Design A Logo For Your Site

by
Jeff Colburn

There may come a time when you, or a client of yours, will want a company logo. Logos are a good way to let people easily identify the products and services offered by a company. As soon as someone sees it, they know whom they are dealing with. Just think of the red "K" on a box of Kodak film, National Geographic's yellow rectangle and the bulls eye for Target Stores. These logos are instantly recognizable, and anyone seeing them identifies the company without even seeing their name.

But designing a logo isn't easy. It's best to have a graphic designer, or someone with graphic design experience, design a logo. You want to be able to draw on their experience with design, color and composition to have a logo that looks good. A well-designed logo will help a company, whereas a poorly designed one will hurt a company's image.

That being said, if you want to design a logo yourself, there are several programs you can use. The key thing is to use a program like Adobe Illustrator that will let you create a logo as a vector graphic. A vector graphic can be scaled to any size so that text remains easy to read and curves have smooth edges no matter how big or small the graphic is. Remember that the logo may be one inch square on a business card and ten feet tall on a sign or banner.

I just started using a logo for my company. Since I like the Celtic culture in my background, I've decided to use green and Celtic knots as my logo. I'm now using a green Celtic knot as a background for my business cards and some sticky notes that I just had printed. I've also used this same knot on the letterhead of my business stationary. I still have some tweaking to do with the exact color of green I want and the knot that I want to use, but I'm very happy with this first step, and people have made positive comments about the design.

There are also some websites that will let you design logos, that sell logo design software, that have logo samples, or that give tips on logo design. These are:

• The Logo Creator - www.thelogocreator.com
• Logo Lounge - www.logolounge.com
• Graphic Design USA - www.gdusa.com
• Cool Text - //cooltext.com
• Business Logos - www.businesslogos.com/gallery.php
• The Logo Factory - www.thelogofactory.com

When designing a logo, there are a few things to keep in mind.

• The graphics should be simple and not busy or cluttered.
• Text, if used, should be short and easily read, no matter how small the logo. It's best to only have the company name, and maybe a two or three word tag line in the logo. It's also fine to have no text at all.
• The design should be easy to see and understand no matter how small or large the logo is.
• When used on a website, the logo's file size should be small so it will load quickly.
• The design should be unique so that it's never confused with someone else's logo.
• If possible, use only one color for the logo. Using too many colors can make the logo difficult for people to understand.

Surf the web, look at magazines and prowl the mall and stores to find logos that you like. Start a file and take note what it is about these logos that you appreciate. Is it the colors, shape, picture or graphics or something else that attracts you? Also pay attention to how successful the logo is. Do you see this logo everywhere you look or have you never seen it before? Successful logos will be seen often, and grab your attention.

It's just as important to have a file of logos that you don't like; to be sure you don't use the elements that bother you in your logo.

When designing your logo ask yourself these questions:

• What do I want the logo to do?
• What company image are you trying to convey?
• Who is your audience?
• What do your competitor's logos look like?

Many logos include artwork or graphics. You can design these graphics yourself, or find them for free online. If you're looking for free graphics or photographs to use in your logo check out my article "Where To Find Free Pictures, Artwork And Animation For Your Website" at www.creativecauldron.com/articlewebFreeGraphics.shtml You'll find many useful links there. You can also get graphics at art stores. I have several clipart books from Dover that include CD's of all the artwork in the books, and they cost less than $15.

You may want to use a special font in your logo. Be sure to use a font that's easy to read. I decided to use a font called Papyrus with my logo. To find free fonts take a look at these sites.

• Fonts and Things - www.fontsnthings.com/Free%20Graphics
• Font Shop - www.fontshop.com
• PC Fonts - www.pcfonts.com/index.php
• Download Fonts - www.1001freefonts.com

A few more tips to remember:

• If your logo will be printed at a print shop, save it as a CMYK file since this is what most printers need for their equipment. Ask the printer just to be sure this is how he wants it.
• For the web, save the logo as a JPG for a graphic or photo, and GIF if it's a text only logo. If you have a logo with both text and graphics, see which format looks best.
• If the logo will be used on a website, you only need to have the logo resolution at 72 dpi (dots per inch). A higher dpi will not look any better, and just make the file larger.

So do your research, decide what you want this tool to do for your business and start designing the logo. Once you have a design you like use it on everything, business cards, letterhead, advertising, promotional material. Make it part of all your business communications and it will serve you well.

Do you want to learn how to make your website work for you and not against you? Then visit The Creative Cauldron NOW to find the answers to your questions, and achieve what you want in life. Go to www.TenCommonWebMistakes.com to download the FREE report "Ten Common Mistakes Found On Websites, And How To Fix Them."

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