While I really like to sit together with my favorite design agency discuss corporate identity, branding and both the key visual and label design for new products – particularly of my MySnax company – , logo design today doesn’t have to be a lengthy process using up a huge amount of both human and capital resources. Particularly as a small business you probably don’t want to allocate too much time and capital to an extensive logo design process. Entrepreneurs today can find plenty of inline resources and tools that help them create both meaningful and appealing designs.
Out of a professional interest I have tested some of the more advanced online tools using our own brand. But before checking the results and platforms, just a quick reminder of what makes a good logo (for more details check out Chapter 3 on corporate identity and image in my Introduction to Corporate Communication textbook or this summary blog post):
- Simplicity: A simple logo design makes sure that it is easily understood, memorized and recognized.
- Memorability: A logo needs to be memorable in terms of associations that people create in their minds. So it should somehow enable people to make reasonable connections to meanings of colors, graphical elements etc. that stick in people’s minds.
- Endurability: A logo should be ‘future proof’, meaning that it should still make sense and be appealing when the company grows. While logos of course can change over time, this is nothing that you want to do too often – so think how people would look at your logo in five or ten years.
- Versatility: A good logo should work across platforms and channels – so when used on products, on merchandise, on communications etc
- Appropriateness: Keeping the intended intended purpose of the logo in mind makes sure that the logo is appropriate for the target group and the likely context (for example you would design a logo for a kids product differently than for adults).
So the first logo maker I tried was https://withoomph.com. It gives you the chance to first enter your company or product name and provide a set of keywords that describe what you are doing. Based on the keywords it starts proposing a ton of logos – basically a combination of text, frames and simple icons – that you can later on adapt in terms of colors, font etc. The result for our case is the following:
The logos are modern and suitable for simple purposes, but they are not very sophisticated and don’t seem to fit very closely (I guess each just combines the name with just one of the keywords). You can then adjust things like color and sizes but apart from that it doesn’t take us too far.
The second site that I tested was https://www.logoshi.com/. Here the starting point is not keywords but rather your own rough sketching. So first you get to type the company or product name and then can draw some basic forms using different colors. So I put in our company name and sketched a few fruits:
It then gives you a first design with a visual based on your sketch and the company name. If you don’t like it you can just have it create an alternative one and can change the font of the name as well. Eventually it gives you not just the logo but even shows you how would it look on business cards, letterhead and even your (imaginary) headquarter – which makes it quite fun to play around with:
The third service I tested was https://www.logaster.com. Here you start again with the company name and in addition can provide a slogan as well as select the specific industry background. Unfortunately something like food production or processing was not available and so I could either choose “Agriculture” as the term getting closest, which obviously is not very to the point. After that you are provided a “logo concept”, meaning a visual combination of graphical element, company name etc. Many of these concepts were of course not a good fit due to the broad industry classification. But out of a hundred proposals there are a few that can be used. The concept can then be simply adapted in terms of the key visual, the font, the colors, etc.
Obviously there are dozens of more logo services and websites out there and each one has its advantages and disadvantages. I find it useful to play around with them all as part of a simple and low-cost logo design process.
