How To Create An Awesome Logo For Your Brand
Your logo is the visual representation of your business. The best logos make a brand recognizable and stand out from competitors. At best, an online store without a logo looks unfinished. At worst, it looks suspicious.
In this article we’ll tell you about different ways to create your own logo and give you advice on how to make yours evocative and appealing. We’ll also show how to create logo online with the help of an free online creator and install it to Ecwid’s Starter Site.
Six Ways To Create a Logo For Your Business
Everything depends on your design skills and budget. Here are some options for any occasions.
1. Draw it yourself
To create a worthwhile logo on your own requires some design skills and knowledge, but you’ll have absolute say over the finished product.
Advantages:
Total control
One-of-a-kind
It’s free
Disadvantages:
You better have some drawing skills
You must know how to use a graphics program
The result won’t be high-quality if you don’t have worthwhile experience
Time spent: It depends. 10-20 hours. Cost: free.
2. Order it from a designer
You have to describe exactly what you want and consider all its nuances in advance. Then you must look for a designer. If you can’t find one easily, you can always fall back on the freelance market (sites like Freelancer, Upwork, Fiverr etc.).
Advantages:
Harness a wide variety of designers with different skills
You logo is one-of-a-kind, made to order
High-quality result
Disadvantages:
It’s not easy to find a good designer
You’ll have to be hands-on throughout the process in order to get a pleasing result
A freelancer can vanish after taking your deposit
Time spent: from 2 days up to 1-2 weeks. Cost: beginners take $30-$90, experienced designers take $300-900.
3. Order it from a design studio
This process is the same as with a freelance designer, but much more convenient and coherent.
Advantages:
Work with professional designers
Great choice of design studios
Easy to communicate and have meetings with your designers
Achieve a unique, high-quality result
Guaranteed to finish on time
Disadvantages:
Expensive!
Time-consuming
Time spent: from 1-2 weeks up to 2 months. Cost: from $300 at small companies up to $15,000-$50,000 at well-known companies.
4. Crowdsource it
Register an account on a site like 99designs, write a description of what you want, and watch participating designers create logos to your specifications. Of course this only works well if your financial incentive is strong enough to capture the best designer to meet your needs. You’ll choose your favorite option and the designer responsible for the work gets paid.
Advantages:
Many options to choose from
Communicate directly with the designer
Work is always handed in on time
Disadvantages:
You’ll have to pay even if you don’t like any of the options
You don’t control the process
Time spent: 2-4 days. Cost: $90-$200.
5. Use a specialized logo maker
You might consider these scaled-down versions of Photoshop, specifically tailored to logo creation. Online Logo Maker is a good example—you’ll have your choice of icons, fonts, and colors from the app’s database.
Advantages:
Almost always free
You retain total control of the process
Disadvantages:
You need some design skills
You can’t edit the images from the database
Time spent: 30 minutes to 3 hours. Cost: free or about $50.
6. Use an online generator
Specialized apps on the Internet use lightweight design elements to help rapidly generate a professional-looking logo for anyone. Type in your company’s name, choose the category of image you want to include, and browse your options. Once the basic elements are in place, many generators allow you to further edit and customize the logo that you liked.
Advantages:
No design skills needed to create a professional-looking logo
Quick result
Lots of options for starter images
Pay only after you have the finished product you want
Disadvantages:
Average design quality
Logo might not be unique
Images from database can’t be edited
Time spent: 5-30 minutes. Cost: free for small images, $5 and up for full sized logos.
What option to choose?
If you have all the necessary skills, draw it yourself, it will be much cheaper and more convenient. If you have the budget for it, hire a designer. If you want to save money, we recommend using online generator. It has the best price to quality ratio.
Online Logo Generators
This option will be ideal for the person who has no idea how your logo should look, who can’t draw, and can’t budget a worthwhile amount for a professional. We’ve chosen three options.
Logaster
Enter your company’s name and type of business and you’ll get a few dozen ready-to-useoptions consisting of an image with a caption. You can change the colors, fonts, and the placement of the image. This generator can create a business card, an envelope, and a favicon for your website based on the logo.
Generator makes quality PNG and vector file formats for you to use in whichever marketing pursuit you need. Once you’ve got it done to your specifications, a 1,024 px logo costs $9.99.
Example:
Hipster Logo Generator
This generator creates your logo out of a combination of elements. You can’t edit these elements and there are only a few dozen of them, but the results are still interesting and stylish.
The completed logo is available in PNG and SVG formats. You can download a 600×500 px logo for free. A higher-quality 2400×2000 px logo costs $5.
Example:
Zillion Designs
This generator allows you to implement an image, font, colors, placement of the text, and even additional elements. The completed logo is available in EPS, JPEG and PNG formats. The service is free, but you can pay extra and choose a package to create your (corporate identity).
Example:
Some Things To Keep In Mind As You Design Your Logo
If you plan to design the logo by yourself, use our tips for best results.
The cliche about “thinking outside the box” is especially true here
Be imaginative. A logo doesn’t always have to reflect the company’s activity. What does Nike’s famous swoosh logo have to do with anything the company actually sells? A distinct logo helps you stand out from competitors and burrow into the consumer mind.
Choose an appropriate color
Check out the chart below, which reveals data on how logo color can affect customers’ perception of your business. For example, purple conveys royalty, blue trustworthiness, and yellow positivity. What do you want to say with your colors?
Don’t get carried away with color choice. Keep it simple, no more than three colors.
Choose a font
There are thousands of fonts, so how can you ever pick the best one. Consider the following criteria:
1. Association. Different fonts evoke different mental associations. For example, a construction company’s logo would want to evoke feelings of monumentality and reliability. Powerful-seeming fonts such as Micra, Audiowide, Europe, or Garamond would be strong options.
2. Readability. Make sure that your font is easy to read. Avoid fonts that are too complicated or “curly,” which is a polite way of saying “illegible.” The simpler, the better.
3. Balance. Use strong fonts with strong imagery, use delicate fonts with softer imagery.
4. Moderation. There’s no reason to use more than two fonts in your logo.
Easy mistakes you can avoid:
Don’t use flat, unappealing clipart.
Don’t make the logo too complicated.
Make sure the logo looks good in black and white; it might appear a variety of different places.
Give your logo some universal appeal, so it can be used on the Internet, on T-shirts,in outdoor advertising etc.
Be sure to save the draft of the logo in vector format.
Make sure the logo scales appropriately. Sometimes a logo can look nice on your mobile phone, but it might look blurry and pixelated elsewhere.
What It’s Like To Use An Online Logo Generator
Let’s create a logo for an online coffee shop using Logaster.
1. Click “Create logo”. Type the name and choose the type of business if you like. Click “Continue”.
2. Choose one of the offered options. If you want to implement our earlier advice, you can edit these results to get something truly unique. If you don’t want to customize, click “Continue” and go to step #6.
3. Change the placement of elements so the text appears larger.
4. Choose your font. Click on the text and search for the appropriate option in the field that appears to the right.
5. This is a coffee shop, so let’s use the infographic to select a color appropriate for food and drink items. Red and yellow colors are good choices, or perhaps brown, for the color of the coffee. Change the color, adjust the size to your liking.
6. Now the logo is more harmonious and cohesive. Click “Continue” and “Save”. Now you’ll download your completed logo. This generator offers a few size options, but the 1,024 px size will be the best option for a new Ecwid store.
Upload your logo to your store
If you use a starter-level Ecwid store, we suggest creating a version of your logo that is longer than it is tall. You’ll want to use a smaller icon and place it next to the text, not above it; it will look better.
