4 Logo Design Tips I Wish I Learned in School

A peer reached out seeking feedback on several logo designs. This is the advice I offered in return.

First and foremost, restrict your designs to one-color, black and white

Adding color at this stage will only cause you to focus on that, when you should remain focused on searching for and deciding upon your logo’s form. Only then should you research how your logo can benefit from being displayed in a color (or multiple colors, though I suggest restricting color use to 1, 2 max)

Explore wild and new visual solutions that don’t directly refer to the words in the name of the company

Scenario: You’re designing a logo for a business in the IT Education industry.
Have you noticed that nearly all logos today for companies that operate in this space leverage the ‘</>’ symbols in some way? Sure, your group may be about learning to code and helping others code, but deep down it’s about making new friends and overcoming knowledge gaps in order to potentially start a new career or maybe even a new business. It’s not necessarily about ‘learning to code’. Plus, your name already says all that. Don’t seek to repeat your name in a visual way, seek to add to your name by leveraging an appropriate font, perhaps customized slightly, to evoke subtle but intelligent new meanings that your existing fanfare will understand and appreciate.

Consider context

By this I mean, as you brainstorm new ideas, seriously consider where this logo will appear: on a website? social media? print? swag? — Depending on how many you can say yes to, remember that your ultimate logo should flexibly adapt to the constraints posed by each medium. Therefore, consider whether your logo even needs an icon, or if it can be just the name.
Draw. Test. Iterate. Repeat.

As you design, try selling your idea to yourself

If you land on an idea that you think works, take a step back and make a short presentation as if you were going to present it to the person who will ultimately approve this logo. Can you predict what that person might say? How he/she might react? What questions he/she might have? By considering each of these points, you may end up back at square one in your logo design process; but you will be all the wiser this time around.