Not a Designer? How To Make a Company Logo on a Budget

A company logo is the visual representation of your brand. It immediately tells consumers who produced a product and communicates history, values, and personality in a single image. The right design also stands out on the shelf and sticks in people's minds, building familiarity that turns into loyalty over time. How can you create an effective logo if you're not a trained designer? The technology ensures you have a few options.

Learn the Design Basics

Before you start drawing, you should learn the design basics. Commercial graphic design isn't just about making something aesthetically pleasing—the logo, packaging, or advertisement should fit seamlessly with your branding. While design incorporates some aspects of art, it's fundamentally about communicating in a visual medium.

Professionals generally break down graphics design into 12 principles, which designers use in tandem for different effects: unity, contrast, variety, balance, movement, emphasis, proportion, white space, hierarchy, pattern, rhythm, and repetition. You can find many online resources defining each principle and illustrating its use. Expert utilization takes a lot of study and practice, but having the basics will help you identify designs that need to be revised.

Take Advantage of a Logo Maker Platform

Creating company logos from scratch can be daunting if you don't have the experience. Fortunately, online logo makers can do most of the heavy lifting, and many are free. You start with a blank canvas and have access to a variety of elements you can drag and drop wherever you please:

• Icons

• Text

• Color
  

Even if you don't use the resulting logo, it's still a great place to start. You can see how ideas play out and narrow your list of potential graphics. The process is so easy that you can create a professional-looking design in minutes, allowing you to focus on the logistics of getting your business up and running.

Draw & Design It Yourself or Use Ready-To-Use Design Templates

If you have a little artistic experience or a strong idea of what you want, you can draw your logo yourself. One of the first things you'll need to do is brainstorm. Do you want to focus on the text? Do you want to include a small illustration? If you like the idea of graphics, what will they be?

Once you've created a list of ideas, narrow it down to a few elements you can easily incorporate into a logo. For example, if you like the theme of storms, clouds, and lightning, you can combine all of those into a cartoon thundercloud.

From there, think about the color palette. Colors have a close association with emotions, so keep that in mind as you choose:

• Blues are calming.

• Reds are passionate.

• Yellows and oranges are warm and cheery.

• Greens relate to nature.

• Purples are mysterious.

If you don't have the time or tools to draw your logo physically, consider using a design template website. These sites provide dozens of templates already sporting complementary color palettes, intriguing graphics, and professional typography. From there, you can customize elements to better align with your brand.

Seek Help from a Graphic Designer

Finally, you can hire a professional graphic designer to create your logo. You can either work with a firm where a team of designers creates your branding or contract a freelance designer who will communicate with you directly. Hiring professionals is the most expensive option, but you'll benefit from their training, experience, and knowledge of current trends. The result will likely be closer to your vision and work well in various media.

Company logo design is complex, but you shouldn't let that stop you from trying to create your own. Remember that logos change with their companies, so there's always a chance for a redesign.