A logo design is one of the fundamentals for any businesses self image.
Starting a new venture can be stressful on its own without having to look for and select a good design team who can help bring your vision to life. From being a startup to working with startups, we understand how overwhelming this task can be.
Designing a Logo is no simple overnight task, it requires multiple streams of communication back and forth between the client and the design team. Sky Guardian can be a little chatty in the beginning of a new project. We spend a lot of time getting to know the business, its competitors, the target audience and much more through multiple carefully crafted questions, we call this the “design brief”. This may seem time consuming but it is very useful to be better informed about the business so that the design can be fully tailored to the business and for its audience.
Usually projects require 4-5 reviews between designer and client to allow for the final design to do justice against the brief.
Here are the top 6 steps Sky Guardian takes when designing a logo.
Step 1 – The Design Brief
The backbone to any good logo design is the design brief. For us to create your logo exactly the way you or your business requires, we go through a number of questions about your likes, dislikes, preferences, competitors, target audience and further information regarding the business. This information goes into, what is called, “the design brief” and helps us to better understand your business and its audience so that we can provide an image fit for purpose.
Step 2 – Concepts and Sketches
Once we obtain the final design brief, we take a little time to go away and research your business via various online avenues based on the brief, we also contact you for further information or details based on specific questions from the brief.
The research is a crucial part of the process, this is where the designer, or team of designers in some cases, will gain inspiration to get the ideas flowing from pencil to paper. Drawing and sketching quickly allows us to get multiple ideas down in a short amount of time. Concepts and sketches can produce 20+ variations which then get filtered and shortlisted until we are at the point of speaking to a client to further shortlist and/or edit the variations in order to produce a rough skeleton of what our clients are envisioning.
Step 3 – Typography
Typeface/Type/Typography – Letters, Numbers and even special characters in a particular design for print or web media, you may also call it “Font”.
Sketching the barebones of a design is always important but so is the typography and the use of type in your design. Based on the design brief, business or client, Sky Guardian either custom designs or looks for a typeface that best matches the brief and business. Each of the variations are presented to the clients to be reviewed and shortlisted. We always believe in the clients thoughts as well as our own designers, after all, two heads are better than one.
Step 4 – Black & White Designs
As difficult as it can be when you are going out and don’t know whether to wear the clean white shirt, or the white shirt with the funky designs, we have to select a design concept which pleases everyone. Once we have narrowed down the selection, we take the concept sketch into our design lab to produce it in black and white.
Designing the logo in black and white helps us visualise the clarity, whether the overall design will be clear when working with it in its more simplest colour forms and in various different sizes. Once we know that the design is readable and works well in black and white, we then move to the colour phase of the design, depending on the brief.
Step 5 – Colour Profiling
Once we are happy with the design, or the variety of design concepts chosen by the team and clients, we start to bring some life to the design with the addition of colour. Sometimes a client might have a set of colours or a single colour in mind which they think could work for the design, but more often than non, we go through a range of colours which we believe best suits the businesses identity. We present 3-4 colour palettes which we believe work for the design and feel of the company. These colour pallets consist of 4-5 colours, which provide reasonable flexibility in order to keep the companies future branding, marketing communications, websites, etc. consistent.
Step 6 – Finalising The Logo
Almost ready to deploy! So we’ve got the chosen logo, the typeface, the brand colours selected by the wonderful client and we probably even gave the design a few final detailed tweaks. Sky Guardian finally exports the design out into various different file formats, some for digital/web use, such as websites or social media and some for use in print, like documents, brochures, business cards and much more.
Finally, the logo design process is complete. Hopefully you get a little more insight on our process and how we take a few questions and turn them into your companies well formed image, with you by our side of course!
If you’re interested in having your logo designed, get in touch with us today! We’re always happy to help: Contact us
