How to Design a Logo for Beginners | BYOL Show EP1

Hi everyone, today's question is... what is the best way to design a logo? Well, there are lots of different ways of doing it... but what I'll do today is, I'll show you my way. So this is where we end up today in this episode... but it's not so much how to draw this logo here... but more about how I got to this point, my process. From competitor analysis, Mind Maps, Mood Boards... and finally some actual drawing in my notebook... through to refining one of these drawings on my laptop. Now, creating your very first logo can be pretty overwhelming. I remember it well, when I got started... the kind of vastness of the internet... and looking at other people's amazing logos... and being kind of paralyzed... and not even getting started on my own work. Now, logo design is part of a kind of larger branding exercise... but for this particular video... we're going to kind of focus down on the logo... and let me show you, we're going to focus on this, like the logo itself... the kind of pictorial mark, the logo symbol, the brand mark... this kind of, like, the pixel-y, image-y bit, okay? In other videos I will discuss fonts and colors... but we'll focus on this part in this video. Step number one, go and read the brief... that you spent ages crafting and getting ready. I'll wait right here. You don't have one, do you? Now, creating a brief, especially when you're new... is probably one of the suckier parts of being a creative designer... but not having one is probably the reason why you are finding it so hard... to kind of, I don't know, get any sort of boundaries... and narrow what you are doing with your kind of creative focus... but let's carry on, like you don't have one... and I'm going to show you some tips to kind of, at least... have a pseudo-brief for yourself... especially if you're doing work on your own, for yourself... you don't have a client to go out and get a brief from... so let me show you some of the tips. Now let me describe the client that I am working with for this video. We are working with a teeny tiny business. It's a husband and wife team, they have an existing bike shop already. They sell mainly road going bikes in a village near me... and they are both the best and worst kind of client. The worst, because they have really no idea... about what they want their brand to do, or communicate. So I'm kind of left guessing, so they have no values... they have no mission statement... they're not really sure who their client is, nothing formalized anyway... so there's a little bit of discovery in the first coffee that I sat down with them in... and they are also the best kind of client... because, check out their existing logo. Now, there is nothing particularly wrong with this logo. The owner, John, made it quickly in PowerPoint, or something like that. He's not particularly fond of it, or proud of it... so I feel like we can build from here... sometimes you get given brands... and they've actually got a pretty amazing kind of brand and logo... and they're just sick of it, and those are harder jobs... where you're trying to be better than the last person, or change it enough... where I feel like, yes, there's room to grow here. I don't think there's going to be much we'll bring through to the next one. Sometimes it's nice to bring parts of the old logo through... but I don't know, this bike here... it's not really saying road going athlete... and Copperplate for the font. We're not going to do fonts on this one... but I doubt we'll bring it through in the next version... but Copperplate, does it break the rules of design? I think it does, put that down on your list of fonts to never use. And if you're going to use it, never ever capitalize. Capitalize, I don't know, that drives me mad... and I guess the weird outline thing. Anyway, I think, yes, we've got places to go. Let's go and make it arguably better. All right, so that is my client. What I want to do though is make this video a little bit more interactive. So if you are following along... and you don't have a client you're working with... and you want to build something for portfolio... practice what you're learning... what we'll do is, we'll pick a company name... I'll show you how to do that in a second... and I'll set some exercises throughout this video... and I'll show you a place you can submit your work... to get a little bit of feedback as well. So let me show you name picking. All right, step one to picking your fictional company... that you're going to be working on is... pick your last name, so my name is Daniel Walter. Scott, so the company that I'd pick would be called Scott. And we're going to be selling, go to this URL here. I'll leave a link to it in the description. Basically it's an object generator... and this is what you're going to be selling. So, in your head, think of your lucky number... and then hit this button that many times. My lucky number's 3, I'll click 1, 2, 3... and you have to, have to pick something out of that 6 there. Don't let us keep going, spending half the day clicking refresh... until you find something you like, or an industry you already know. So have to pick something from here. In my case it'd be Scott's Eggs, or Scott, and we just sell eggs. Lime, can of peas, beef, perfume, butter knife. So I'd probably pick, I don't know, Scott's Eggs... or perfume would be interesting. So you have to pick from something from here... and even if there's, even if it's all lame... pick something from the list... because you'll, I bet you'll find more value out of this exercise... branding a company that you don't already know the industry. You'll get more value out of doing that... than trying to pick something you already know. So, all right, pick a name, let me know in the comments what you got... and I'll see you in the next step. All right, so we have our client name, mine is Adare Bikes. Yours is whatever York's came up with, selling baked beans, or whatever it is. So we know the name. Now we're going to assume... we don't have a really rigorous brief to work from. You should go and learn how to make a rigorous brief. It's out of the scope of this course... but let's say we need to move on... and we don't have that amazing clear brief. For me, I need a kind of a pseudo brief. I really just need two questions answered, so that I can keep moving along. I'm going to ask the client two questions... and it's going to be who their ideal client is... and who their competitors are. Often they can answer those pretty easily. If you're working on your own kind of self-generated project... pretend you're the client, and answer those two questions. Write it down, and let's move on to the next step. All right, the next step is Competitor Analysis. It's a fancy word, but really... we're just going to grab other people's logos... competitors in the same sort of bike space as us. So it's going to help us do a couple of things. One is, it'll just allow us to see... how other brands are communicating their values... in an industry that we might not be really, you know, understand. Bikes, I kind of understand, but if you don't bake beans... it's really interesting to see if there's some sort of consistency as well... across what types of logos that they are... the way that they're developed, the colors they use, the fonts they use. And probably its biggest perk for Competitor Analysis... is to really add some boundaries to your kind of creative work. I talked about it before, the designer kiss of death is to say... hey, design me a logo, I don't mind, just make it cool. And you're, instead of like creative freedom... which it feels like it should be... it's like, I don't know, panic and vague looks... you know, wandering around, not really getting anywhere... because you haven't given some boundaries. So that's what we're going to do with our Competitor Analysis. Let me show you, kind of, the process. So the client gave us these businesses that are local to them... that are competing, so I just went through them all... googled them, found their websites... and then went and kind of did a screenshot... and grabbed up all of their logos, then dumped them on a page. You can put them in anything you like. Just something that you can kind of move them around... and start grouping them in a second. I'm using Adobe Illustrator, but PowerPoint, Google Presentation... Photoshop, whatever you've got. So next up is going and finding some other competitors. Sticking locally is pretty limiting... so let's go and have a look at the international stage of Bike Shops. Bike Shop, you can just type in Bike Shop... what I find really useful is doing stuff in different countries... so just so that you don't get, like... it's only going to show me bikes in my local area, in Ireland... it's actually defaulting to Dublin... but type in London, type in your city, type in New York... and just get a feel for a bunch of other ones... and all I do now is start clicking on them... and opening them up in separate tabs... and just doing screenshots of all the different options... and grab a bunch of them, don't stop... like, just give yourself like 30 minutes... and say, I'm going to get as many as I can in 30 minutes... and just dump them all into a document... and I'll see you in a sec. All right, so scratch, half an hour, this took me about 15 minutes. I was able to pick a few cities... get a few screenshots, dump them in here... and then spend time kind of moving them around quite quickly... mainly because bike shops, there's just so many around... so I was, so much choice. If you're doing, you know, my baked beans example... you might have to search a lot harder, and it'll take a bit longer... but I'm happy with this amount. And what I've done as well is, I have put them on two kind of Spectrums. Well, one Spectrum, and Groups. So my Spectrum on the top here is... I've got Radical at one end, and Simple down the other. Now, this gauge will depend on your industry, there's no, like, absolute one. You might have one in Traditional... I'm not sure what the way the camera works... but one in Traditional, and the other one, you know, Radical. Or you might have Conservative at one end, and whatever is at the other. Whatever metric seems to work good for the industry that you're working on. So, down this end, really Simple... and down this end, super Radical. For the industry, so that's important. You know, if I'm doing a Skate brand... that's not Radical for Skate brands, that is quite traditional. So it'll depend on your type of work you're doing. What I've also done is... I have grouped them in terms of, kind of like logo style. So here, this is a word mark, and basically just letters, stylized... so that, you know, stylized in a way that signifies the brand. There's quite a few of these, as far as my research has gone... so that's quite popular, so it helps kind of direct where I might be heading... or where I might be rebelling. So, these ones here as well, these are kind of more the... this is what I want to go for this particular lesson. I want to go for this, kind of pictorial mark, all these... let's have a look, all these kind of like logo style imagery in here. These are technically combination logos, or a bit of both. This one here, especially, it is a bit of, you know, kind of a word type... and with a branding kind of logo mark. So that's kind of where I went, and want to go with this particular course. What I'll do is, I'll ignore font for the moment... just to separate it out for another video. Same with color, we'll spend a bit more time on that later on. Branding can be big or small, and we're going for just the pictorial mark. So this is the kind of area I want to be in here... and the nice thing about it is that it's clearly something the audience is expecting. Down here, we've got some kind of like emblem logos. There wasn't many of those around... so if I wanted to be like completely different... I might go down this route, just to kind of be different... if I felt like my client was ready for it, or asking for it. You see, down here, there's a... I wasn't sure what to put with that one... that was in our kind of like combination logo... down this kind of radical, it was a bit strange... in comparison to the rest of the industry... and same with these ones down here. Real common when we enter like skate brands... or drifting, or something like that, tattoo parlor... but quite radical when it came to a bike shop. So where do I like to end up? If I zoom out here, I like to end up about here as a rule, generally. Kind of, I don't want to be, like... I know my client's not going to hang out here in radical. I've had very few clients that do. I get the impression from them, they want to like... do something completely different. Normally, what we want to do is... find out where the industry sits in the middle... and be just a little bit more progressive. Just to be different, and be cutting edge, and be now. So this kind of two third mark. Now, it doesn't help you too much in terms of making your logo... but what we should be able to do, once we've done some concepts... is grab it, and if we were unbiasedly going to put it somewhere... it would fit in here, not really simple... but nothing too crazy. So I find that process, it doesn't take very long, super helpful. It's almost as helpful to know what not to do. We didn't see many, kind of like crest logos, or mascots, or anything like that. So, that's what I used to do when I was younger. I used to turn up to meetings, have one of every different style... and kind of, which one do you like? Whereas now I can go in, I'll take my competitive analysis... and it does a couple of things, it helps you present... something to get started with... and it helps, like show that you care, you understand the industry... and where your logo is positioned, so it gives it context... and often, instead of like giving it to them, and they go, I don't like blue... or that looks like something else... you can have different kinds of conversations... because you can relate back to the competitive analysis... always have it open, and just show where you position them, and why. It's also really helpful, even if you decide, you're like, this logo... the client wants to be like, way out of here, he wants to be different... she's going to do something completely different, and disrupt the industry. You need to know where the industry is to be able to disrupt it... so it's really useful for that too. Next step on our amazing logo design journey is a mind map. Boring old mind map, super useful, quick to do, I'll show you mine now. The thing to do though, is to keep in mind, your customer's customer... their ideal customer, keep them in your mind, and also the competitors. Is he ever going to show us how to draw a logo? So this is how I get started. I just list out all of the words that relate to both my customer's customer... and looking at the competitive analysis, what vibes I get from the client... and just start listing out all of those words. I need the thesaurus online to help me... and I just kind of go until I feel like I'm running out of ideas. This is how far I got in this one. Then I go through and have a re-read of them all, and I pick out three... that I feel like the most... has a nice connection to what I want to do. Tough, engineering, vitality, then I kind of make more of a mind map... where I go through and say, put tough in the middle... and then kind of like spread out from there about... I forget about the Adare bikes and the client... and I just think about the word tough, and add all the words around it. Same with engineering and vitality. I just kind of add all the words that I feel connect to those. And then, once I've done those, I start to look for... what I'm really hoping for, is some sort of object, or... I do things like object, animal, color, shape... to try and kind of think of different ideas. It might be verbs, just something to get the ideas going... and I'm looking for something that threads between all three of them. That's what I'm really hoping for, and in my case, this particular one... there's kind of an eagle, or there's a local bird, it's a buzzard. It's kind of a bird of prey, looks pretty cool. It's local to the area, I thought that might be... it's through a couple of them, and I think that might be a way to go-ish. Goat, I really... I don't know what happened there. I thought that was going to be a good connection, but... yes, so that's my mind map. Let's get on to the next bit, which is still not drawing. All right, it's homework time. I've done my mind map, you need to do yours. So remember, list out, doesn't matter if it's offline or digital... just list out your company name, and then have your competitor analysis... and have your client's client in your mind... and then just start listing out words, thesaurus... whatever you need to get a bunch of words together. Then pick only three of those words... place them out into their own page, and then expand on those. Once you've finished, go through, circle the ones that you think... connect to what you're doing, and then start to look... to see if there's any kind of threads that connect them all... or any objects, or animals, or colors, or shapes that start connecting them all... and that's going to be our kind of starting point for our next step... which is still not drawing logos, we're going to do Mood Boards. Let's get on to that. All right, this is my Mood Board, this is what I ended up with. So how I got here is, I went back to my mind map, I picked out... I'd probably pick out like three or four different things... and do them individually. I'm just going to do one for this video, just to keep it concise... but I picked out this, there was eagles, and crows, and hawks, and stuff in there. What I ended up finding out is that there's a local bird... I know there's a local bird, it's a buzzard, it's a bird of prey... looks really majestic, and it's local to the area... so it has a lot more connection, so I kind of focused on that. Then I go off to something like Google, a mixture of Google Images... that's where I found all the very... I was looking for like dynamic poses for the bird... and then into something like Dribbble, with three B's, or Behance. These two, generally, I don't go much further than these days... it's just a wealth of good inspiration. So my Mood Board is there to have a look, to see what else is out there... to see what I think might connect all the different parts... that I've been kind of developing for my customer. And yeah, lots of screenshots, and what I think looks nice... and modern, and cool, and fits in with my plan for my competitor analysis. And lots and lots of screenshots, and then just dumping them into here. So I searched for bird logo on Behance, and in Dribbble I just typed in bird. I just went through, and found the things that I liked... and then kind of combined them here. They're not really combined too much, I tried to group them a little bit. These are kind of like Vector Gradient styles, but more line art... really simple kind of outlines. Then more Icon style, and I just kind of half put them into some groups. And that's going to be enough for me to actually start drawing, yay. Don't think I forgot, I kind of forgot. You have to do your homework, so go through, create your Mood Board... and be ready for the next step. All right, we get to start drawing now. So I generally do it offline, just because it's quicker and easier. You don't need to be a good drawer, that comes up a lot. Nobody's going to see these, I'm going to show you mine. I'm not a bad drawer, so I find it quite comfortable to do it. But if you aren't a good drawer, it's not about the final product. We'll move this on to the computer later on, and tidy it up. It's all about getting the ideas out. So have your kind of customer profile... your competitor analysis, your Mood Board, all kind of with you... and start drawing. Now, you might be one of those people who can start drawing... and just kind of keep doing it. What I need is a little bit of process. I find myself getting stuck at like drawing number 5... and then not knowing what to do, and then just developing one of those. So to get past that, I know through experience... and people more experienced than me have shown... is that I need to kind of push myself to do a minimum of 20. So I do 20 drawings, keep them short and quick... because the first few are pretty, like, I don't know... the word is, obvious, that's the word. They're going to look exactly, kind of, like they're planned. And then you get to about 5 or 6, and they start looking bad... and you're just going around in the weeds trying to figure out what to do... and that is an important part of this process... is to go into the murky, icky, I don't even know if this works... and you will find, eventually, it might take 10 terrible versions... that don't really make any sense, to come out the other side... and have a couple that actually, you have to think about in a different way. So do push yourself to do more than you would normally do. So 20 is a really good number for me. If you do need to, like, set timers, so you're not stuck on one... you can do that on your phone easily... just to kind of get through, and actually have a chunk done. So what I'll do is, I'll record me doing my versions... and I'll set up the camera now. All right, it is drawing time. I probably normally use a pencil. Check out that sweet pencil, it's got Photoshop written on it. There's a rubber at the end, but you can't see that on camera... so I'll use a big thick pen. All right, drawing time. All right, this is super hard, even when you are not watching... so I'm just going to start. So I'm kind of looking at my little eagerly thing, and it's so bad. All right, I think it's the beak that's giving me most problems. So I googled, shape of beak. Okay, better wing, I think, better wing... but some sort of kind of line art thing. Kind of looks like the bird's face, kind of handlebars... and that wing needs a lot of work. There you go, again, I think, maybe, another one of those. And better wing, Google better wings. Oh, I think we made a basketball team. I can keep going. Yay, 19. All right, how long did that take? All right, we've been at that about an hour and a bit. Oh, hang on, over 20, and it's a start. I feel like, it's weird that that last one, I feel like... there might be something in that kind of negative space bike... or negative space sprocket, but there's some stuff to continue on with. That's logo doodling done, I got 20 of them, yay. All right, that went okay. There were some terrible ones in the beginning... lots of terrible ones in the middle. I felt like the helmet wearing buzzards... probably not going to win any awards... but there were a couple in there that I think I can move along further. Now it's your turn, so go through... draw your 20, and what I want you to do is take photographs of them... number them, take photographs of them... and then upload them to the Facebook group. There'll be a link in the description for that. Make sure you include the context, so Mind Map, Competitor Analysis... and just make sure you remember the Bring Your Laptop values... if you're new to us and the group. Creativity without limits, ownership of your work... that's what you're doing now by getting involved, and humility. Humility when you share, and post on the group... and when you respond, and add advice... because there's a mixture of people who are brand new... to design, giving feedback... and it's just as important to learn as it is to actually present work... but also, there's some experienced people there as well. So remember, humility... and then we're going to pick one, and develop it here in Illustrator. Do that now. Okay, so I chose logo number 10 to develop further here in Illustrator. I just photographed them, imported them... ready for lots of the dreaded Pen tool... plus a bit of Shape Builder action, and the Direct Selection tool... just to tidy up my initial concept. Clearly, part of my time here was to take my buzzard... and turn him into an angry, yet surprisingly feminine flamingo. Also, if you are new or self-taught in Adobe Illustrator... you might want to check out my Illustrator Essentials or Advanced course... you can click that card at the top there... or you can check the links in the description. It's getting a little motorcycle brand-ish... so I'm not sure if the client's going to go for it... but I feel like we've developed a concept from our kind of mind map... all the way through to kind of this slightly tidier version on Illustrator. I think, ready for at least discussing this with the client. All right, so now it's your turn. Whichever one that you want to develop... post it to the Facebook group to get feedback as well. You can obviously develop more than just one. I've just done one for this one. And what we'll do is, we'll leave it there. I will do some videos on Font and Color... as it relates to this logo in upcoming videos. Once they're out, I'll link to them in the description. As one last thing, we all need to agree... that we will all never speak of Dan's logo number one... Dan's logo number two, and especially number eight. What to do next? If you're already a subscriber at bringyourownlaptop.com... go check out the exclusive podcast with Phil Van Dusen... Victoria Burrowdale, and Sarah Parkinson... all about logo design and branding. Those are well worth a listen. Also, there are design challenges there. There's a couple of logo design challenges there now. So go check out those. If you're not a subscriber for bringyourownlaptop... and let's say Illustrator might be something that you're struggling with... go check out the Essentials course there. Also, there's an Advanced course for people who have a little bit of skills... but want to go to the next level, links in the description. All right, that is going to be it. Let me know in the comments what you thought of the video... and what other design topics you'd like me to cover. And I will see you in one of those videos, bye now. We also probably need to forget about the flamingo, the angry flamingo. That was also bad.