Top 5 Ways to Get Logo Design Ideas and Inspiration
It is not fair when logos are considered among the insignificant details of a company or a particular brand.
In contrast, and you’d relate, it’s one of the most critical aspects that leaves its fingerprint in your mind when you come across a brand or a company.
After all, who doesn’t know how McDonald’s “M” looks, or how the “L” and “V” of Louis Vuitton are intermingled in their iconic logo.
Brand logos are designed to create visual appeal for customers.
They may look like they just represent a company symbolically, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg, it goes way deeper than that.
The business giants spend tons of capital to get a logo designed that is not only visually appealing but also catchy. You heard that right! CATCHY!
What would a CEO love more than to have a logo for their company that leaves a permanent impression in people’s minds?
If you look at it in a certain way, it’s a pretty well thought out marketing technique.
The ultimate aim in marketing is to let people be aware (and in a positive way) of a particular product or service from a company, and a logo design is the first step in that direction.
A catchy and visually attractive logo creates a subconscious bias towards a particular brand before people have even decided to buy or hire from them.
For instance, a couple of months ago, I was hanging out with a friend of mine who though being a noob, temporarily flirted with the idea of becoming a programmer.
He was searching for educational apps related to coding in the Play store; although he didn’t have the slightest idea which one to download, he downloaded Mimo because it had a “cool” logo.
It looked cool but lucky for him, it was good in the “education” department as well.
The point is, you can’t just overlook the importance of having an attractive logo if you want your brand to be successful.
Your company may sell excellent quality products and may have regular customers as well.
However, if your brand logo doesn’t stimulate people’s minds in all the right ways, you’d have a hard time attracting new customers.
Especially the ones who love trying new things, a boring logo wouldn’t help attract this particular customer base.
Features in a ‘bad’ logo
There are several things you should avoid when designing a logo if you want your brand to stand out.
1: Cliché
Most companies overuse similar concepts and create logos that become so cliché that they no longer provoke interest in their brands.
You’ve got to avoid this! If you want your brand’s logo to have a marketing significance, you need to stand out.
The logo should be unique and thought-provoking enough to leave your company’s memory in people’s minds.
Everyday stuff never becomes the talk of the town, but a unique thing does!
2: Convolution
If your brand logo is difficult to follow or say, if it contains a lot of stuffed up words, it won’t create the attraction it otherwise would if it reflected clarity and elegance.
Most companies make this mistake.
They end up with logo design ideas for their brands that lack aesthetic value, which ultimately ends up automatically turning away potential new customers. This happens!
Mostly, a first-time customer ends up entering a clothing store just because their logo seems attractive and thoughtful.
3: Asymmetry
The human brain is wired to be attracted to symmetry so much so that in the collective subjective world view of humanity, balance can be considered synonymous with beauty.
We don’t like randomness, chaos, and asymmetrical stuff and logos are no exception.
Asymmetrical logos can be a massive turn off given the meaninglessness and randomness they symbolise.
Features of a ‘good’ logo
Let’s now have a look at the core features that are required for a perfect logo.
The first thing to consider in this matter is what people like and dislike.
People are attracted neither to extremes of simplicity nor complexity.
In this sphere of features, they’re more drawn towards elegance, a logo that is simple to visualise yet rich in its symbolic value.
This is the philosophy that defines all the features required in perfect logo design, a sweet spot if you will.
1: Types
Now that you have a rule of thumb, the next stuff to consider is the type of logo you want; there are various types of logo designs like abstract logos, mascot logos, emblem logos, and text logos among others.
No type is inferior or superior in any sense; it depends on people’s tastes.
You can get excellent as well as horrible logo designs in all of these.
2: Colour
Then comes colour.
Bear in mind that colours are fundamental in logo design because of their visual appeal so you would want to use the kind of colour in your company’s logo that is appropriate to the tastes of your customer base.
3: Relevancy
And last but not least is the relevancy of your logo design to the product or service.
For instance, if your company sells products related to water like inflatable pools, it wouldn’t be a good idea to have a red-coloured logo with a cartoonish zebra for your company.
The colour blue in this regard and a cartoonish dolphin perhaps would be more appropriate to give you an idea.
Now that all the appropriate features have been discussed, let’s delve a little deeper and find out what are the top 5 ways to get logo design ideas and inspiration.
1: Use of Machine Learning
Machine learning is a subfield of Artificial Intelligence that allows a software program to learn on its own from the available data, analyse patterns and produce outputs.
It has become one of the most useful tools in several applications; one of these includes understanding people’s online behaviour, particularly in the marketing context.
Consider this, you are signed in to an E-commerce website through Facebook, and you look up some stuff to buy on that site.
Later on, while going through your FB newsfeed, you’d start seeing ads showing products similar to your searches on an E-commerce site.
That is machine learning at work.
Similarly, you can use machine learning applications to determine the personalities of people interested in products or services relevant to the company you’ve built.
And you can use that data to design a logo that perfectly stimulates their senses.
For example, analysing the data, if you conclude that the customer base that buys these particular products is mostly introverted, then it’s better to research what introverts would like in a logo like colours, shapes and text style.
Now it’s not that you’d find articles suggesting what kind of logos introverts like, but you’d be able to get some logo design ideas for what an introvert would want.
For instance, introverts generally tend to be imaginative, deep, reserved and mystical and the colours that most correspond to these kinds of traits are blue, indigo, black, and grey due to their intensity and richness.
While extroverts more usually prefer lighter and warmer colours like yellow and red.
On top of that, introverts with their quiet mouths but talkative minds, love brain teasers, they usually but not universally, like unique patterns and symmetries.
So this gives you general logo design ideas of what colour palette and word styles you need to use.
This method is the most positive way to gather enough information to design your company logo; the data collected through machine learning is unmistakable and precise.
2: Reverse Image Search
It may be that you know what your logo should look like but don’t know how to visualise and work it out in your mind.
And then, on a warm sunny day, you’re browsing through the internet, and you find a company’s logo that is similar to your desired one.
However, it is someone else’s logo, and you can’t use it because that would be theft of someone else’s property.
What to do now! It did help you visualise your logo to some extent, didn’t it?
Well, you can ultimately work it out and visualise it with a little more help with more logos that are similar to the one you found.
All you have to do is search by image and find out more such logos that are somewhat similar to your logo design ideas.
That can be done through Google Lens or Prepostseo as the latter provides images from three big search engines, i.e., Google, Bing, and Yandex.
All these images would help you work it out and finally design your own.
For starters, the reverse image search tool is software that finds you images that are the same and similar to the one you looked for on the internet.
The concept is very similar to looking things up on the internet through keywords except that instead of keywords, this software allows you to search by images.
Speaking of software tools, once you’ve designed a logo for your brand, you can use tools like ICO converter (ICO stands for Icon) to convert the image into ICO format if you plan to represent your company on social media, app stores, and web.
Icon converters are available online and can convert images in formats like .PNG, .JPG, and.JPEG into ICO which turns the image into an Icon.
3: Using data from Surveys
Surveys are the statistical data gathered on the ground or online from people about a particular subject.
In this context, if you have built a company that sells a product or service that attracts a particular type of people, you can create surveys or questionnaires for those people.
These surveys should ask questions like their favourite colours, shapes, writing styles, etc.
This method is similar to the first; however, it’s a more direct approach.
As the particular kind of people your brand attracts, would keep attracting similar people in the future, so they’d although not individually but generally fit in the same group of people that answered your questionnaires.
You can conduct surveys either physically or online through emails, websites or social media pages.
This is one of the most significant methods to gather material for your logo design ideas since it allows you to engage with the customer directly.
4: Get logo design ideas online
Well, you’d be thinking when this article would talk internet. Yeah! The place where you find nearly everything. The One and Only, World Wide Web.
The internet has become one of the most critical factors in our daily lives.
There are excellent websites where you can get logo design ideas like deviantart.com, which boasts roughly a million logo designs.
Other than DeviantArt, there is pinterest.com, logospire.com, and dribbble.com, among many others where you can find very creative logo designs to help you shape your ideas.
If you’re on a tight budget, you can also check out free logo designing apps and web tools that have hundreds of thousands of templates designed exclusively for this purpose.
You can customise these templates with features that suit your company.
For instance, you can edit text related to your company on these templates.
5: Gather inspiration from other companies
Finally, you can gather inspiration from other companies that are selling the same product or service that your company would be providing.
Look these companies up on the internet and evaluate their icon designs.
You’d find subtle yet exciting details in their branding that would help you form up logo design ideas for your own.
For example, if you own a restaurant and plan to design a logo for it, you can look up logos of other restaurants exclusively of the ones that serve the same cuisines as yours.
On the other hand, if you own a car wash, you’d need to check out other car wash companies and check out what they have to show in their companies’ logos.
Doing this would probably prove fruitful as these insights may help you come up with better logo design ideas for your company.
