Logo & Branding

A tiny piece of text or image illustrates the identity of the brand and the responsibility of representing the people who are working for it. A logo conveys the core values and goals of an organization and that is why the importance of its creation process is quite significant for a successful brand. Every designer has his own logo design process but I did generalize it into four different phases: Requirement, Research, Design, Deliver (RRDD).

The first and core phase is the requirement gathering of product’s context and target audience. Contacting the client and asking the right questions might reduce the design time and rework. Mostly, designers make a mistake here by taking decisions without the client’s involvement and eventually end up working again on the same logo from scratch. From my perspective, it’s all about the target audience. During my freelancing work experience, I learned how we can ask about the product details to the clients if they are not much expressive or can’t convey the concept/idea that they are thinking. Showing them examples of existing identities help to get the expected needs.

The second phase is research and brainstorming of a concept. Once the designer knows the background and objective completely the next part is to check competitors in market and inspirations on the web. Sometimes convincing clients about the logo design is also mandatory. Consider the example of an entrepreneur having no domain knowledge in the design industry who is looking for a brand identity for his start-up idea of a charity. He described it to be colorful yet feels masculine and on the top of that, it should be youthful. Now here a designer has to go back and forth and push the client through the process to explain the traits of having a bad design which can ruin the organization’s impression.

Simply looking for inspirations on websites like Pinterest can boost a sketching process for the designer. Drawing initial ideas and concepts on paper and then merging it into a design will prepare the first draft.

Design is my favorite part because it always lasts longer than it should be. The fun part about designing a logo is that iterations are expected. From sketch to the final design there will be mercurial changes till the logo identity. Making sketches on paper helps me to convey my idea on a physical entity from my virtual mind. Next step is to convert the paper idea into the vector-based format. Adobe Illustrator is the tool which I use for my graphic design work otherwise for quick sketch prototypes I use Adobe Photoshop. Always make sure to create all the design by measuring the pixels and maintaining equal similarity according to the Gestalt Principles.

The last frontier is to deliver the design correctly in different formats. In my deliverables, it depends on what the client has requested in the first meeting. Mostly vector and pdf are two main file types which I deliver to them. But sometimes if logo usage guidelines and social media deliverables requested, then it’s my responsibility to make a complete brand package and send it to them in a compressed file with all the possible future use formats.