Branding Your Creative Business: Designing Your Logo

1. Intro to course: Hello everyone, and welcome to part 2 of Branding Your Creative Business, Designing Your Logo. Hopefully, a lot of you are joining me from part 1 but for any newbies, I'll briefly introduce myself. My name is Faye Brown, and I'm a Graphic Designer from the UK. I've worked in motion graphics, designing title sequences for TV shows and films along with illustrations and random projects. I'm also a little bit of a typography geek, and having launched my first online course on Skillshare, The Art of Typography, a few years ago. I started thinking about another course, and really wanted to share my knowledge and experience of branding with you guys via this series of classes, branding your creative business. This is aimed at creative people in many industries from bakers, Joy Makers, photographers to people who do online courses, tutorials in a specialized field. I really want to share my skills in branding as I know it's a tough area to get right. Even as a graphic designer myself, I found branding myself quite a difficult job. I'm hoping these classes will walk you through an easy step-by-step process. In this particular class, we're focusing on designing your logo. Hopefully, you've already completed part 1. That was all about defining your brand. Part 1 really got down to the nitty-gritty of what you and your business is all about, and who your ideal market is? We looked at how to position yourself in your market, creating profiles for your ideal customer, and also wrote a brief for your logo design. I will attach that PDF in the course resources, but if you haven't already taken part 1, take a look as I do talk you through each stage of perfecting your brand. That will put you in a really good position to know what your logo design needs to communicate and represent. We all know that branding is so much bigger than a logo. It's all about how you are perceived, how you present yourself, your products and your services to your customers and your clients. But the logo or the logo type is a very important element, and it will form the base of your visual voice of your business. This will be used in both print and online. People will start to recognize it. So let's make sure it's a good one and relevant to your brand message. If you took part 1, you will now have your logo design brief handy to refer back to. If you haven't taken part 1 yet, I've attached this as a resource. It will be useful for you to fill this out. That if at any stage during this course you are feeling a little bit lost and go back and take part 1 as it will help you really get under the skin of your brand. I've broken the business, branding your creative business course, down into three separate classes as, otherwise, it can be a little overwhelming. In this class, we will cover using a graphic designer versus designing your own logo. I'll talk you through this in the next video. Then we will move on to the seven steps of designing your logo broken down into easy digestible videos. We will be looking at things like typography, your logo symbol, and color palettes. Then we will briefly look at how to develop your visual identity over all your promotional materials, your packaging, your social media, etc. Before we move on to the pros and cons of designing your own logo over using a graphic designer, a good place to start is writing down an inventory of all the promotional uses that you're going to need for your logo and visual identity from websites to labels to business cards. In your resources, there's this useful checklist. What I want you to do is tick which ones will be relevant to you and your business. I've also left some gaps for any extra items you might need. Now you don't need to conquer all this in one go. Maybe prioritize which five you'll need working few straightaway. How you view this list is one part of the equational dilemma as to whether you decide to design your own logo and materials or whether you opt for a graphic designer. If it looks totally overwhelming, that might be a good sign to find a graphic designer at some point down the line. In the next video, will help you decide a little bit more about using graphic designers over designing your own logo to start with. 2. Design your own logo or use a graphic designer?: In an ideal world, I'm sure most non designers would love to employ a graphic designer to design their logo and other visual identity items. Most of good graphic designer can cost money, they can also save you a lot of time, effort and even more money by ensuring everything is set up correctly in the right formats for printing and online use. They should also make sure that all the elements look consistent and in line with your brand message. A good graphic designer is worth their weight in gold and if you completed part 1 of this series of classes, you would now have a very clear brief for a designer. Maybe you have a graphic designer friend who you could trade some services with in exchange for logo or perhaps you really want to design your own visual identity, which is fabulous. Or maybe you are dreading the prospect of designing your own logo because you simply have no other choice. Whichever category you fall into, this course will help guide you through the process. Like I said in part 1 of this series, designing your own logo can be one of the hardest jobs even for us graphic designers, because it's so personal. I delayed mine time and time again. As I know, I've been my own worst client. But I'm going to walk you step-by-step through the most important considerations when designing your logo and even if you have a graphic designer on board, working your way through this class should help you visualize what sort of logo will suit your brand and products. Another route to consider is using Clip art to help you with your design. I can now feel designers everywhere shudder at the term Clip art and I do too. But honestly, this area of graphics has come a long way since adding some dodgy Clip art to a word document. You can buy some great examples via sites like Creative Market and Etsy. Watch out on Etsy though because there are some dodgy examples too. My advice would be to work through this course, start getting a good idea of what you'd like your logo to look like. Then if you don't feel comfortable creating a final version yourself from scratch, then see if some Clip art can help you out. Don't do this the other way around. We will talk about this more later. I've kept this class to designing your brand logo and just to try and keep it focused, but remember, there are many elements which go up towards making your visual brand from shop banners, business stationery, to photography and packaging. We will talk briefly about this in a later video. But I will also cover this in a little bit more detail in part 3 of this series of courses, which is due to be launched late summer 2015 and that's all about releasing your brand to the world. I'm always interested to hear from you guys, so if there's an area you'd like to know more about, please do get in touch and I'll see if I can create either a short course or add a unit to this one. Who's ready to dive in and start designing your logo? Show of hands, please. All of you. Great. Next unit, we will walk through the seven steps of designing your logo and I'm looking forward to seeing all your developments in the project gallery. 3. 7 Steps Intro: Seven steps to designing your logo. So in this unit, we will go through the seven main points to consider in your logo design. Watch it all the way through, and then come back to each of the points and work for each step. Even if you've decided to use the services of a graphic designer, working through these steps can help you breath in more detail. What we need to keep at the forefront of your mind throughout is keeping your design on-brand and on message. Your logo needs to visually tell a story about your brand. So if you take in part 1, you should know exactly what your brand needs to stay and who your brand needs to speak to and relate to. 4. Step 1 - Consider the usage: Step 1. Consider the usage. I say this upfront as there's no point in designing a logo that you then realize simply won't work for you. It's really important to think about how you need to use your logo, so let's take a pattern designer and a photographer's examples. You might want to watermark your design. The logo needs to be simple enough for that to work. If it's too intricate, it might start taking away from the focus of your actual work. Here, I just place a watermark in the bottom right-hand corner or you might need to enclose your logo in a little box, which is fine too but it needs to compliment your work, not distract away from it. A few years ago, I used to do a little bit of wedding photography with some friends. We called our little collective Bells & Bubbles. I wanted a clean, simple logo that reflected our style but that would also work on most marks on the photographs. Here's a logo over an image. Now this logo is very, very simple, mostly just a logo type with a few very subtle details on the Bs, to look like bubbles. Now, I want to show you a bad example of a potential logo we could've used. Now I've gone pretty extreme here, but you can see that this logo completely takes the focus away from the actual photography, which defeats the point. It's clubbing all the attention and for completely the wrong reasons. It's trying too hard. It might work for business that organizes handys, but in this instance, it's just way too much. Another thing to consider is if you plan to use a stamp of your logo, say on tags. This logo, Katy Clemmans designed for her business is a good example. Here you can see it being used as a stamp. In that case, you need to kind of think about, would your logo work in one color? You might decide to have two variations of your logo, a simple one and a more elaborate one. So you have to approach this with a certain amount of care. It's important to stay on brand. Sometimes logo versions can look completely different from each other, and then that all starts to dilute the brand and your recognition. So Katy manages her successfully. Here's her full logo, which she uses on her Etsy tags, on her tags, not in her Etsy shop, but the logo type can also be used as a stand-alone, if needs be. Take a minute to think about where you want to see your logo and if any of those places bring with it certain limitations. We will also talk about scalability in a later step, but for now, just keep this thought in your minds as we progress through the steps. The next step is get inspired. 5. Step 2 - Get inspired!: Step 2, get inspired. This is a very important step that comprises of two parts. All those coming over from part 1 of this series of classes will know that I love a mood board. In part 1, we created mood boards that illustrated your perfect customer. Either using Pinterest or a good old style physical mood board, I want you to do the same for your logo design. I'm going to flip through some screen grabs of logos and illustrations I've pinned and collected whilst I talk you through this. I want you to find existing logos or design references you really, really like. You know when you see something and just love it. Maybe you find that you're drawn to a certain design aesthetic or certain colors keep reappearing in your life and work. Now this is a good thing to do for designing your own logo. It can also help creating mood boards when designing for other people or clients. Although your personal preference is then a little bit less important, it's all about the client. Then in this exercise, you are the client, you are the brand, so figure out your personal style. Sometimes I get logo Jobin, and I literally have no inspiration. I look through my copious design books or online and get some ideas swimming around. Most importantly, this stage is not about copying. That's just not on. You also need to be original to stand out. This step is all about figuring out your design style and getting some inspiration along the way. You might find that you're really attracted to circular logos or purely typographic logos. You might find that you have quite an eclectic taste. But hopefully, you'll start to see some similarities and common traits in the styles that you are attracted to. You might get an idea of my design style from seeing these boards. I'm drawn to simple, bold, often colorful design with typographic element. I'd love to see a screen grab or two of photos of your boards with links to your boards as well, uploaded into the portrait gallery for us all to have a look at. Then we can move on to the next part of this step, which is doodling. Now this is often my favorite part of a logo design job. For others, there will be some of you saying, but I can't draw. That doesn't matter. No one has to see your doodles, although I would love to see them in the project gallery, even if they do only make sense to you. As you can see, my doodles, they're not works of art. It's more about just getting ideas on the page for you to them workup. I usually start by drawing out some spider webs of the key words I need to bear in mind, and then I'll stop doodling. If you did the exercises in part 1 of the course, use those keywords. Write them down so they're fresh in your mind. Then I start to just doodle until something magic happens, and that magic can sometimes take longer than I'd like. But don't worry. It doesn't always spring out of the page. Now two logos I'm really pleased with both came out of quite few hours of just doodling. One is for a hair salon called Scarlet Knight, and after doodling a lot of shields, and I mean a lot, I started playing around with the letters, S and K, and realized that they could neatly form some hairdressing scissors. Now doodling is also an important stage to getting any old ideas out of your head. I didn't really want to do a shield logo, but it was in my head. Once I got it out of my head and onto paper, it made room for other ideas. Much like writing lists, and I do love writing lists for this reason, to clear my thoughts to make way for others. Treat doodling like that if you will. Another logo that had a little bit of a light bulb moment for was for visual effects company called Coffee and TV, which incidentally is a great name. It has nothing to do with me, but I do love this name. Again, while sitting, actually watching TV, I started playing around with the idea of using a television on button, and then realized if I turned it 90 degrees, it would create a C shape, and it also looked like a coffee cup, looking down on it. We got to see a TV on button and a coffee cup in one logo. I told the client that I would present them with a few ideas, so then I had to come up with a few of the logos, but I knew immediately that this would be the one they went for. I really recommend spending some decent time on the doodle stage as it really is where the main idea can stem from. If ideas aren't happening straight away, take a break and come back to it, or maybe go to your favorite park or coffee shop and try doodling now instead. Doodle on napkins if you have to, and then post up your doodles with a little paragraph about your process. Then we will move on to step 3, which is all about typography. 6. Step 3 - Typography: Step 3, typography. I could talk about typography for hours, honestly. If this is an area you would like to know a bit more about, then I will post up a link to my other Skillshare class, The Art of Typography. But I'll try to keep this step relatively short and not talk for hours about type. Typography is such an important element to your brand. Firstly, you need to either choose a typeface or create your own logotype. Some people simply use a logotype as their whole logo most famously, Coca-Cola and Google perhaps. We're going to look at how typefaces give off so many messages. Typefaces can act as a visual form of your own voice. I'd like to use the example of one word and then how the message of that word changes depending on the typefaces used. For this class, I'll use the word "Hello" as it seems appropriate. Your logo might be the first interaction someone has with your brand. It needs to say hello in the right manner. You could be really loud and showy as you can be or more quiet and refrained. Let's look at a few different typefaces and think about the personality of each. Here's Times New Roman. This is quite a serious and professional hello, maybe a touch old-fashioned. On the other end of the scale, there's a typeface called Muffler, a comic book esque handwritten typeface that says Hello in a very different way. Here's a few other typefaces and underneath each, I've written their classifications they would come under. Times New Roman is a serif typeface. These might help you when you search for a suitable typeface that fits your brand. Maybe you'll see that that typeface, Homestead, which is the top right is a slab serif and think, ''Yes, something like that would be perfect,'' and then you can start searching under that classification. The main classifications here are serif, sans serif, slab serif, script, display or decorative, handwritten, blackletter, typewriter, and calligraphy, which is really on-trend at the moment. Font Squirrel is a great site to find typefaces and they're mostly free. You can see down the right-hand side that you can search under classifications, that will help you on your search for a typeface. I really want you to think about the personality of the typeface you choose and whether that's relevant for your brand. Now, let's take a look at some examples, starting with two very close to my heart. Here's my Faye Brown Designs logo, and I used a typeface called Simula. I like the friendly script-like appeal, but also the fact that it's very structured and not too fussy. It's bold yet approachable. For Miss Printables, the logo symbol plays the biggest role. I wanted the typeface to be secondary. I chose a great free typeface called Grant Hotel. Coincidentally, for a lot of the promotional items I produce for Miss Printables, I use American typewriter, as I like the retro feel of a typewriter font as a reference to an earlier form of printing. Here's a logo I designed for a company called Let's Doodle. It uses a nice simple handwritten typeface, reflecting the notion of doodling and drawing. Graphic designer, Nicole, uses a lovely typeface called Bookeyed Suzanne for her company Gooseberrymoon. She designs a lot of wedding stationery, and this captures the emotion and feelings of her designs perfectly. For those of you who have taken part 1, you'll remember Wendy's logo for Doris & Fred. She named her company after her grandparents and used her grandma's handwriting as inspiration for her logotype. This is a great personal touch. In the finalizing your logo step, I'll also show you how to convert some handwriting into a vector using Adobe Illustrator. If you're interested in creating your own typeface for your logo, either based on some handwriting or design using a program, I'll talk about this in a lot more depth in my other class, The Art of Typography, especially in the unit creating typefaces. I'll post a link in the discussions and please do check out that particular video if you can. Let's break this all down into chunks. Like on how to pick a perfect typeface for your brand, here's the main points to consider. Look back on your doodles. What do your doodles look like? Are you writing the name of your company in a script or maybe all uppercase letters or maybe something more decorative? This might give you a good starting point to start looking for or creating a typeface. Think about your brand personality and then start looking for a typeface that communicates this. In that discussion section, I'll post links to some great places to find typefaces. Some you pay for, some are free. But don't be afraid to invest in a great typeface if you can afford it. The typefaces I've spent money on are usually my go-to typefaces. Don't be afraid to simply use a logotype as your logo. Maybe you don't need a symbol as well. Just always think back to usage and when and where you'll need to use your logo. What you need to bear in mind is don't take away from a strong logo symbol. If you've designed a really strong logo symbol, you might find that a very simple typeface will work best alongside it. Otherwise, the symbol and the logotype could start to fight against each other. Here's a logo designed for a company called Original Cinema Posters, selling, you guessed it, original cinema posters. Now, this logo symbol with the three initials is a pretty bold and striking logo. The supporting typeface can be pretty simple. That doesn't have to try too hard. The symbol can also be easily used in its own right without the supporting type. I could talk about typography all day, but some of you might start dozing off. If you are a Skillshare member and fancy becoming a type geek like me, then please do check out my other course. Before we move on to the next step on creating your logo symbol, why not share your ideas for typefaces in the project gallery? If you'd like any feedback, please do ask for it. 7. Step 4 - The Symbol: Step 4, The Symbol. I'm going to refer to what is often the main element of a logo as a symbol. It can be given other names like the logo mark, but to keep it simple, let's just call it a symbol. This refers to the logo element often used without support in text. Think the Nike tick or the Apple logo. We all recognize these without seeing Nike or Apple written next to them. Don't think you have to have a completely separate symbol though. Many logos are designed, including my own incorporate a symbol and text together. I say it all depends on the business and the brand, as to which way will work best. There is no hard and fast rules. How do you make a great logo symbol that sums up your brand in its simplest form? My biggest piece of advice is to keep it simple. A fancy or complicated logo can get lost and look messy. Often, the simplest logos can have the biggest impact. What will help is to look back at your moodboards and see what brands you are attracted to. Try to focus on what you like about their logos or their logo type. With that in mind, you can then start designing your logo. Maybe something has sprung up from your doodles, that you could now develop into a logo. If you didn't have much success with the doodle stage, I want you to again, look back on your moodboards from Step 2, and think about what styles you like and how can you translate that into a logo for yourself. Obviously, all of you will be coming at this from different businesses, but I want you to keep referring back to the logo design briefs that you created in Part 1. What key points would you like your logo to convey and communicate about your brand? Then visually, what ideas can we start looking at? Can you use the initials of your brand name in a clever way, like this Scarlet Knight logo? Or maybe you like a more illustrative symbol. There's a logo I designed here for a salad company using a graphic salad bowl. I also designed the typeface for this and used the inside of the A shape to create a leaf, that was then used on the other elements of the visual identity like on the business cards here. Think about how you can carry elements for your brand and promotional material. Something I want you to bear in mind is that the logo itself doesn't need to instantly tell people exactly what you do. Not every salad company needs a salad bowl, not every hairdresser needs hair or scissors, not every photographer has to have a camera icon as a logo for instance. What your logo does need to do is communicate your style, and your brand message. Will it attract your ideal customer or client? Does it give people an idea of where you stand in terms of pricing? Are you expensive and high-end? Your logo needs to reflect this. Even if you've decided to call on the services of a graphic designer, this is still a useful stage to consider all of these points. It's also very useful if you're thinking of buying some clipart or stock art to help you with your final logo design. If you have a clear idea of the logo you'd like, it's going to help you a lot when searching for clipart. I strongly advise you not to do this the other way round. Don't look at stock imagery, pick something and make your brand fit to work with it. Always figure out what's best for your brand first. Now, in an ideal world, we'd all be designing our logos from scratch or employing a graphic designer. The term clipart is often associated with cheap illustrations. But nowadays there are some very high-end examples you can buy. I'll show you a few examples of high-quality clipart that is available. Let's take a look at Katy Clemmans shop on Etsy KC printables. She's got a fab file of love clipart. Some of which you can envisage working well for logo. In this set, you will also get some digital papers which could work well for elements of your brand's visual identity, and make everything look cohesive. However, you have to consider if you take this approach, someone else could buy this too and use it. So this will never be uniquely yours. Maybe you have your heart set on a circular logo, and you can purchase a pack like this from Creative Market. There's loads of other shapes available too. All a matter of searching. I'll post up some useful links for you. But do remember to read through the T&Cs and license agreements if you choose this route and make sure they allow you to use these logos. Now remember, you don't necessarily need a symbol element to your logo. A strong logo type can be equally as effective. A purely typographic logo can work well for photographers, maybe with a little embellishments such as a decorative border or little graphic touch on one of the letters. If you're selling a lifestyle business where you're the face of it and people come to you, then it can be a nice idea to simply use a stylish signature of your name for example. If you are getting absolutely no inspiration for your logo symbol, why not try a purely typographic approach instead? Why not share your ideas so far? This can be the hardest stage and it's quite good to get some feedback. Give yourself a break and go back to the doodling if you need to. The trick is knowing when you have the winning logo idea. If I'm honest, there's only been a few projects where I've had the light bulb moment and knew a 100 percent that logo was perfect. I could have spent another six months fiddling with the vibrant designs and misprintable logos, but I also know that particularly for the misprintable shop, that would delay me making money and launching the shop. You need to find the balance. You need to start selling your products or services to make your business work, and make money. In an ideal world, we would all be a 100 percent happy with our logos. But realistically, sometimes 90 percent perfect is okay. When it comes to our own personal logos, it's very rare to be completely happy with it anyway, in the same way we all find imperfections in ourselves. Also, if you're getting really stuck on this, it might be a good sign to speak to a graphic designer, or post up your progress and start a conversation here or on our Facebook page. When you get to the point where you have a logo, just come back to this simple checklist. Will this work as a logo? By that, I mean is it simple enough? Think back to Step 1, consider the usage. Will your logo work with all your products and services? Does it reflect your brand message? Remember, it doesn't have to be so obvious to say exactly what you do, but it does need to reflect you and your business and your brand. A person selling the knitted brightly colored hat should probably have a completely different logo to a person selling very simple elegant jewelry. If you aren't sure what your brand message is, then pop back over to Part 1 of this series of classes to find your brand. This will help you work through that process. The next question to ask is how your logo will work at different sizes across different media, and on different products? Because there's quite a lot to think about here, we're going to talk about this in the next step. All about scalability. 8. Step 5 - Scalability: Step 5, scalability. So let's think about all the potential different uses for your logo. In its smallest form, it might need to work as a Twitter avatar. So viewed at only 73 pixels square. Although just to note, don't upload it at that size, as it can also be seeing bigger on your profile page and that'll look blurry if you just upload it very small. So probably go for 300 pixels square. So with my Faye Brown Designs logo, this works okay, very small. But the Miss Printables logo, works well on the profile page, but you can't really read the type on the logo of the Twitter feed. So maybe I can think about uploading a different version of that logo. That's maybe just the face icon or something. Then on a bigger scale, maybe your logo might need to work as a shop front or on the van. Sometimes one logo might not scale up or down so well. Other times you might not have a problem with them being big or small. But I think the best advice I can give is to work out why your logo will be mostly seen and work towards designing for that format or usage. Then figure out if other versions are going to be needed. So maybe you have a version that works well in square for your Twitter or Facebook profiles like Julie Reed here. But there's also a version that works well as a horizontal banner at the top of your blog or your website. Also Katy has a few different versions of her logo as well. They're all part of the same family that just adapted slightly. That they all part of the Katy Clemmans brand. So if you find that you're having troubles with different versions of your logo, share your ideas in the project gallery and between us maybe we can help find a solution. Remember, don't go looking for a problem if it doesn't exist, your logo might work perfectly well in all sizes. You don't necessarily need to use your logo as a Twitter avatar. A photo view might be more relevant if the business is focused on you as a personality more. So scalability is just to go aspect to bear in mind when designing your logo. You don't have to have a one size fits all logo. But if you need it to work across all sizes, either make it work as one or give it the freedom to create a couple of versions. Or maybe a typographic version, as well as a full logo with a symbol. So think about how it will work. Big, small, in a square, horizontally, and maybe even vertically. So in the next step we will be looking at a really fun part of your logo design and visual branding. The all-important color palette. 9. Step 6 - Color Palette: Step 6, Color Palettes. I'm a big fan of logos that work simply black and white. I like the simplicity and times quality a very simple logo can have. By having said that adding color can help bring crucial brand personality. I have a main brand color for fiber and designs, but I can also change this easily so it sits along other designs or products. A consistent brand color palette will help your brand get recognized and develop your style. You only have to look at some really successful brands on Instagram, and notice how all that fit and their photos look like part of one family, one brand, and one business. A color palette can help you achieve this too. A good exercise is to come up with a main brand color palette of 3-6 colors. This will work better for some businesses over others. A photographer might simply just need one color that works over their photographs. Like a black and white logo that sits over their photos. If you knit brightly colored hats, it would probably be good if your logo and visual identity reflected that. I'm not advising you to use up to six colors in a logo though. I'd suggest keeping that to a maximum of two or three. Then have a secondary color palette that you can call upon for other materials like your website and stationary etc. Look back at your favorite brands and mood boards and see what colors are being used, what colors are you drawn to? Then also you consider what emotional response people have to color. There have been many studies into this and the following slides we're going to go if you have break this down. But you will also have to take into account the tone of the color. To say blue is relaxing can be true with many blue tones, but not all. Before we look at individual colors, let's take a quick look at tones and tints of colors. If we look at pastel colors, they're often viewed upon as calming and relaxing. But they can also be seen as being a little bit weak and not confident. Bright, bold colors are often associated with fun and happiness. But be careful because they can also look cheap. Darker shades can add some depth and the gravitas seriousness. But they can also be seen as somber. Getting the right balance can be tricky and sometimes a color palette with a mix of can work quite well. I wanted to recommend this website design-seeds.com team is really, really good for getting some inspiration for color palettes. Also, take note of how the pallets are made up using photographs. Maybe you have some photos you can draw upon for color inspiration yourself. Let's take a look at quite a general view of color associations. Starting with yellow. Words and feelings may associate with the color yellow, bright, summer, creative, happy, energy. Too much yellow though can be a little bit full-on. You've got to work out how it fits him with everything else. Orange is often seen as useful, fun, friendly, confident. Another summery color, red. There's lots of color associations with red. It often depends on what tone of red you're looking as well. If we're thinking about a real bright, deep red, the words that you must associate with the more, attention, passionate, anger. Red's been known to increase appetite, so a lot of restaurants use the color red. Hot, vibrant, intense, exciting is often used for warnings and being dangerous as well they say, use red with care. Pink. Again, there's a lot of different shades of pink, so well, some of the bright hot pinks will have different meanings to the more passively pinks. But in general, we're looking at it being very feminine, playful, calming, is a color of love and romance, is warm, but can also be immature. Purple, often seen is got a classy color associated with quality, royalty, ambition, it's a luxury, but can also be moody, and mysterious. Blues. There's so many tones of blues. This is quite a broad spectrum, but they're often, depending on the tone, peaceful, they can be cold. Often used for technological companies or sporting companies. May a lot of time is seen is masculine, but they can be used very well in part of a color palette to make it feminine as well. It's a dependable color, trusting, honest, loyal. Also associate with intelligence. These malls at query, blurry green color, often associated with healing and being serene, clean, spiritual, and escape. It's a color you'd associate it with tropical seas and everything that you could imagine sitting on the beach and looking out to that sea the feelings you would feel. Green. There's another color where there's so many different types of greens, but in general, green can be looked upon as healthy healing, natural color, fresh, can also be associated with jealousy. Lots of different meanings for green. Brown. Sometimes to chase a brown can be used really nicely. Other ones start to look a bit dirty, but they're also used very nicely for natural companies, and earthy companies, businesses that maybe have some ethical and recycling echo, filter them. Grays. Often associate with intelligence being quite conservative, sometimes a bit dull, and secure, and neutral. Black. Black is a funny one because it's got so much associated with it. It's quite formal color, but it's also sophisticated, it's associated with elegance and style, and also associated with having power. Then to very negative connotations of death and evil. But black is a great color. Black is a great color to use alongside other colors. Like black and pink work really well together, for instance. Then you've got a nice mix of two different meanings working together well. White. Probably got, obviously, but associate with being clean, simplicity, clarity, pure, winter, and also innocence. As part of your project steps, it would be really great if you showed us some examples of palette you were thinking about for your brand and share it in the project gallery. Do ask for some feedback if you aren't sure or maybe you have a few options that you can't decide on. Try to respond to other students to well style will be checking in. It would be good to get some discussions going between yourselves also. I hope this helps and there's quite a lot to take him with color. Have a look on Pinterest and online for some more inspiration and more thoughts about colors and what they mean. Spend a little bit of time on this, don't rush it. It's quite important to get it right. Try and pick out colors from nature. Sometimes the colors you might pick directly from, say, Photoshop or Illustrator are quite digital, and they don't also come across as a quite natural together. I think that's why design seeds works so well, because you're picking out colors from photographs of real things, and the colors just seem to work really well together. The next step we're going to be looking at finalizing your logo. 10. Step 7 - Part 1 - Finalising your logo: In this step, we will look at finalizing your logo into a usable format and then getting some all important feedback. Once you have a good idea for your logo, you'll need to create it into a finalized version that you can then easily use and send printers use online, etc. I create all my logos in Adobe Illustrator. I tend to stay away from Photoshop as its pixel-based and not vector-based. If you were to create a logo in Photoshop, and then you realize that you needed to scale up, the image can become blurred and pixelated like you can see here. If you create it really big to start with, then you can start running into really massive file sizes and slowing down your program. Vector-based programs are best for logos to ensure clean edges and allowing you to easily adjust the size, change colors, and tweak shapes. I'm going to run through a process of creating a logo in Illustrator. Now, this isn't a tutorial on how to use Illustrator. There's lots of great courses on Skillshare that can teach you Illustrator. This is mainly just to show you how I personally finalize a logo design, albeit in bite size form. I usually spend a lot longer on perfecting and designing a logo, honestly. I want to show you a few different ways of how you can get your logo finalized in Illustrator. Here, you can see I've just imported this pretty bad photographs that I literally just took from my phone. I just want to show you that you don't have to use scanners in Photoshop, there are other ways around that. One of the options you've got in Illustrator is to use the live trace tool, which is up here, and I'm just going to go to Tracing Options. What I want to do is just press "Ignore White", I'm going to keep all the other settings as they are for now. What this does is it looks at the image and it converts into outlines. Now, this works really well on very clean black and white images. This one's a little bit dirty, but as you can see, it's not too bad at all. This is our result and I'm just going to press "Expand" and now I can see my paths. What I'm going to do is just highlight everything I don't need and delete that. Then, as you can see, we're left with our little elephant icon. Now, the problem with live trace is you can fiddle around with it for ages to try and get these edges moved and clean. Sometimes in some are this rough edge look, you can get away with it depending on what size you're looking at it in everything. But for logo, I think you really need a clean image. What I will do in this instance is just draw around the original photograph really. I'm going to go back a few steps now and undo, and just get back to the original photo. I could obviously use the live trace as a base as well, but I just want to show you that you can easily do it from the photograph. We're on the photograph now, and I'm just going to grab the pen tool, and I'm going to start drawing around the elephant, just going to zoom out to make it a little bit easier for me. As you can see, this photograph is really quite bad, it's blurry, it's dull, but it doesn't matter depending on what you want it for. Let's just draw around this. As I've said before, there are lots of really good classes on Skillshare to teach you how to use Illustrator. This is just showing you the basics of a process you could take. But if you'd like to know Illustrator in a lot more depth, then I'd really advise to just take a little bit of time to do one of the other classes. We've got this outline now. I'm just going to switch that here so I can see that as a stroke, and then I'm going to draw around my eye. Now obviously, I could use the circle tool here, but I quite like the imperfection of a not perfect circle, and then let's draw in this ear. Now, I have all the shapes I want. I'm just going to select this photograph in the background and delete it, so we've got a nice clean elephant. Now, there's some parts of this I'm not really quite happy with, its a bit wobbly around these areas, this point here and here are little bit harsh. There's a lot you can do to just clean that up now. First of all, I'm just going to go to my stroke tool and press on these middle options which help curve the points here that clean that up a little bit. Now, I'm going to play around with my bezier curves. I won't spend too long on this, because it can get a bit boring for you to watch. Obviously, if you are doing your own logo, you want to spend a bit of time on this and make it perfect so it fits for you. Why not try a few different options as well? It might not be that the first thing you do is perfect. One thing I do want to show you and illustrate is the color switches option that you have, because that's quite useful and it'll help you get consistency with your brand colors. I'm just going to select a new color group and name it elliepants, and then I'm going to select a couple of colors, so I can then just drag straight into that folder. Then, that helps me easily call upon them whenever I need them for my brand. I'll just stop at tube. Obviously, if you've got more brand colors, it's quite a useful tool to work with. Let's just select our elephant now, I don't want a stroke, so I'm going to turn the stroke off, and I'm going to make this eye white fill. This ear, I actually want to do a little bit more with, so I'm going to go object path outlined stroke, and as you can see, that now gives me a little bit more editing points to play with, because it's made it not just a line. Now I can pull that in and I can just do something a little bit nicer with it. Again, I won't spend too long perfecting this, because it's probably something you don't want to watch completely, but it gives you a good idea of just trying to and really make sure that your logo, it's going to work the best, and you spend a little bit of time doing whatever you can to make it look better. I'd probably work a bit more on that. Yeah, if I had more time, but you get the idea. Now, I'm going to just use the text tool and write elliepants. I'm happy with this font, this is a typeface called Gothan. But what I might do is just separate the pants and make that slightly different with type. Let's see what that looks like in blue. That's quite cute. What you could do is you could then play around with the scale a little bit more, I'm just going to select all that elephant and group them together. You might decide to just have the elephant as a small icon, obviously the elephant could then be used on its own as well. You could do other versions where the elephant is to the side. I just want to show you that the great thing about Illustrator is it just gives you this freedom to work with these shapes very easily, and move them around. Then, when you've got your final logo, which I'll probably go with this top one, so I'm just going to delete them. Now, if you were to send this to a printer, they will want your typefaces outlined, so they don't have to worry about having the font. You can just go Type, Create Outlines, and your elephant is nice and clean. I want these to stay white, but if you want them to be see-through onto different backgrounds, you can start using your paths to minus out the area. Hopefully, that will give you a good idea, and then what you need to do is when you go to Save, save it as an EPS file. There you go, that's how you can create your logo in Illustrator. It'll be a little bit of a rush job, this one, just to show you, there's obviously a lot more I do and a lot more fiddling to make it perfect, but this should give you a good idea of the process. Once you have your AI file or EPS, you'll be in a good position to start getting some feedback on your logo. The best people to get feedback from are some existing loyal customers, if you're already set up, once you've built a really good relationship with and if they know you very well. You might not have started up your business yet. Other people do ask friends, particularly those in a similar industry or arena and your area of business, and then family too. But not the ones that would just say that's great to everything, you want some honest constructive feedback. Hopefully, all will be positive, and you might just need to tweak a few things here and there. If one person out of 20 says they don't like the typeface, then don't go changing the typeface just to please one person. Just use your judgment. If that person does make a really good point, then maybe change it. But of course, use the project gallery here as well to get feedback from your fellow students and myself. That's what we're all here for, Skillshare. Go through each of these steps slowly and give yourself some time in between. Don't rush the logo design, but at the same time, you don't want this to take months. Ninety percent perfect is better than no logo at all. Once you have a finalized logo, you're in a great position to start moving forward to create a whole brand visual identity. Using everything we've talked about in this class, and part 1, you can start designing your website, stationary, and other promotional items that you might have ticked off in the brand inventory doc. In the next video, we will talk briefly about how to develop your visual identity across the other items and platforms. 11. Step 7 - Part 2 - vectorising hand written letters: I've got one more quick video to just quickly show you before we move on to how to develop your visual identity. I did promise you I'll show you how to convert some sort of handwriting into a usable form in Illustrator. This is a real quick little tutorial to show you how. Literally taken, another quite bad picture of a signature that I've just called Name on my phone. I'm in Photoshop, and what I'm going to do is convert this into a cleaner black and white image. First of all, I'm going to just rotate the image round so we are reading it properly. Then I'm going to go to my levels, which is Apple L and just brighten it up, clean out this background text that you can see from the page below. That should be fine and "Okay" that. Then, I'm going to go to my "Hue and Saturation" again, which is Apple G and just lock that down to grayscale. There's lots of other ways you can do that. Then again, I'm just going to play around with my levels to make that nice and black and clean. Now we have a nice clean black and white image that I'm going to save off, and I will bring that into Illustrator. Back in Illustrator, I've imported the image in from Photoshop and there's quite a few different ways you can now convert this into a vector image. Again, we could use Live Trace, like I showed you with the little elephant icon. But again, I'm just going to press "Ignore White". You are going to run into the problems of quite rough edges. This is just working its way through, taking its time. I use this technique quite a lot for some sort of greeting cards and things where I know that the type is only going to be at a certain size. Here, it looks fine, but then when you start to zoom in, you can start seeing all the rough edges. Yes, you could clean them up, but there's probably quicker ways to do this. Your other options are, I'll just go on to a different layer. I just imported the same image and just put them on a slightly transparent background so I can work over the top of them. The first one, I simply used a pen tool as the stroke. So you should be able to see the stroke lines here. I'll just finish that e off here. The good thing about this is that you will get some very clean edges, and it's quite easy to work with. I'm just going to turn my Fill off, and you can easily go into the shapes, move them about. Not quite like that. You can really get it exactly how you want it. Then if you are happy with that, what you would do is do "Object", "Path", "Outline Stroke". Then in your Pathfinder's, for areas like that on the N, you would just press this one here to make it a expanded object, so they're used as a film now. Alternatively, you could do that straight away and actually draw around the shapes. This helps you get some more of the detail in. As you can see here, this has already been outlined. The way I've done that is by using the pen tool again, but using it as a fill rather than a stroke. I've actually drawn around the edge of the whole letter. Now, this process does not take long. I would say, if you are going for a signature style logo, this is a good way to do it. It's worth taking a little bit of time to finesse it and making it look quite authentic. You can go into these points and just smooth them off. I'm using the stroke for the moment just so I can see all the shapes that I'm using. Then we will delete the middle section out once I'm happyish with the shapes. I'm now going to select both of those objects and flip that back to the film mode. As we can see, the e needs the middle bit taken out of it. We can just go into our Pathfinder's, press this one, which minuses that middle section. Then this just now makes it really easy. Let's just turn off those back layer with those photographs. As you can see, the bottom one, we've got a bit more weight to some of the strokes. This one is literally just the stroke of the pen. Now, the great thing about it being vector is you can easily change any of the colors to whatever you want. It's just so much easier to edit and use rather than a scanned image in Photoshop that printers would not like and can't zoom up. This one we can scale up to our heart's content and we're not going to lose any of the quality. I hope that helps. I will speak to you next in the class on developing your visual identity. 12. Developing your visual identity: I wanted to talk briefly about how to develop your visual identity across all your promotional material, products, and services. Now you hopefully have a logo and you're in a really good position to move forward and start implementing your visual brand across some of the items that you ticked off in your brand inventory. I want you to bear in mind now that everything you create for your business should look like it belongs to the same family and that will help grow your brand and your brand message. A business card that looks completely different to an Etsy shop banner or your product packaging can actually dilute your brand and make it less memorable. That's why I'm really focusing on your brand typography and your color palette can help tie that all together. If you're new to all this, then you might not get it right straight away. As much as brand consistency is important, l also want you to give yourself a break. It might take you a good year to feel really comfortable with your brand and we all make mistakes. If I look back at some of the designs I did 10 years ago, I shudder. I'm going to break this down into one simple question to ask yourself whenever you create something new or just before you post up a new Facebook status on your business page, or you post a new photo on Instagram. Just ask yourself one question, does this reflect my brand and how I want to grow my brand? If you don't know the answer, go back and take Part 1, Define Your Brand because that course will help you. But I'm not saying don't have fun. If you're a cat person and like posting photos of cats but equally, that has nothing to do with your jewelry business or your crafting tutorials, don't think you can never post cat photos. This is part of your personality in life. Just maybe keep them to a minimum. For my business, Miss Printables, it's all about fun, friendly printable for families. So my target audience probably like to see the old photo of my family may be using one of my products. By now you are probably quite familiar with Katy Clemmans brand. In fact, you've just seen some photos of her cats as well and I've been using Katy's branding as a good example throughout this course. I'm now just going to show you how all of her work and online presence look as one like a family. Now, Katy has been working in branding for many years. So she's a bit of an expert this. Again, don't worry if you don't 100 percent crack it straight off, but this should give you a good idea of what to aim for. Katy's personal website is clean and eye-catching and straight away you can see her logo. The photography all looks part of her brand too. Nothing looks like it doesn't belong on this page. Some of you will be selling on third-party websites, so maybe you'll be launching a YouTube channel. Bear in mind that all these websites have their own layout. It's up to you to then make sure that your shop front or channel page looks like part of your brand. With Katy Clemmans, printable shop on Etsy, her branding carries through on her shop banner and her product thumbnails. On her Not On The High Street shop, the scalable logo is featured on her product photography. Again, on her Facebook page. So making sure all your online presence looks like part of the same family is important to strengthen your brand. If someone wanted to search for Katy Clemmans on Facebook, and the page looked like nothing they were familiar with from her brand, they might think they have the wrong Katy, for instance, and click on. Katy's Instagram feed is full of lovely photos of her latest doodle designs, along with the old cat and some travel photos, and this is a nice way to make your followers feel connected to you as a person. Not everything on your feeds have to be exactly about your products, remember. Then Katy sends a lot of prints out via the post, so she has some lovely finishing touches like this stamp and her packaging for her wedding invites. All this forms part of Katy's visual branding. So very much like we spoke about in the first part, about the way you talk and communicate to customers reflects you as a brand. Everything you do in the visual form equally reflects your brand and you want to strengthen your brand, not dilute it with mixed messages. A really good exercise is to basically do what I've done with Katy's branding but for yourself. I'd like you to pick one of your favorite brands and start looking at all their visual brand materials from leaflets to package into online or social media. Start looking at how it all ties together. To do this exercise with one of your favorite brands will help you immensely when doing this for your own business, and I'd love to see your examples that you've collated in the project gallery. Just take some screenshots or a photo and post it up. Talk about what you like or what you don't like. It's a really useful exercise to get your brain thinking in the right frame. Without complicating the fact, it all comes down to this question, does this reflect my brand message and how I'd like to grow my brand? Visually, does this look like one family? As you develop all your other visual identity materials, keep asking yourself this question and you should be absolutely fine. Even if you decided on the graphic designer option, whenever you receive designs from them, ask that same question and if the answer is yes, you've cracked it. 13. Next steps: I'm hoping that you're now fully equipped with all the skills you need to design your brand logo or work really closely with a graphic designer and create your masterpiece. Now I love to see what people create, and I tried to give feedback on every project posted in the gallery. Please do use this feature. Asked myself and other students, "I have posted a sample project in the gallery of what I'd love to see you post, but don't worry if you don't post something for every step." I just love to hear about your process. Maybe you're stuck with typefaces, ask a question, ask for some advice, and join a class Facebook group 2. I'll post a link in the discussion in this panel, but it's www.facebook.com/group/brandingyourcreativebusiness. Here we can carry on the conversation, I'll post a useful links and advice, so please do join us. I'd love it if you could join me for part 3 of this course. This will be launched in the late summer of 2015. It will be all about releasing your brand to the world. We will talk about how to take good photography, how to set up your shops or your websites, how to get publicity, and how to use social media, it's going to be a lot of fun. In the meantime, if you have any questions, please feel free to ask and I'd love to hear from you. I hope you enjoyed this class, I want to see all your logos posted, and hopefully see you in the next class. Bye.