Time to design some logos? Stuck staring at a blank artboard (for you Illustrator buffs)? Or maybe your company wants to keep logo design in-house (gulp!) and the task has fallen to you. Designing a logo can be intimidating, even if you have designed a few before. A logo is what represents a company; it should help the public identify your business image and any public documents or products they may see. Another difficult aspect of logo design is making sure that it will be easy to decipher whether on something as small as business cards or as large as a billboard.
No matter your level of expertise in logo design, you should be able to find something to help you get started in the resources below. If you know of any other resources that we should have included, let us know below!
Inspiration
To start off with, it can be a great idea to see some other logos done well. There are tons of one-stop-shops online for people to upload their logos and get critiques. You can use these to peruse others’ work and get some ideas along the way. Not only does this help you get some ideas, it gets you away from that empty artboard:
- Brands of the World
- Logo Design Love
- Logo Lounge
- Logo Pond
- Logo of the Day
- Good Logo
- Logo Design Works
Color Swatches
Once you have your inspiration, you know what you’ve got to do, take some time to analyze and craft your color palette. Sometimes this has been predefined for you in a brand’s style guide. If not, the absolute freedom can sometimes be paralyzing. Taking the time to develop your colors can help you consolidate your concept and articulate your ideas, too:
- Adobe’s Kuler System
- Color Combos
- Color Scheme Designer
- Colour Lovers
- Colour Blender
- DeGraeve
- Colors on the Web
Type
You have your design and your color swatches, but now you need to get the typography elements just right. Maybe your logo doesn’t have typography. Great! Don’t read this section. For the rest of us, we need some points of reference to get started:
- The Ministry of Type
- Typography Served
- I Love Typography
- The Font Feed
- Daily Type
- Microsoft Typography
- Type Junkies
Illustrator Tutorials
Everything is together. Inspiration — check. Colors — check. Type — check. Now how the heck to do you pull it all together? Sometimes you run into a few issues when developing fonts that you just can’t seem to solve. Here are some tutorials to get you through the worst of it. We’ll skip the basics like using the Pen Tool and jump to the more advanced features:
- Quick Logos Using Live Trace
- Gradient Meshes
- Using the Perspective Grid
- Creating Glass Effects
- 3D Text (no use of 3D Extrude & Bevel)
- 3D Text (use of 3D Extrude & Bevel)
- Textures
You may not need all of these resources, but hopefully there will be some in these lists that you can take away with you. Let them guide you to new levels of design in your next projects, and be sure to let us know which ones you found to be the most useful.
Tara HornorTara Hornor has a degree in English and has found her niche writing about marketing, advertising, branding, graphic design, and desktop publishing. She is a Senior Editor for Creative Content Experts, a company that specializes in guest blogging and building backlinks. In addition to her writing career, Tara also enjoys spending time with her husband and two children.
