Depending on the slogan’s length, try different placements to find the most visually appealing arrangement.

Best Practices for Logo Design

There are several best logo design practices to bear in mind, including simplicity, originality, and versatility. Let's explore these in more depth:

• Simplicity is key. Aim to sketch the most symbolic elements in seven seconds or less. Strive for a clean, uncluttered design that communicates your brand identity clearly and straightforwardly. The aim is for viewers to instantly recognize and understand your logo.
• Avoid common clip art or generic symbols: Standing out is essential in today's competitive market. Your logo design should be as unique as your value proposition. So, avoid generic designs and common cliché symbols, like globes, stars, and other overused icons.
• Prioritize versatility: Your logo should work across on various backgrounds and colors. So, test your logo in different scenarios to ensure it remains legible and clear. This means having alternate color palettes and orientations to suit any situation.
• Design your logo with your audience in mind: Consider your target audience's demographics and interests and aim to meet their expectations and needs in your design.
• Be timeless: Your logo should be iconic and timeless, much like Coca-Cola’s. Avoid fleeting design trends and opt for a simple, classic design that will represent your company for years to come.

6. Refine Your Chosen Sketch

Now that you have a few sketches choose the one that resonates with you the most. Take the time to reflect on your brand values, evaluate whether your logo communicates what your brand stands for, and tweak your design accordingly.  

7. Develop Your Logo’s Layout

If you've been sketching your designs on paper, now's the time to transition your design to a digital platform so that you can start developing your logo's layout. There are tons of free tools you can use to help with this, such as Appy Pie’s Logo Maker, Logo Crisp, and Looka.

Other tools include:

• DesignMantic
• GraphicSprings
• Turbologo

When developing your logo's layout, remember that proper alignment is crucial. Your logo doesn’t have to be perfectly symmetrical, but it should appear visually balanced, with every element feeling well-placed.

How do you know if your logo is well-balanced? As a general rule, if your design looks great in black and white, you’ve achieved a well-balanced logo.

8. Ensure Scalability

Your logo will represent your company across multiple platforms—in print, on your website, social media pages, and more. As your business grows, you might consider renting billboard space or creating larger assets like flags, banners, and vehicle decals. In these cases, you'll need to ensure your logo can be enlarged without losing legibility.

9. Test Logo Sketches With Your Target Audience

Once your logo design feels ready, share it with others to get constructive feedback. While input is valuable at any stage, it's especially crucial to gauge reactions to your finalized vision and refine it from there.

What Makes a Good Logo?

While opinions on what constitutes a good logo vary, certain characteristics generally define an excellent design, including simplicity, memorability, and uniqueness. Let’s explore these factors in more detail:

• Simplicity: A good logo is simple, making it easy to recognize and clearly conveying the brand’s identity.
• Memorability: It sticks in the mind of the viewer.
• Uniqueness: It stands out and is distinct from competitors.
• Versatility: It needs to work well across different channels and sizes.
• Industry appropriateness: It should suit the industry it represents.
• Market Relevance: It should resonate with your target audience.

Take the Nike logo, for example. Known as the Swoosh, it's visually appealing and easily identifiable, signifying performance, innovation, and progress.

Conversely, poor logos often chase trends, mimic famous logos, are overly complicated or confusing, and fail to establish a strong brand presence - so avoid those pitfalls!

Types of Logos

Given the millions of logos globally, it might surprise you that they all fall into one of seven main categories. Each logotype has distinct characteristics, strengths, and weaknesses. So, when designing your logo, choose the style that best aligns with your brand's values and objectives.

Below are some of the key logo types you need to know about:

1. Emblems
2. Pictorial Marks (or Logo Symbols)
3. Wordmarks (or Logotypes)
4. Monogram Logos (or Lettermarks)
5. Abstract Logo Marks
6. Mascot Logos
7. Combination Marks

Let's explore each of these in more detail:

Emblem Logos

An emblem logo combines text within a symbol to create a cohesive image. This kind of logo is powerful and striking, often exuding a sense of formality and tradition. However, its elements can sometimes be difficult to separate for various uses and may not reproduce well in smaller sizes.

Pictorial Marks (Logo Symbols)

Pictorial marks, or logo symbols, use a single image to represent a brand. These logos are iconic and memorable, effectively conveying a brand's essence without text.

However, for startups looking to establish a following, these logos may struggle to foster brand recognition immediately. Sometimes, it's also harder to communicate your brand's purpose without accompanying words.

Wordmarks (Logotypes)

Wordmarks are text-based—they transform your brand name into a logo using typography. They rely solely on your business name, with no symbols or monograms, using either an existing or custom typeface.

This type of logo is best for short, distinctive business names without a slogan. Famous examples include Google, The New York Times, and Coca-Cola. They're perfect for companies with unique names, offering simplicity and easy integration.

However, bear in mind that if you have a longer brand name, your logo might not stand out as much.

Monogram Logos (Lettermarks)

Monogram logos, or lettermarks, use the initials or the first letter of the company's name to create a concise logo. A monogram logo typically contains only one to three letters.

This kind of logo is ideal for companies with longer names as it's easy to remember and scale. Famous examples include the logos of Hewlett-Packard, Volkswagen, and Louis Vuitton.

However, if your brand's initials are common, it could be mistaken for other brands, so be sure to weigh up the likelihood of this when brainstorming logo ideas.

Abstract Logomarks

Abstract logos, such as the Pepsi logo, use geometric forms and colors instead of real-life images to uniquely represent a brand. These logos are inherently distinctive and can convey complex ideas through simple shapes and colors.

However, be aware that their abstract nature may lead to misinterpretation, especially for new brands.

Mascot Logos

Mascot logos feature illustrated characters to personify a brand, providing a fun and friendly image. They're ideal for brands seeking a light-hearted and family-friendly appeal, offering an engaging approach that effectively tells your brand's story.

However, they may not suit serious or corporate brands, and their complex design can be challenging to reproduce in smaller sizes.

Combination Marks (Combination Logos)

A combination mark integrates text with an icon, usually combining a brand name with a memorable symbol. This is a versatile option because the two elements can also be used separately when needed, which is probably why combination marks are the common type of logo. Famous examples include Burger King, Salesforce, and Dropbox.

However, if not carefully designed, this logo can become overly busy and face challenges scaling down for smaller applications.

How To Build a Logo: Our Final Thoughts

We hope that after read this blog post you now have a clearer idea of how to make a logo. Although creating a logo from scratch can seem daunting, with the right approach, it's a rewarding process that will greatly enhance your brand's identity.

By understanding your brand, brainstorming ideas, selecting appropriate colors and fonts, and refining your design, you can develop a logo that effectively communicates your brand's essence.

Remember, a great logo is simple, memorable, unique, versatile, and relevant. By following the steps outlined in this guide, you'll achieve a design that stands out and leaves a lasting impression.

But why go through this journey alone when you can leverage cutting-edge technology to simplify the process? With LogoMe, you can take the guesswork out of logo design. LogoMe uses advanced AI to create professional, custom logos tailored to your brand's unique identity. 

Whether you're just starting out or looking to rebrand, LogoMe can help you bring your vision to life in just a few clicks.

Ready to create a logo that sets your brand apart? Visit LogoMe today and get started on your path to a stunning and impactful logo!

Frequently Asked Questions About Designing Your Own Logo

Should you have logo variations for different uses?

Yes, it's wise to have logo variations for different uses. A distinctive wordmark (the typography) combined with a unique symbol (the image) allows you to use these elements together or separately to represent your brand.

For instance, the logo you use as your Facebook profile photo might be a symbol-only or monogram-only version. In contrast, the logo you print on a T-shirt would be the full version. Despite their differences, they all represent the same brand.

Should you have brand guidelines?

Once your design is finalized, it's essential to create brand guidelines—a set of rules that ensure you represent your brand consistently across various channels and assets. Consistent branding is essential for building credibility and recognition as your business grows.

Brand guidelines should include insights into your:

• Logo guidelines
• Color palettes
• Typography
• Usage examples

Additionally, they can encompass a mission statement, visual rules for images and icons, brand voice guidelines, and specifications for assets such as packaging, email marketing, and more.