Components of a Visual Brand - Designing your Logo
It’s no secret that a business is not a brand unless you have an established brand awareness and recognition. Having a strong brand not only conveys a message to your audience that you care about what they think, evoking that emotional response we spoke about on an earlier blog, but it’s also the key to increasing your prices.
Imagine this: A Stabucks - Pumpkin Spice latte #psl sitting next to an unknown blue coffee cup without any labels. Chances are, more people are going to choose that world-famous mermaid logo coffee cup over the random blue coffee cup, even if it costs €1 more. Why? Well it’s simple. We know Starbucks #psl. We know their quality and we know they produce consistent products. We know whenever we buy from them, we will have the same cozy hot drink – so that extra €1 is a tiny price to pay for our comfort.
That brand consciousness begins with the 5 components referenced here. As per the the example above, that brand logo has a mayor role to play, so weather you are a DIY-ing it or working with a designer, here are some steps to consider when designing your logo.
Create a mood board
Start thinking about what you want to visually establish as an overall aesthetics, style & vibe for your brand. What is its personality: Moody? Minimal? Earthy? Feminine? Grungy? When you hone this in, you can start browsing for things that visually represent that personality, be it through photos, colours, typography, quotes, furniture, textures, objects, and more. You can do this digitally, via Pinterest or images that you find on Google, or you could even go the old-fashioned route and piece one together using magazines and paint chips.
Imagery style
Once you decided upon the personality of your brand and started getting your hands into some visual representation of it, then you can start to sharpen the style you’d like to lean towards. Are you using just typograhy, an icon, illustration, specific lines or shapes? Is it a combination of some of these elements? These will come in handy for this process. Get some examples of things you like & dislike about other logos, as this will also help steer the process in the right direction. Just remember to keep the overall idea for the logo design as simple as possible.
Sketch it out
Using inspiration from your mood board and imagery style, this is where you (or your designer) put pen to paper. Start broad and create as many as you can, and then narrow them down to a maximum of 3 options. From my past experience with clients, I’ve found that the more options you have, the harder the decision-making is. Test the designs against colour and also black and white. Revise and tweak as necessary.
Saving it
Once you have your final logo design refined and ready to go, save it in the proper file formats and resolutions for print and digital applications. Most importantly, the logo needs to be vector-based. Vector simply means that the design will be scalable to any size and won’t lose its quality or resolution. Your designer should be giving you the following files: EPS (vectorial file), JPEG, PNG (transparent background), PDF + jpeg’s in CMYK and RGB color modes.
Keep tuned in, as we will be addressing the other brand components during the coming weeks!
Did you find this helpful? Are there any other questions regarding branding that you’d like us to tackle? Please leave all your comments below. We can’t wait to read them!
For even more inspiration, make sure to hop on over to our Pinterest or Instagram profiles.
Happy Musings!!
