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How To Design a Basic Logo

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A logo is the most important thing you'll design for your company. It's what customers, prospects and competitors will identify you with. It's how customers browsing shelves will know your product packaging and even your product, if you choose to put your logo there.

Your logo will go on your business cards, brochures, stationery, posters basically everything that is associated with your business. A good logo is a simple logo. Look at Target's bulls eye. Nothing fancy there, but it's effective because it's simple, which makes it easy to remember. A logo can be anything from graphics only (Target) to graphics and text together (McDonald's) to just text (FedEx). It's up to you. Just make sure your logo really represents your brand and your company.

Things You Will Need

Corel Draw Software

Step 1

Learn more about what a logo is. Wikipedia has a good definition as does CreativeBits.

Step 2

A logo should made from vector art, so you'll need a program like Corel Draw to design your logo. Vector art is made of lines, not pixels, which means it can be sized to take up a whole billboard or scaled down to fit on the corner of a business card without losing its readability or shape. Vector art does not get fuzzy like photos do when blown up. Read more about vector art at Wikipedia.

Step 3

Start by playing around with lines and shapes in Corel Draw. Vary the thicknesses of the lines and create patterns with the lines. Just get a feel for what kind of vector art you can create. Add some curves to the lines to see what curves can convey: softness. Hard lines with sharp corners indicate a serious, formal type of business. Make other simple shapes, like triangles, circles and squares just to give your brain some creativity to think. Meld the shapes together or group them to make different designs.

Step 4

Make a sketch of what you think your logo should look like, either on paper or in Corel Draw. Make the sketch in black and white and in color. You shouldn't rely on color for a successful logo. Your logo should be recognizable whether it's in color or not.

Step 5

If you are planning on using your company's name for the logo, play around with different fonts. A popular design technique for word logos is to pick one letter out of the word to make a different font, or to change into a shape. Triangles make excellent 'A's and 'V's while circles are obviously for 'O's and small 'A's.

Step 6

Decide on what colors to bring to your logo. Keep the color selection to no more than 3 colors. Any more than that will look unprofessional, unless of course, your logo is a rainbow. Use colors that represent your brand, purple connotes royalty while yellow is cheerful. Check out what other colors mean at InfoPlease

Step 7

Test your logo by asking colleagues and those who don't know your company what they think of it. Ask what feelings it conveys. What do people think of when they see your logo? An aggressive company or a relaxing company? If the answers aren't what you expected, go back to the drawing board and try again. Test again and again until you get the feelings you expect and the logo reflects your brand accurately.