How to Design a Professional Custom Logo for Your Business

This is the best way I know of to design a logo or to just generate ideas to hand over to your designer.

Decide if you want a text logo or an illustrative logo, or a combination mark.

Get out a pen and a pad of paper and brainstorm. Think about what your company does, how you want to be perceived. What are a couple of phrases of what you want people to think of when they look at your logo? Possibly take the business name, divide it up and see what types of images come to mind for each word. Take those images and put them together to see if you have something that you can use.

Google those image words and see what comes up. Search for your type of business and compare your ideas to thiers. This is still part of the brainstorming.

Take your best ideas and draw them up roughly on your pad of paper.

Either show your client your ideas, of if this is for yourself, pick the one you like the best and possibly add or subtract images and ideas from the logo, still on your paper.

Once you have the idea, scan your idea and drop it into illustrator or any other vector drawing software. Trace the image in Illustrator and start adding color and texture with different brushes and swatches. If there are many changes, make sure you save a copy each step of the way, so if you change your mind, you can go back to the original.

Pick the right font for your logo, if it is not already incorporated into the design. I have a free program called “free and easy font viewer” so I can scroll through all the fonts on my computer and see what pops. If I don’t like any of them, I sometimes resort to finding new ones on the internet.

Keep working at your logo until it looks the way you want it. Easy huh?

Other designers may use a slightly different technique but I know what works best for me. If you plan on working with a designer, skip the last three steps and just use this technique to brainstorm.

Professionally Designed Custom Logos