Logo design costs can very easily run away into more money than they should do when you have not done your homework. If you’re on a tight budget we can still help you. Logo designs do not need to cost more than £500 and believe me, some can reach millions of pounds. So if this is the case, what makes logos cheap, and I mean under £100 cheap!? Well, it all starts with you, the client. Knowing what you want, and what your budget is will give a massive head start to the amount of work needing put into the task of creating a new logo. Other things like knowing which colours you want to use and the wording also helps. Let’s never forget, it is our job to create designs, and we probably wouldn’t understand much of what it is other industries do or how they work. So it is best that you tell your designer what you want rather than ask them to ‘just be creative’. If they don’t know the industry you work in as well as you, why would they? It’s very likely time will be wasted by the designer getting things wrong.
Step one – the design idea
Our recommended starting point is visiting https://stock.adobe.com and searching for keywords for your business followed by the word ‘logo’ See if something catches your eye. These are pre-made logo templates that you can use to keep costs at a much lower level. The reason for this is, your designer will only need to tweak an existing design to fit your needs rather than build a new logo from scratch that is completely bespoke. These templates are also resold to other people so costs can be kept low by selling the same design multiple times rather than a one-off sale. This can be compared to the difference between buying a production line car that is manufactured by robots and is one of the millions made costing only £8,000 upwards, compared to asking someone to build you a unique car that is never been built before costing millions. So with logos, designers can sell a logo for £100 to 1000 people and make selling it at only £100 worthwhile. If that logo took him 20 hours to perfect, he would be working for less than £5 per hour without even getting into overhead costs if it was only sold once. This is exactly why bespoke logo design costs often hundreds and thousands of pounds, even millions. If you find logos you like, take a note of the file numbers so you can pass it onto us so we know which logo you are choosing.
Step two – the colour scheme
This is usually overlooked and not considered important. Believe me, it is very important. The colours of your logo say so much more than the person that picked the colours liked them. Here is a list of the symbolism behind each colour that the average human will subconsciously relate to;
BLACK – mystery, power, nothingness
PURPLE – royalty, extravagance, wealth
BLUE – calmness, tranquility, sadness, coldness
PINK – femininity, compassion, tenderness
GREEN – nature, growth, envy, money
RED – passion, danger, urgency, hot
ORANGE – warmth, warning, energy
YELLOW – happiness, positivity, creativity
Which of these meanings would you want to be associated with your brand? Maybe you have more than one colour you’d like for your logo. This is where the importance of colour theory and science comes in. There are colours that work very well grouped together and there are colours that should never be used together. This is called your colour scheme. Just like decorating at home, you want to make sure you pick a carpet colour that will fit nicely with your walls and furniture. So already you have a basic understanding of building a colour scheme. Here are some examples of colours that work together
and here is an example of a colour scheme that does not work well.
Do you think you can put a good colour scheme together? Regardless of whether you can or not, let us share with you a tip that we use. This tip can help you in two different ways. We use https://www.coolors.co to build our colour scheme on the ‘palette generator’. There are two different ways as we said, which we’ll explain now.
The first way: At the top of this web page, once you’re on the generator, you’ll see a link that says ‘Explore‘, you can simply click on this and pick a professionally pre-created colour scheme that you like. When you find one, click on the three dots ‘…’ at the bottom right of that palette and click on ‘Copy URL’, and you should have a URL that looks something like this: https://coolors.co/0B141F-0D1B27-1057C1-188BF6-FFFFFF-CAC4CE. You should see if you click this link that it will open up your generator window with the colours shown above in our example of a colour scheme of colours that work well together.
The second way: If you go directly to the generator it will show you one random colour scheme. You may like one or some of the colours but not like others. So, if you put your mouse over the colours individually you will see a padlock icon that will be open. If you like a colour, by clicking the icon on that colour, you will lock that colour so it will not change. The website gives you 5 colours, so maybe 2 of those 5 you like, and 3 you dislike. Once both colours you do like are locked, you can press your space bar on your keyboard and the generator will select 3 different colours that will work well with your locked 2. Again, you may like 1 of the new colours, so you can lock this and continue generating until you get all the colours you need to fill your colour scheme. Not all colour schemes are 5 colours, you may need more. So by placing your mouse between 2 colours you will see an icon which is a square with a plus inside it ‘[+]’ which allows you to introduce an additional colour.
Step three – the wording
Ultimately the most important part of any brand, the words used. Your logo wording is most often your brand name but can often be a product name. People often associate the name Pepsi with the name of the company that makes the soft drink, but at the time of writing this, that company is actually called PepsiCo. You are way more likely to recognise the Pepsi logo than the PepsiCo logo. Due to the size of the company and the popularity of the product, we all know what Pepsi is. Some clients would prefer to be safer with the wording of their business name, brand name and what to put on their logo. The brand Just Water lets you know exactly what that company does whereas Evian does not. If both of these brands were to start at the same time and were unknown in the market, you are more likely to find Just Water first if you searched looking for what both of these companies do, make water. This is because what the company does is written in the name.
So you need to know if you want a specific product name in your logo, or if you want your brand name. You should also consider if your logo will include a slogan such as Nike – Just do it. If your brand has a slogan, make sure it is small and fits with the logo idea you have. Try and imagine these three steps together in your head. Try imagining the logo template you picked, in the colour scheme you like with the wording you want. Will it all tie into a nice design in your opinion? Will the wording fit? Do the colours make sense to the image element of the logo you have selected? If you are ticking all of these boxes, take your logo template numbers, your colour scheme link and your wording and email it over to us to give you some feedback before submitting an order.
