Designing a logo is not as easy as it looks. Sure there are crowd sourcing websites out there that will be able to cobble 50 different logo variations for you in about 3 days. But, in reality, if you are wanting your corporate branding or business logo to stand out, then you will need to have an design agency working on this that is prepared to invest the appropriate amount of time.
Logo Design is Not a Quick Process.
To truly capture the essence of your business and have an identity created that clearly reflects this, logo design is a staged process. Following are the stages or steps necessary that your design team must take to deliver the best possible logo for your business.
1) you need to brief your graphic designer about your business and what you expect your logo to look like. This doesn’t have to be an exact detailed description of your logo, but a broad outline of what you like and don’t like. Colours and fonts can be discussed as well. It would also be a good idea to have a look at your competition and see the way they are branded.
2) your designer needs to then go away and do some industry research and see how your business can be distinguished from the pack. Ideally, you do not want to look like everyone other business. That’s the reason why you are engaging a design team in the first place.
3) there needs to be at least 3 or 4 initial concepts presented to you based on the design brief given. When presenting these to you, your designer needs to come up with logical reasons and explanations about the design and how he/she arrived there.
4) from this point onwards there will be to / fro emails between you are your graphics guys till you are finally happy with the end result.
5) the approved final artwork is them applied to all of your marketing and sales collateral. This is where the fun really begins as you now need to look at your marketing and start applying your new brand to your website, stationary, brochures, social media and blogs.
As you can see the design process for your logo is not a simple 1 step process. It is quite labour intensive and takes a certain skill set and high level of expertise to get it looking just the way you want it to look.
Remember, your logo is the foundation of your business and if it is created by a professional agency from the outset then you will never need to change it, or at least for the next couple of years. If you rush the design process and expect a logo in a matter of days, then you are going to end up with sub standard branding, that simply won’t work.
Hopping Mad Designs has developed logos and identities for well over 1000 businesses and if there is one thing I can tell you from my experience in this industry; expect the process to take at least 2 weeks. Rushing designers and pressuring them to complete your branding and style guide is going to result in sloppy artwork that leaves your business with an uncompetitive logo. All we ask for is a reasonable and realistic time frame.