The 2020 Logo Design (Mini) Crash Course

logo design is 5% knowledge of design software and 95% your ability to think outside the box hey everybody what's up Gary Simon here in today we're going to embark upon a journey of logo design now this is a area of expertise that I was very heavily involved in in a different life I design many many logos and I really wanted to put out a refresher course here because 2020 is now out and this is going to be a fun video it's not going to be your typical sort of logo design tutorial or course where I'm just showing you how to use a program in fact we're not going to be really doing that at all I like I mentioned at the beginning the effective good logo design is only 5% your knowledge of design applications the rest lies in your ability like I said to think creative and outside of the box all right so with that said this is a app that I'm going to be building or actually I am building right now it's not quite done yet but you can see it's called fretter and it's a guitar fretboard visualization app for helping people learn now looking up here you can see this is the logo which it's not really a logo because I haven't added anything to it now of course there are simple word mark logos that exist but I want something more for this and that is really what I'm going to be doing in this tutorial you're going to see a time lapse version of me working within a design software to try to come up with some concepts so I'm going to walk you through but through my voice over audio as this time lapse video is playing I'm gonna walk you through my thought process but first before we do that I'm going to first let you guys know and reveal to you you know what is effective logo design so we're gonna take a look at a few examples and then at the very end I'm going to show you some survey results that I had I produce two different concepts in this video for that company fretter and I was able to get several hundred responses from one group is just a bunch of designers that I know from my discord server and the other group is actual guitarists who are going to use this app and then I'll challenge you to see which one do you think these grow these groups chose alright so make sure to subscribe if you haven't yet and let's get started before we begin the note makes it easy and affordable to host your website your portfolio your online store and more on whatever technology stack you use getting up and running is fast and easy with one-click app installs like WordPress and Drupal with back-end access to your server customization and scaling options are all but limitless if you just need something small like an online portfolio to showcase your work Linode has you covered if you need to manage tons of clients websites and reliably serve them to millions of visitors luneau can do that too so sign up using the link below in the description to get $20 in credit on your new alan owed account so first I want to talk about the tools very quickly there's a lot of design software that you can use I'm going to showcase just a few of them here but it in the end you want to make sure that you are using graphic design software that is vector capable alright so in terms of graphic design software there's there's two realms you have vector and then you have raster for instance Adobe Photoshop is a raster based application you don't want to design your logo in Adobe Photoshop and the reason is is because when you go to have your logo design printed for instance maybe on a billboard they have to have a vector version of your logo because vector can be scaled to any size imaginable and it won't lose quality and so I'll talk about that a little bit more here in a bit so don't use Photoshop for your logo design now Adobe Illustrator which is another product from the creators of Photoshop Adobe is pretty much the staple of the logo design it has been for a very long time does that mean that you have to have and use illustrator no you just in fact when it comes to logo design if we're only talking about logo design because logo design is so simple in nature you can use any vector capable software possible and because that usually logo design or good logo design is kept simple you don't need a ton of features and tools and you'll see what I'm talking about as we progress throughout this mini course so Adobe Illustrator very capable and you can do a lot more than just a logo design and it has a million different features and so check it out they do offer I monthly plans for axing accessing this software as well as their entire suite so check them out also affinity designer this is another very popular option for designing logos I haven't personally used it but I know it is possible err rather and then also Inkscape is another option it's free and open-source it's been around for a long time and again we're talking about logo design you don't have to have every feature Under the Sun I've never used an escape myself but I do know you know it's very popular out there now there's a bunch of other you know applications that you can use like I said make sure in the end the one requirement is that its vector okay let's continue on all right so before we get to the actual time lapse portion where you see me designing a logo I wanted to go over just a few slides to talk about the core tenets of what effective logo design is so the first one and these are in no particular order they're all very important and they all must be considered simultaneously when you're designing a logo so the first one we'll talk about is scale and scale I basically mean size so I'm gonna take a look at an example right here here's a logo a fake logo I created it in about 2 minutes essentially we're at this size we can see or at this scale we can see what it says West software right but logos need to be flexible in that a logo can be displayed very small maybe like on a website header and a nav bar or it can be very big on a billboard they have to be flexible and if we scale this down this almost becomes pretty much unreadable and that's because software is so tiny in relation to the rest of the proportion of this logo so whether it's type that's in a logo or an illustration with details you want to make sure it scales well and usually that means you have to try to keep it simple and not have a ton of detail inside of your logo contrast this is another core tenant and fundamental of effective logo design and right here we can see another fake logo I created where it says West software but the West here does not contrast very well with this blue right so there's a lot of people who have visual impairments and they would have a hard time reading this and even those of us who have 20/20 I do with my contacts it still doesn't look good and it's kind of hard to read at very first glance so instead you want to make sure you're using maximum contrast color color is a massive topic in and of itself you could do and you know hours upon hours long courses just on color theory but I'm Justices a crash course but basically when you choose a color or colors for your logo you want to do research first you need to understand who your target audience is versus what the purpose of your company or your business is so to some cultures depending on where they live where that target audience or demographic lives green can mean one thing and green key meaning another so you have to know and of course Google is your friend you can get more in depth and read books on this topic like I said it's a very in-depth talking topic but also as you can see in this particular example colors are all over the place and it doesn't really make sense for a software company to have three different colors now you could say for instance Google but Google is of one anomaly and they actually do have a relevant justification for having all those colors in there because it's simply to mean that they cover everything under the Sun in terms of knowledge and your access to it through their search engine but for the most part you want to avoid mixing a bunch of colors into your logo instead doing something like this is so much more appealing to the eye so like I said do research on the color of meanings especially in terms of you know different parts of the world and also try to minimize the amount of colors that you use simplicity verse complexity so right here we have another fake logo that I created dog home so we see home and therefore a home is depicted depicted above it and we have a lot of details in these windows with these tiny little elements right here in terms of the the window frames and such we have right here a little pathway leading to the house we have a chimney of roof there's a lot happening here even though it doesn't look like the worst logo you've probably ever seen but changes could be made to this and to make it so much more simple like that so we can see both of these side by side which do you think you would remember the most this right here or this simple mark right here I mean yeah it's still a little bit literal and that it is showcasing a house but at least it's a more abstract representation and it is much more simple and if this logo over here was scaled down on the left you would also run into the issue of scale because these tiny little window frames would start to become blurry and hard to see next up is literal verse figurative so here's another fictional logo that I designed I grabbed this icon from icon finder calm and we can see that this is a very literal take on a business so this is a business that has something to do with money or wealth so we're just going to show a dollar not very unique and it's not very memorable so the more obvious that you make an icon that's a part of a logo the less memorable it will become because you're just depicting everyday elements you want to try to think outside of the box and try to be a little bit more figurative in your execution and in fact from the previous example right here this is a very literal take you have a chimney have windows you have this this path leading up to the door very literal this is much more abstracting something that you would expect or this is the type of logo that you might see in a company that has a ton of money to hire the very best logo designers vector so you always want to make sure that your logos are in vector format I talked about this a little bit earlier but vector is very important I'm gonna show you why so this right here let's say for instance you had a designer or you're you're the designer yourself and you produce a PNG or a jpg or a gif or a jiff however some of you want to pronounce it version of the logo and this is the size that you have it at well let's say for instance that you need to have that blown up so you provide a printing service with a PNG that's not very large but has to be enlarged based on that raster and image this is what ends up happening when it's increased a lot what ends up happening is you get pixelation and issues with the quality and it's just so ugly and horrible and blurry looking so always make sure that you do have your logo in vector format and so now we're gonna go ahead and fast forward to the main part of this logo design mini course we're gonna see me design a logo for that threader company and just to give you a quick recap on that this is for a app that I'm working on I'm currently building it using something called UJS this is the design at least and the name is Fred er and it's for a guitar visualization app to try to help people learn scales and notes and all of that so this is what we're gonna focus on right now so the first thing I'm doing here is experimenting with fonts normally I would spend a lot more time you can go to sites like da font com type in your business name and see them output across a bunch of fonts on a typical design course YouTube channel fashion I'm gonna keep things simple and stick with the Monts Vaughn now right here I'm going to pause the frame because I simply sat there for a while and I stared at the letter forms I was trying to identify anything relevant in the shapes of the letters that could signify what this business is about which is guitars and notes and I immediately saw something the two T's could possibly act as guitar frets the last thing I want to do is be literal about this logo I don't want to just show some illustration of a guitar or a guitar note or a musical note I'd rather feature some sort of subtle hint at the guitar so to reinforce that the T's are actual frets here I start to experiment by adding the fret markers that you see between the frets of the guitar I want to ensure the size of the fret markers is just right because if they're too small they won't be visible at smaller sizes I'm also spending time trying to get the alignment of these markers just right you want as much symmetry as possible you want equal whitespace or the empty space around the fret markers next I decide to leave that as its own concept and have replicated to further experiment with a variation using this same concept as a starting point now I had a different idea I thought about making the top of the t's extend upwards so that I can make the frets more obvious and also possibly create a badge of some sort or in other words the top of the t's would form a rectangular container around the entire word mark [Music] and also in order to make it obvious that the two lines are actual t's I needed to separate them with whitespace so remember you always want to make sure that if you have type in your logo like the business name that it is a hundred percent readable I had another idea on a variation that I could make upon this previous variation I decided to wrap everything in another rectangular container and make that new wrapper black and invert the word mark white and this sort of gives it a bit of a retro feel as these types of badge logos were quite common decades upon decades ago and finally for this concept I decided to do one more slight variation where the two white lines on the top and bottom simply extend outwards to the right left as opposed to wrapping around I thought this might make sense given a guitar neck is quite long [Music] here I decide to see how each of these variations work when they're scaled down quite small and they all seem to do a decent job next up is a second entirely different concept I had the idea this time to focus on a combination logo where there's a separate symbol as well as the word mark now the idea I'm trying to execute here is showcasing a circular fret marker with a guitar string going through it in the middle remember the goal is not to be literal but figurative in abstract and unique so I'm not going to show an entire guitar but maybe just a certain element of the guitar now I'm going to make another variation using the same concept I had the idea to turn this more into a circular emblem style icon at this point I only know that I want to make this circular so I'm visualizing thinking about ways to take these three guitar strings in 1 fret marker and turn them into a sort of circle and by the way many people prefer to draw with paper and pen or pencil for drafting out concepts for logos and that's entirely fine I'm personally very comfortable with the tools in adobe illustrator to create concept ideas from within the app so I think this looks interesting and could stand on its own as a concept so I saved this one and replicated further for yet another variation for this variation I want assemble to completely fit within a circular emblem so I just need to adjust the strings to the right and left to do so [Music] now at this point I'm satisfied with these concepts and next I want to create a logo reconstruction for each concept now a logo reconstruction allows you to signify and visually represent the meaning behind the symbolism in the logo [Music] I start with the first concept I created and I take the core unique focus of this wordmark logo and I lay it out and integrate it onto an actual guitar fretboard now I will replicate it several times so that eventually I bring out and reveal the important elements that are a part of the actual logo the other gray element is to give context and inform others which could be a potential client about how I arrived at this logo now it's time to do the same thing for the second concept that created this time I will convey that the symbol itself is a part of a guitar neck with strings in a vertical position which differs from the first concept where the guitar neck was laying down [Music] so now that I have these two different concepts right here which do you think that the survey participants chose when these two are compared with each other so first off I have two different survey groups one is from my personal discord server for the YouTube channel on a bunch of designers and developers and then we also asked what a bunch of guitarists from a guitar discord server thought so I'll give you a few seconds you can go ahead and pause and try to think about which group chose which so the first group I'm going to show is the designers group and their results you know which they chose was that this one or this one and then I'll show the results from the guitar discord server so going to the discord server here this is the personal server I have with a bunch of designers and I basically told them to choose the reaction of a stick out tongue emoticon right here I for this option and then a heart react for this option so as we can see not everybody followed the rules here but we do have a lot of them here and basically there's a hundred eighteen responses between these two and the first option clearly has a lot more likes it happens to be about 72% of the entries reacted to this one because they like this so this right here is the one that one here now I'm going to show you the results from the discord server with guitar players so they sent out this message and clearly very few people or some people at least don't follow directions we have a lot of other reaction types but nonetheless we've had 140 entries between these two reacts right here and really as we could see the same result practically out of 140 entries 69% as opposed to the 72% over here there's only three percentage difference points liked this one with the combination logo better than just the word mark logo so I have some assumptions as to why that is and that might be because people prefer symbolism they liked that symbol a lot and so ultimately that's what I'm going to go with now because I do personally like that one better as well alright so that is it hopefully you learned a lot throughout this process and hopefully is a different type of tutorial not one where I'm just showing features of software applications there's plenty of those to go around but hopefully now you have a really strong conceptual understanding about what constitutes an effective logo so make sure to subscribe here I have a ton more content involving UI UX design and as well as front-end development coming here in the future all right I'll see you guys soon goodbye

Channel: DesignCourse

Views: 344,614

Rating: 4.9478326 out of 5

Keywords: logo design, logo, logos, logo design 2020, logo design 2020 crash course, logo design course, logo design course 2020, how to make a logo, how to design a logo, how to create a logo, identity design, identity design 2020, identity design course, logo design tips, effective logos

Id: ab3Sy-HnUB0

Length: 22min 20sec (1340 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 07 2020