LOGO DESIGN - A journey through a logo design project

1. Class intro: Hello, and welcome to this class; Logo Design, a journey through a logo design project. My name is Faith Brown and I'm a graphic designer from the UK. My background is motion graphics and branding. I've had the pleasure of designing many logos for my clients, and I will share with you lots of tips that I've learned throughout my career. In this class, you will literally be following my process of taking an initial brief from the client, gaining inspiration, designing initial ideas, developing ideas based on their feedback, finalizing the files, and creating a brand board. I will also talk about quoting and invoicing. This class is aimed at designers who just need a little extra direction with these sort of projects. Often it's difficult to know where to start or how to communicate with clients for a project. How many initial ideas do you show? Managing your clients expectations and at the end of the day producing a perfect logo for that business. You'll be following me along almost live as I share with you my design process. You'll see my mistakes too, nobody is perfect. For your project, you can either work along with an existing logo design project that you have one at the moment or you can choose one of the three briefs that I'm going to share with you. I'll basically take the place of a client. I will check in as often as possible and be the pretend client. But I'll also encourage you all as other students the feedback on other people's projects. For the first month of this class going live, I will be log in in most days to feedback on your projects. So please do use the project gallery. I might even be an awkward client at some point, just so the project feels a little bit more real. But I do promise that the briefs of fun and we will keep it lie and enjoyable. I'll talk more about this in the class. So let's dive in. 2. What will we cover: Each video covers a different area of a logo design project. So we will start with initial contact. This may sound like we're about to make contact with aliens, but clients aren't that scary, I promise. I'll be sharing some tips for how to get the most out of that first communication. Quoting are then talk you through my process of quoting for a project, digging deeper. Once the client has come back and confirm the project, you'll need to either set up a meeting or a Skype call or email to really find out more about their business and their goals, inspiration and mood boards. It's very hard to just come up with a perfect logos. So we will talk about finding inspiration and they should ideas. We will talk about sketching and also going straight to a vector program for a play around colors. I'll talk a little about, a little bit about coming up with perfect color palettes. Presentation. I will talk you through how I present my ideas to the client. Development.This is what happens after the initial ideas have been sent and you've had some feedback. Finalizing files are go through what files to supply, brand boards I'll talk a little bit about brand boards, which is basically a mini version of brand guidelines. And then we will talk about getting paid for your work. I'll also briefly talk about some unwritten rules for how you can then show off the logo once you've designed it for your client. So in terms of a project for this class, you may have a logo project on the go at the moment, which would be great to work along with, or you can choose one of the three briefs I've included with this class. Like I said, I will be your pretend client for the first month that has class go in life. I was still check in after that, but probably not as regularly. So as students, you can also feed back on other people's work. We can all help each other.The three briefs to choose from, design a logo for new gym could be life gym, design a logo for a cake shop called Glorious Cakes. And design a logo for a new juice drink called Essentially. In your class resources you will find under project tabs are three briefs and filled out questionnaires to help you with each project. So feel free to tackle one or all three if you like. 3. Initial contact: Let's begin by talking about that initial contact with a potential client. This class isn't really about finding clients, but clients can come from many different areas of life. Recommendations from friends will pass clients, social media groups, people who have seen your posts on social media, LinkedIn is a good site for networking, maybe you've been to a networking event. Sometimes you will have already had face-to-face contact. You may know them or know of them through acquaintances or friends, or they may be someone that you've just never met. How you communicate with each would differ on the differing circumstances. I usually wouldn't have a meeting with someone until they've confirmed that they are happy to go ahead with me on my quote. The main reason for this is that I could go to a coffee shop for a meeting and talk to someone for couple of hours about their logo and their branding, they [inaudible] then decide that I'm too expensive. Then, I wouldn't be getting any money for that time. Now If the project was potentially a very big project, I have met clients before quoting as it's useful to really talk over what they need and what elements that they might be needing, how they will work together. This will then help me quote. But for a fairly simple logo design project, I tried to save my meetings for once projects actually being confirmed. The first step for me is finding out a little bit about the businesses so I have enough information to quote. This can usually be done over email, or if you are at networking event, you can obviously chat a little bit about them then and there. What you'll want to know is the name of the business and what it does, are you re-branding or is this a totally new business? How many people will be signing off the logo? This is a big question for quoting. If there are 10 people who will all want to sign it off or have their say, by the way, this is totally not ideal, then you'll want to charge a lot more as the project will be difficult. The ideal is one person. Top 10 people all with different tastes and likes is hard work, but obviously for big corporate client, this is sometimes unavoidable, and You'll want to know where the logo will be seen. Where it's going to need to work. Think social media, shop signage fans, stationary, stickers, packaging, etc. This will help you come up with the official quote for the work. The other important thing to do up front to avoid time being lost preparing a quote, is making sure that the client has senior portfolio and really liked your style of design. There's no point spending time quoting if actually you aren't a good fit for each other, and that's okay, that's quite normal. That can happen. So let's talk a little bit about quoting. 4. Quoting: Quoting. An official quote is beneficial for the client and for you. It sets out the expectations so you don't end up designing 100 logos. I'll tell you a big mistake I made once a few years back. I was in concession with a client and sent out the official quote. As you will see on my quote that I will share with you shortly, I break down the work that I do, and usually I start between three to four initial ideas. The client got back to me and asked me to develop one of these ideas. So I did. She then wasn't really feeling it and we went back to the initial design stage or because I've missed out the important part, additional work. I hadn't covered myself for the fact that clients can change their mind. I literally designed about 30 logos for this client, before I just politely said, "I don't think I'm the right person for your project." I got paid nothing. The client now knew what she didn't want, but I spent a lot of time going around the houses. Now, I never like to say I wasted my time because I learned a lot from it. One, is to cover yourself extra work, and two, sometimes your style just isn't right for someone. This is now what a usual quote looks like for me. Initial designs, usually between three to four, a development stage, I developed one of the logos based on their feedback, and final stage, this should be minor tweaks. If there is additional work, I will charge an hourly rate. I usually say additional work after the initial logos stage, 99 percent of the time the client is happy with one of the first logos I designed. Sometimes I will ask for an upfront percentage based on a few different factors, whether the client lives abroad and this would be much harder to chase any pavements, or if I've never met them, then I may ask for little upfront. But when I first started out, I didn't do this. I think this comes down to confidence, so do what feels right for you and you can always change the terms as your career develops. I purposely haven't told you how much I quote because I tend to not have a fixed price and I quote per project, based on some of the questions I've asked at the initial stage. I have friends who have fixed packages. The first one might include a logo design, color palette, brand board, and with typography options. The second option may include some stationary like business cards and letterheads. The third option will include a style guide for photography, website elements, et cetera. This is a good way to approach it and saves you haven't quote each time. The downside is it doesn't cover you for ten people or wanting to sign off a logo that might take a little longer than you had allowed for. These are all other options for how you can price your work. I just want to give you an idea of how you might quote. Each designer will do it slightly differently and you'll figure out what works best for you. I've seen logo designers charge anything between $99 to over $2,000 for a full brand package. It's important to find that right price point for you. You send over the quote, the client is happy. You may wish you tried quote in more. But [inaudible]. I should just say, whatever you price yourself, wherever you price yourself, there will be some people who think that they have a bargain and others who would think that you are expensive. Stick to your guns and know your worth. If over time you're literally getting every job you quote for, maybe think about raising your price. Also, make note of the hours that you are spending on each project and figure out what your hourly rate is working out at and are you getting what you want? There's also a lot of logos you can just purchase these days very cheaply. Now, whilst these logos themselves can be quite nice, the company will never have a unique logo as someone else can easily buy it too. So don't undervalue your work. A unique one-off logo that really speaks that business and that brand is worth more than an $25 logo that hundreds of people could buy and use. 5. Digging deeper: Digging deeper. So the client has approved your quote and your now good to start the process of designing the logo. I will now introduce the project that I'm working on live to show you my next steps. The logo on designing is for a garden designer called Catherine Lee. She's a friend who lives in the same town as me, so we are lucky enough to be able to meet easily face-to-face for that first meeting. Being a garden designer, Catherine is very visual and she brings along references of pictures and colors that she likes. We talk about her business aims, how she hopes to expand, her ideal clients and everything I include on the brand questionnaire which I will be sharing with you. If you can't meet someone face to face, sending them some key questions will help you to get to know their business better. If it's a small business, you will find a lot about their brand qualities, they are very personal to the owner. If they are the face of the brand and business, you'll want the letter to reflect that. So there's not a fight between the visual side of the brand and how the person actually communicates. If the person is very friendly, warm, and jolly, if a labor looks very corporately too might not marry up. As a great quote from Seth Godin says, "Every interaction, in any form, is branding." So it's really important to dig deeper and understand the business and how the owner fits into it. In a class resources, you'll see the brand questionnaire with some questions that you might want to consider asking your clients. Some might not be relevant to each project, so pick and choose all at your own. From me to [inaudible] in face to face, having a Skype call or email and questions, you should now have a good knowledge of that business and how it plans to evolve. I've tried to include all of this info in three briefs that you can choose from. 6. Inspiration and mood boards: Inspiration and mood boards. Anyone that has taken my previous classes know that I do like a moodboard, and I use this to start off my idea stage with producing one. After my first meeting with Catherine, she told me that she really loves the fern shape and the links to the Fibonacci sequence. So, I suppose you've heard of the Fibonacci sequence, it's a series of numbers that is made up by adding the previous two numbers together. The sequence is zero, one, one, two, three, five, eight, 13, 21 et cetera. So, 21 is made up from eight plus 13, for example. When illustrated together, in this spiral, it's known as The Golden Spiral and can be seen lots in nature is quite fascinating. Artists have used the ratios a lot in art too. There's something very visually pleasing about it. I started by collecting some imagery related to that, and also ferns in general. I also have in my head a logo idea that might be quite illustrative. So, I looked a little bit at botanical drawings. I literally just do Google or Pinterest search as in drag and drop the images in. Sometimes I'll get out and about take photos, sometimes I'll use magazines and books, also textures if I make like a Physical moodboard. It depends on the project really. So, this example is a physical moodboard I created for a patent design project. It's a lot of fun creating moodboards like this. I could have got myself out for this logo and collected some foliage in flowers, but it was really the wrong time of the year. Everything was wet and cold, and the images online, we're a lot more vibrant, which I felt was important for this project. So, do what feels natural to you. There's no right or wrong approach with moodboards. Your client doesn't ever even have to see them. It's more for you to get some ideas and inspiration going. I quite often get asked whether I look at other logos for similar industry. So, yes I do but I try not to do it straight away. I don't want to be overly influenced by anything else I see and I certainly don't want to copy. So, try to come up with some initial ideas and thoughts first, but I do think it's important to look especially at any direct competitors your client might have. You want their logo to stand out and not for the wrong reasons I should add. You want it to have its own unique personality look different enough, but in a good way. So, yes it's important to check out the competition, but try to time this right so it doesn't send you off course too much. You can add a few of those to your moodboard as well if you like. Once my moodboard is complete, or at least a good work in progress is time that I start sketching out my first ideas or having a play in Illustrator. Please feel free at this point to upload your moodboard into the project gallery within this class. 7. Initial Ideas: Initial ideas. Usually I go straight to a sketchbook rather than head straight to Illustrator. You don't have to use Illustrator for your logo design. It's always advisable to use a vector-based program notes so the logo can be easily scaled up and down unlike Photoshop, which is pixel based, which means that you can't scale up without it blurring. But for this particular logo, because Katherine, who told me about her love for the Fibonacci sequence, I felt I wasn't going to be able to draw the ratios correctly and I didn't have any graph paper at times so I've gone straight into Illustrator and I'm literally using this like sketchbook. I don't really know where I'm heading at the moment. I'm just playing and seeing if some happy accidents happen. I've super speed this up by the way, I'm not that fast. I'm starting to just see where these circles might get me and then I move into moon-shapes and see if I can make anything interesting out of them before fitting them together. I'm just going to park that one for now and I may come back to it. I want to explore a leaf or tree shape as this is very relevant for garden designs so I'm thinking about the ratios between each shape, relating to the sequence again. By sitting them onto each other, this is starting to take shape into a potential logo. Just going to try that as a tree instead of a leaf although it's actually quite cute as it looks like both. I'm just going to keep that over one side and have a bit more of a play with these shapes and their relationships with each other. Again, I don't really know where I'm going with this. I'm just using this art board within Illustrator like a sketchbook. Remember, most people would never see this stage of your design process. Doesn't matter if something doesn't work out, you've tried it and it just won't be one of the options that you show client. I'm not sure about this, it's looking like a weird animal, but I do like the leaf-shaped, so I'm just going to try something else with it. Sometimes you'll get ideas in your head or even sketched out that when it comes to colorizing them, they just don't seem to work as well. I want to also show you my more traditional approach to initial ideas and that is sketching. For this project, Katherine had told me the style she likes and they were all very clean and graphic but I like to throw in a few wildcard options into some initial designs, sometimes just for fun or maybe it's something that client hadn't considered. I want to show a totally different route of using botanical style drawings so I set myself up with a few leaves and twigs and did some relatively detailed drawings. Let's say they were considered rather than total sketches. I then scan these in a decent resolution so I could bring them into Illustrator to work with. First of all, I just wanted to place them into the design idea that I had to see if they work before I then went into vectorizing them. We're just going to image trace a little bit here, as it's such a useful tool. You can find it in either the drop-down window or depending on your workspace, it might be set up along the crossbar at the top. You can bring up the custom settings and you can play with these settings until you're happy with the outcome. Just make sure you've got that preview box ticked so you can see it happening live. Once you're happy, you can click on expand and it will vectorize the artwork and now you can do all the fun stuff like adding color. If you find that you do try to change the color but still coming out gray, just go to edit and edit colors and convert it to CMYK. Now I start seeing how this will work within the text design that I've already done. The next stage is to really look in more detail at the colors for these designs and we will talk about that in the next video. In terms of projects steps, if you'd like to share anything at this stage then please do and I won't be putting my client hat on just yet. I'll save that for when you have finalized those initial ideas. 8. Colors: Coming up with a color book can be really helpful. My go-to place for color palettes is Design Seeds. It's a great intuitive website where you can easily find some great colorways. I also try to keep in mind that whilst these palettes look gorgeous next to a photo, they might not work so well when you simplify them down for two colors to work with a logo. To anything that really takes my eye, I just drag and drop into the board. Another great place to find color inspiration is Pinterest. I could get lost looking at color palettes, but don't rush this stage. First, I do believe that the strongest logos need to work in black and white. The wrong color can really affect your client's response to a logo. For instance, if I made this tree design peach and orange, I'm pretty sure my client would instantly take dislike to it and it would be difficult for them to see the potential of the logo. Quite often, I also look through my Pantone books and my postcards which I'll come to in a minute. It's quite difficult sometimes with these Pantone books to really start seeing what colors might work well together. It's a little bit fiddly. I did invest in this pack of Pantone, a hundred postcards, and it's really cool. You just get loads and loads of colors obviously and it just helps you really start to see what colors are going to work well together as a color palette. Which ones might not work so well together. Then you can just start getting an idea of a color palette using three or four of these. I tend to not use that many colors in a logo if I can, but it's quite good to have a secondary color palette for your clients so they can use it on websites or other things. I don't think that green really goes with those ones. Yes, it's really cool way of thinking about color palettes as well, so that is another thing to consider. You can also do that with paint strips from home-ware shops and paint shops. That's quite handy thing to do as well. I've arranged my color inspiration on a board. I'm really drawn to this Pantone color of the year from a few years back. I'm also wondering if I can incorporate these foreign colors into a logo. I love the relationships of these pinks with the colors surrounding it, but I'm mindful that, that might instantly make this logo a bit more feminine than it needs to be. Again, at this point, feel free to share any color board you've created in your project area. This isn't always something you have to share it with a client, but you can. I know a lot of designers who do produce mood boards and color boards for their clients and show them as part of the presentation. Usually I get good sense of what my client is after from the initial conversations we have, but I have on occasion sent them a mood board to double-check that I'm on the right track. Feel free to share these in your project gallery as well. There's some really nicely designed ones on Pinterest again here for inspiration. Also, if you find [inaudible] color a hard part of your design process, please check out my other class, The Art of Color, where we really go into this subject in more detail. You can see everything we've covered in the lessons here. Maybe check that out after this class and I will include a link in the notes below on the timeline of this video. 9. Presenting to client: I start with a title page and then show each design. This will also highlight to me how the logo will look on dark colors and what logo options might be needed for each design. This was a design I ended up developing from those initial moon shapes. They scale innwards at the ratios of the Fibonacci sequence to create a rose petal type effect. I show an option with a gradient color and also a more graphic option. I really that is not a tree design but I think I need to tweak the colors and the relationships of the type, size. I also want to show how this will look on a different color background or having an alternative color option using the two greens. I spent quite a lot of time on this stage, so I'm fast-forwarding a little bit trying to show you the process I take. Sometimes I add in some slightly alternative designs that while they are different, relate to one particular idea. I'm concerned this design looks bit too geometric and is not loose enough for a garden designer. I wanted to show a slight development with this one. This idea was another wildcard. I just use one element of my sketches to place with some scripted typeface to make it look extra personnel. Like Katherine almost signed her name. This idea we've done some leaves came from the little tree design, but just a much looser approach. At this point, I add a little reasoning behind each design and my thought process, how the logo could be used, and I also check for spelling mistakes. I will explain about the wildcard designs. Here I've said the next two designs are a little off brief, but we're to try some other approaches to give you more choice. If we think back to the quote I originally said, I designed three to four options. I'm actually showing Katherine six designs. I didn't do this all the time, but if I get into the zone with a project, I'd loved to give the client more than they expect, although this can backfire, sometimes too much choice makes it very hard for the client to decide on one route. So do be warned. I also show little ways of using part of the visual brand elements, like the motive to break up text, which might look nice on documents or on websites. Again, for this design, I've showed an example of using the leaf like a watermark. I'll then save this out as a PDF ready to send to the client. Personally emailing the PDF with a few notes has always worked well for me. Sometimes it might be beneficial to arrange another meeting or actually present the ideas. For big corporate projects, this would probably be expected. But for smaller projects, I like to think of clients being excited to open their email, to see the ideas, and then just letting them sit with it. I usually have a preference of one of the designs that I've done, and I don't want to subconsciously convinced my client to go with it. For instance, the logo Katherine doesn't end up going with was not my particular favorite, but she loved it. I just wanted to say I used to send my presentation documents off a little differently. I'd start with the title page and then on the first page, I'd show all the options so they can see them next to each other. I then go into a little bit more detail for each one. I've changed this now, but for the purposes of your projects, feel free to just post up an image or two showing your initial ideas. You don't need to create a big presentation document unless you want to, of course. Then in the notes on your project, just write your reasonings for each design. You send your presentation off or deliver in person and wait for feedback. This is often a tricky part of our jobs. How long do you wait feedback before chasing? You've got other projects on the go and you might want to schedule your time a little bit. It's hard. Some clients will want at least a few days to go over the options, maybe even a few weeks. I tried to be as patient as possible with clients, but also if they have a deadline whether logo needs to be done, I tried to gently remind them that, there's time and it takes time to develop these ideas and finalize the files. If you know you have a big project coming up, you might want to set out some terms at the start for projects and just politely say, I will need feedback within three days of you receiving the initial ideas. Katherine came back to me almost straight away and said, "I really love one of them, but can I just sit on it for a few days and make sure I'm not rushing into a decision." This is obviously the perfect situation as you don't want to start finalizing files of the client then decides two days later they've changed their mind. It's good to give them a little bit of time. Katherine came back and said she wanted to go with dancing leaves. She felt it represented her, it didn't look to corporate, but also looked professional. The even better thing was that she loved it just so much that she didn't want anything changed, which makes it a little bit tricky for how I'm now going to talk to you about development stage, but I'm just going talk to you about a different logo. 10. Development: Whilst Catherine was happy with her logo design, there is usually a development stage involved in a Logo Project. I'm just going to show you this one, which is a different logo project I did for a company called Wet Banana. You've got check out their stuff, they sell really lots of funky T-Shirts and things; It's really funny. These were two designs I showed my client. So this one was a little bit more clean and graphic and then this one a lot more illustrative. But our client wanted to see the first typeface with the more illustrative banana. So I tried that in the development stage. She also wanted to see the text colored in, in some different colors. So we tried that. Kind of getting there now with this one but you would want to see it in one drip. Then we actually finalized it on the drip in different positions, slightly different color pink. It's all very sort of small things, but that's normally kind of a development stage, trying different typefaces, trying different colors. Quite a lot of time you might try and change the scale of something in relation to one another. Just be prepared for development stage. It's quite normal. It's more often than not, there will be changes. I was quite lucky with Catherine, that she just really liked it, how it was. In terms of your projects, you've uploaded your initial ideas and project gallery, hopefully. Now is the point where I'm going to come in or other students and kind of recommend which logo to go for and ideas for development. So we'll be taking that place of the client for this stage. 11. Finalising your files: We're going to go ahead and prep this now and I'm going to just go through all these different ways. I prep this logo for a client, the different file types. I will bring this into a new document and I'm just going to delete those for now. First of all, I will make sure the type is converted to outlines. I've already just did the Katherine a little bit on some of the letters I wasn't that happy with. I'm going to go ahead now and save this as an EPS file. Okay, so an EPS file is good for print. It stays in fact format and you can scale it up and down and basically print at any size, so if she ever wants a van, this would be good for that. Also any business like stationary, basically all print stuff should be in that format if it can be. But then we also have to think about social media. Like a square or a circle format on Twitter and Facebook. I'm going to go ahead now and prep this into a square as a JPEG for my client. This will work well on a Facebook profile image, for example. Just going to move that up a little bit and we'll see that in a bigger picture. Then I will save this as a JPEG. I'm going to make a white background to keep the shape, and then I'm going to go Export as a JPEG. Which is a nick for the name from that one, and navigate. We are going to change that to RGB as this will mostly be used on screen. It can be used in print for small print things, but I'm going to try and encourage my client to use EPS wherever possible. Now we're also going to save this as a PNG and that basically means it doesn't have a background. Because PNG files, if I just show you an example, it's going to basically be like this so whatever background just behind the logo will show up. I'm also going to give her this with the text converted to white so she can put this over a photo or something like that. I won't go through all the versions with you because it might get a little bit boring.But basically a PNG file is really good if the logo needs a transparent background. Because JPEGs don't have transparent backgrounds, they'll always going to have to be on a color or a white or a black background. Let's just go ahead and save that one as well. Those are the three data you can see that transparent background there. I'm going to make that a higher resolution. Just in case she needs it. There we go. That's my three basic versions of the logo that I would give a client, but sometimes clients need other versions or other options. What we also might want to do with this one is I might give her a social media one on the dark green background and also this leaf. I'm thinking of giving it to her as a pure, solid PNG that she can then use on any material that she might want as a watermark. I know she has Photoshop, so she'll be to play around with the transparency and the positioning of that. I think it's just going to be useful if she has that as a separate file. I'm going to go ahead and make all these versions up for her. Then I will come back. I've gone through and saved off some other versions of the things that she might need. I just want to talk to you briefly about Pantone colors. I'm also going to give my clients a Pantone version of their logo. Pantone colors are used and why? You may ask. Basically, how you see this logo on screen will be different to how I see it. Probably only marginally, but all our screens absolutely slightly different and that will affect how we see the color. If we print from our domestic home printers with CMYK inks, that cyan, magenta, yellow and black. Again, because all our printers and color setups where we slightly different. There's no guarantee that everything we print will match up between people and printers. Pantone colors are really useful to ensure that when anything is professionally printed, the colors will always match. Also what you see on screen and what you might see in a Pantone, but don't always look the same so I tend to give the RGB option as well. There's sites online which will recommend which RGB and CMYK matches and up to each Pantone color. So I have the Pantone book and I've looked through to find a good green and a good gray for the text and a really good thing about Pantone books is that you can see which other colors will fit within that tonal range. If you want a tint, you can see that if I pick the 375, if I wanted to go lighter, the 372 is going to be a good one and if I wanted to go darker, I can just move up the scale. That's what Pantone colors are really good for. But mostly it is to really make sure that we get continuity with our colors. In Illustrator, and as I'm using Illustrator, if you need to find your Pantone colors, you will have to have them in your libraries. Sometimes they do come naturally, I think. Here you go. You've got Pantone solid coated and Pantone solid uncoated. I've just turned my box off now, I'm not done doing that. Here I can put in whatever color I want and it will give me that color. Okay. I'm going to go for 375 and that's this one, and then my gray also I'm just going to do that and I'm then going to save off this file again as a EPS for my client. Just so I quickly show you all the files that I've saved off now. Okay, so we've got big leaf EPS. If that's opened up in a vector program, you'll have the outlines, you can scale up, scale it down. We've got big leaf JPEG, which is always going to be on the white background. Then a big leaf PNG so you can see that that's on a transparent background. Then we've got Katherine Lee logo. This is the main one. Katherine Lee logo as a JPEG for her social media and a PNG transparent. This is our Pantone EPS. Somebody's names get a little bit long, but I think it's really important that the client knows exactly what is on this logo. Because especially with this EPS, you can't see the white text. She just needs to know that this is the white text option, EPS, and then there's your PNG and another social media one on the dark green. Now the next stage is, I'm going to build a little brand guideline document to help my client with color palettes, typefaces, and ways to use this logo. 12. Brandboards: Creating a brand board is a good way to show your client how to use the logo and the colors and typography. If you are creating a logo for a big company, a full brand guidelines book might be needed. Now I've only done a few of these, and basically you go into a lot more detail in terms of the space around a logo, logo variations, typography choices, and colors, et cetera. But this is useful for bigger companies as there will be many people using the logo so they can all read the guidelines to ensure that there's good continuity and good practices throughout everything they produce basically. Now a brand board is a much simplified option and often very useful for your clients. Including this in your price package is a nice addition for full brand guidelines but people charge a lot more by the way. Let's take a look at what I've included for Katherine's logo. We start off with just her logo and then a couple of versions. To be honest, these are pretty much the same, but I just wanted to show her on different backgrounds. Sometimes you might have an icon that stands alone, whereas these leaves really do need to sit with the type as a logo. Then we've got color palettes. Now, you don't always have to put in the CMYK and RGB values on a brown board but I did want to include that on this one so I've gone into the colors and given Pantone colors as well. Now we've got a primary color palette here and then I've also given Katherine a secondary palette. It's just useful to have these colors up your sleeve if you want to change things up a little bit and introduce some new colors and then what I've also done is just a recommended usage. This is just a little bit of fun and that shows the size of the color in which colors should be used the most. Coming back to our color boards here, this really helped me come up with this secondary palate. I looked back on this, saw what colors might be working well with the other colors and come up with that based on that, so as you can see that color there is very similar to this one. Then typography, I've given Katherine the name of the typeface, I've used in her logo and then I've also just done a little recommendation here for secondary typeface that she might use for body type. Now in a brand massive brand guidelines booklet, you would go into that in a lot more depth. But here I've just kind of given a little bit of a suggestion of what might work well and complement these typefaces. Then we come down to the graphic devices where I've just given you a little example of how you could use the leaf to break up text on websites and also showing the watermark again, which I did show in the original presentation. I just wanted to use that again and give her an example of if she uses it 25 percent this is the watermark that she'll get. Giving a client something like this is a really nice addition to a logo and it helps them, they can print it out, put it upon their notes board, and just keep referring back to it and seeing where they're at. Now, these might change depending on your client. Let's say you've got a photography client. You're going to want to show an example of the logo on a photographic background, for instance, so don't take this as standard, just do what is going to work best for your particular client and that particular project. But this can just help as a guide. There are loads of these as well on Pinterest so if you do need a little bit more inspiration for different clients then take a look on there and you can see what they've done and you'll see that there's ones where there's lots of different little logo versions depending on the original design. I just think it's a really nice addition to a logo design package. For your project step, why not have a go at creating a brand board. Think about logo versions of primary and secondary color palettes and typography suggestions. Maybe add in a few graphic device ideas as well. 13. Extra work: Extra work. I always ask my clients once the logo is complete, if there's anything else I can help with business cards, social media templates, fliers, etc. Sometimes these things might be included in that first quote, but otherwise always think about how you can add further value for your client. Could you send them a quote for x, y, and z? It sounds silly, but quite often clients have said, "oh, you can do that, can you?" "Uh-m, yeah." So it might not always be obvious to people what you can offer as a designer. So here's a list of potential items that you might want to consider offering. Think about your clients, think about what they might need for that particular business, and then maybe just sort of go in and ask for a few extra. Don't say, "hey, here's everything I can do," because that's going to be a bit overwhelming for them, but just think about what they might need. This step is completely optional, but if you want to expand on your project now, think about how you could take it a step further with some extra design materials. Think about how you can present that to the client. There's some great markets online these days where you can place your design over some nice photography of business cards for example. Upload any extra designs you do and I'd really love to see them. 14. Getting paid: Getting paid. So here's the tricky part about getting paid for the work that you've just done. Now, depending on your initial terms, you might have already asked for some upfront. You might have also said, "I will send over the final files once I've received full payment. " This is a good option if you have literally never met that person or they live the other side of the world. Or you can just go with trust and send off the final files and then ask for the money, which is what I actually tend to do. But please note, a lot of my clients are local. They are people that I'm quite likely to meet at Networking events or a friend of a friend. For those I have no prior knowledge of or live further away, I will usually ask for some money before handing over the final files. I think a lot of this will come down to your gut instinct. But if you feel happier asking for money upfront or full payment before the final logos are sent, then make sure you set all of that out in your original quote so the client knows what to expect and when. I usually state payment within 14 days, I do sometimes have to chase clients, but usually they are on it straight away and they just simply forgot to pay. I just want to reiterate to be super clear of your payment terms in advance and make sure your client is in agreement. 15. Showing your work off: Showing your designs so the client is happy with a logo. Can you now just shove off your fabulous work in your portfolios or on Instagram, etcetera. Now, nine out of ten times, this should not be an issue, I never had a client say no, you can't show my logo. But please always make sure that the logo has actually gone live by the client before you share it on social media. Imagine if they were planning a big launch day and the reveal of their lovely new visual brand identity. But it had already been shared on Instagram about a month ago. Not ideal. Checking with your client, showing your work is a great way to find more work. If you do post something on social media, try to make it into a story rather than just uploading an image with no background to the business or project, what was the brief and what did the logo need to achieve for that client? Whether any obstacles you had to overcome, make it interesting. Make the person reading it, want to work with you without being all [inaudible] and pushy. But showing off your design work is obviously a great way to expand your client base. Just make sure you don't annoy previous clients by doing so. Ask if and when it's okay to share. So let's do this. Why not post an image or two of your projects onto Instagram? Remember, if you're not doing one of the lives briefs that I'd set you, then you will need to check with your client first. It would be great if you could tag me @fayebrowndesigns, so I get to see them and also feel free to use the #fayebrownskillshare. I would love to see your designs going public if you're happy to share at this stage. 16. Conclusion: I really hope that this class has been helpful in some way to all my fellow designers out there. Whether you needed some guidance in a certain area or just starting out and please take what you can from this class. But remember, this is my process. It's not gospel. There's no 100% formula for designing a logo. It's taken me a good few years to work out the best way that works for me. You might need to do the same. Hopefully, this class will save you from making a few of the mistakes I've made and learnt from. I'm a true believer in that we learn from our mistakes. So if you do have a few projects that don't go to plan then don't lose heart, just make note of what went wrong and why, and then learn from that. So my biggest takeaways for you are, in your quote, set out a clear process in terms with the client so they know what to expect and when. Really get under the skin of the business and make sure your logo reflects the brand values. A face-to-face meeting or Skype call is a great way to ensure that. Take time on the inspiration and moodboard stage. This will make the process quicker in the long run. Don't design too many initial ideas. This can take a lot of your time and make the client's decision harder. What else can you do for your clients? Stationary, social media templates, etc. Show off your work this will lead to more clients and enjoy your work. Whilst we might have worked really hard to make a living designing, I always kept myself very fortunate to do a job that I truly love. So try to really enjoy what you do and good work will follow. I'm really looking forward to seeing all your projects so please do make the most of Skillshare and upload in the project gallery. If you like this class, please check out my other classes. I'll post the link in the timeline below to my profile page and hope to see you in another class soon.