One of the most exciting parts of business– and treating blogging as a business– is design. Sometimes you already have a blog Logo in mind even before you start blogging! It’s comparable to little girls already knowing about their motifs and flowers for their wedding.
An effective, cleverly executed logo is a sales tool. Powerful. Remember that readers are visual creatures, and sometimes it’s your logo that could lift you and yours above the crowd.
That’s how important and cut-throat logos have become, especially in the digital age of visual, social communications. Of course, none of us can afford that. But entrepreneurs need a logo. If you consider yourself an entrepreneur, you should have one!
How to Brainstorm For Your Blog Logo
Start with your product and service. Go for personality. This is what makes a strong brand. When you see the Disney logo, you think family-friendly stories and love. When you see the Starbucks mermaid, you think coffee and comfort, and the ambiance of Starbucks– understated modern elegance.
What about you and yours? What do you and your blog stand for? Work on that, establish that, and your logo would be easier to design. What you and your blog provide is what will propel your logo into visibility and recognition, because the logo makes sense! It’s smart! Wow!
Create a mind map. What do you feel like? What colors and images do you want? Plot your design ideas. Go back to your business plan (as detailed in Treating Your Blog Like a Business). Look at your mission and vision statements. What your blog does, what it provides, your dreams for your blog. This is your blog’s essence.
From this, come up with words and phrases, images and representations (Flora? Fauna? A person?) that portray your blog essence. This is your mind map– everything relevant and related to you and your blog: location (those located in harbor cities usually have something nautical!), your services, tools of the craft…
Come up with a tagline. Those words and phrases would also be handy for your tagline. Sometimes a tagline inspires a logo. Nike’s check– it’s so satisfying to do that little tick when we get something out of the way in our to-do lists, right? I don’t know if the check or Just Do It! came first, but it’s an awesome match!
For taglines, 3-7 words stick.
THE CENTRAL MOTIF. While you brainstorm with images and words, narrow down the list of several elements in the running to become your central motif. This is THE image or theme you’ll want the design to revolve around.
And once you’ve got words, images and motif narrowed down…
Look at what’s already out there. Very important. This narrows down your concepts, and you get to see what’s been done (especially those that have been done so much you’d only sink in the ocean of unoriginal branding if you do it too) and what you can do better. Call it ‘borrowing’ and ‘improving’ on other ideas to expand your own.
Take your time. Don’t rush it. Ideas will come to you, and when they do, you don’t want to bemoan the fact that you’ve already made and launched your half-baked logo.
UNDERSTAND YOUR BRAND/BLOG. Do a lot of homework about your blog and about your logo before creating one.
The Rules of Logo Design
If you commission a graphic designer for this, he/she should already know these rules, but it helps that YOU know them too so your comments and suggestions are rooted in rules– you need to know them so you can break them!
Simple But Striking
Hitting bull’s-eye in this dichotomy of “simple but striking” is difficult. But many have achieved it. They utilize design flow and negative space. For design flow, look at the logo of Washington State Cougars. That’s W, S, C, and the cougar– all at the same time!
The best logos LOOK simple but are actually works of genius in creativity of utilizing negative space. Consider the logos of FedEx and Amazon. That’s FedEx’s famous arrow. And that’s a smile AND “A-to-Z” for Amazon.
No attempts at being cool. It’s simple text, but with hidden AND relevant images. Simple and minimal is best for logos. Make it yours, make it nice. And then take unnecessary elements away until what’s left is still yours and still nice, still awesome, but without frills and bells and whistles.
Color and Fonts
FONTS are the meat of most logos. Why do you think so many people love Helvetica? Don’t stop looking for fonts. New ones come out every hour, every day! Experiment with mixing and matching. Or make it hand-drawn!
Fonts and typography are the easiest way of making a logo, using text. Plenty of font repositories are online– try out the fonts to see if it fits.
When you like a font and you’ll go for it, you either buy it (you usually have to buy when you’ll be using it for commercial purposes) or get it for free.
Avoid gimmicky fonts. You can tweak an existing font.
A logotype is a logo composed of a word or two set in your chosen font. If your blog has a unique name, by heck, use it in your logo! That’s why you see Blogelina up there! If you have a generic name (nothing wrong with that!), that’s when you need an additional image and design, a logo mark, to identify your brand.
COLOR. Your logo should pop. That’s what would make it memorable. It should remain behind the eyelids of your readers. When they hear or read about your blog, there’s a color association that happens immediately.
Most of us go on to make logos after we establish our blog. Coordinate with everything else. What are your favorite blog themes and colors? Do you know what those colors evoke and represent?
Pick a color or two and stick with it. And remember that if you need color to differentiate YOUR logo from another logo, you need to make another one!
Versatility and Individuality
What I said above reminded me: if your logo looks too similar to another one, it’s bound to confuse people– or worse, make people think you imitated the logo. This is YOUR brand. Make it yours.
Your logo should look good, distinct and original–
- On any type of background
- In full color
- In black and white
- Big or small
- Without your tagline, brand name
- Dressed up for occasions (think Santa hat perched on your logo for Christmas)
- Dressed down (think Google becoming a simple G)
This is where your simple design comes in: because it’s clear and easily made to be consistent across all channels, on desktop and on mobile.
Techniques and Tricks in Logo Design
- Experiment with letters and acronyms.
- And then experiment with different sizing and formatting for those letters. Boldface, italics, lowercase and uppercase.
- Stacking, too. Vertical alignment! They don’t always have to be side by side.
- Play with shapes. Again, look at the Washington Cougars logo. That was creative!
- Play with fonts– plural. Use them together for something cohesive and unique.
- Play with opacity and overlays.
- Don’t forget patterns and negative space!
Go for online resources and tools. Photoshop is still the best, but go beyond to Pixlr and other tools. If you’re going to DIY it, get ideas from 99designs— or purchase something you can tweak!
You can also use sites like CoolText, Hipster Logo Generator (upcoming), Logomakr and LogoYes— easy to use and FREE logo design interfaces. You usually only pay to download high resolution versions you need for prints.
Get ideas from 2016 Design Trends and more tips and techniques from free Udemy and Coursera design courses. It’s self-investment. You might like it and start designing logos for others!
MakeUseOf compiled tools to make an eye-catching logo from almost nothing. And of course, here’s the timeless and classic post from ProBlogger on the proper mindset and workflow for a smashing blog logo.
We all want our logos to become iconic, of course, but that’s waaaaay down the line. Even the clever logos graphic designers venerate these days got little to no recognition when they first came out. Develop your blog and your business– and your logo’s success will follow!
Any musings to add about blog logos? Have you had to make more than one?
Share your stories in the comments!
