Design Process of Professional Logo Designers
For most clients, logo designs are simple images that represent brands and as such are easy to create. It is not surprising that logo designers are offered cheap prices because of this misconception.
What they don't know is that it takes a lot of time to draft a logo that is able to speak volume to the consumers.
In the previous post, Why Professional Logos Are Not Cheap explains the science of logo creation. In here, we will discuss the painstaking process designers go through to create the perfect logo for your company – from the conceptualization to the final product.
This post will answer how professional logo designers capture a company's core values, mission and personality into a single piece of image. Read further below to find out.
The Design Process of Creating a Remarkable Logo
1. Industry Research
Designers need to know what type of environment the company is involved in, so they know how to it needs to look and feel to its target market. For example, a security company, in hindsight, must offer security, trust and competence. How will a professional designer interpret that information?
Let's go back to the science of logo creation. According to human psychology, trust, security and competence translate to the color blue and the shapes of either circle or square.
Part of industry research is checking out the company competition since designers will want to provide you with a new logo that is unique but is not entirely radically different from the industry standards.
2. KYC Process (Know Your Customer)
Now that a designer has an idea of what the industry looks and feels like, the next step is to get to allow the designers to get to know your company in-depth. These include answering the following questions:
What does your company do?
What are your goals?
Who is your target market?
Once you provide the necessary information, which is when the real challenge starts for the professional designer. It will involve a lot of brainstorming on their part articulating your company's value proposition through a simple image.
3. Logo Usage / Application
This stage of the design process is simple for you (as the client) since you will only need to answer the question: how and where will the logo be used?
But for designers, your answer may mean more work. Why?
Designers need to know where the logo will be used so that they can create variations appropriate for its placement. Think of it as a short-hand and a long-hand signature. For example, a brand logo may look great on an airline website but will look weird in a tail fin of the airplane, since space is narrow.
4. Sketching Process
Based on the information gathered from the first three design stages, designers will start to work on two to three variations of logo sketches to present to the client (you). However, most designers often sketch a dozen more to explore other logo ideas and then choose only a few to digitalize and present.
However, that doesn't end there.
5. Revisions or Refinement
Most of the time, the client and the designer do not meet eye to eye when it comes to the initial drafts. But that's alright, it is normal. You do not need to fire the guy immediately just because the first few logo designs were not to your liking. In fact, the refinement process is one of the longest in the design process because it requires a lot of back and forth.
In the end, the most important thing is to openly communicate with your designer and as much as possible be clear about what revisions you want.
6. Design Guideline
Companies often do not know that the logo will also affect other aspects of their marketing materials either digital or in print. For instance, the color of the logo may be used on the website (e.g. background, buttons etc.). Depending on your agreement with the professional logo designer, you can entrust creating the design guideline to him/her. A design guide is part of the brand guideline that will provide consistency to your brand, which is crucial to a company's identity.
Also, having a design and branding guideline will help ensure that standard principles are followed and applied even when you work with another designer.
