Logo Design Efficiently: Create a Logo Presentation in 1 Hour

1. Logo Design Efficiently Trailer: Hey, so there are dozens of course is aimed at helping you grow your graphic design skills and create better logos. However, this course focuses on creating effective logos as efficiently as possible. So if you are an employee graphic designer or free lunch logo design services, this course is aimed at helping you create an amazing logo presentation in only one hour from start to finish, we will create a range of different logos for different industries. And I'll show you the methodology behind logo design, the brainstorming, the creation and the presenting of the logo. For my graphic design services, I offer logo design packages with five custom logos in a presentation, I'll show you how to go from reading the client's brief to a complete logo presentation in again, only one hour. In this course, we won't be looking at brands like Coca-Cola or Apple, but small businesses that as a graphic designer, you're likely to work within your career. Not saying that you weren't work with Apple, but the small businesses will work with include a dog grooming service, cochlea, and in service. Q cooking class, coffee shop, and more. This course is aimed at showing you how to deconstruct a client's needs quickly in order to turn around well-made designs by simply understanding the key components of the brief. This course is perfect for beginner logo designers looking to start their career and get an understanding of the basics of logo design concepts. But this course also evolves for experienced logo designers to help become more efficient in the process of designing a logo. So by the end of this course, you'll be able to create a full logo presentation in only one alpha. This means you can complete more projects per day because you know how to properly understand and execute the design projects. My name is Elliott and welcome to logo design efficiently. 2. Symbol & Text: If you're up to this point, then I just want to say thank you so much for joining the class. I think it's going to be really fun. And I hope that you learn a lot. Yeah, let's have a good time and let's start with the lesson 1. Lesson 1, what is logo design? So logos are basically the text icon or combination of the two use to recognize a business. A good logo should represent the company through the symbol and the font of the text. The symbol on the text both work together to describe the business. Saggy heavy from this company here have designed some of the world's most famous logos, such as he talks about how through consistent viewing of the logo, you will recognize it and know what the company is about. However, this course looks at designing logos for small to medium-sized businesses that often require some form of communicating of what the business offers. Companies like Showtime on National Geographic don't really need their logo described because we'll see them a million times and associate them with the offerings of that company. But a local dog grooming business, for example, that you quickly drive past will need their branding to quickly convey what they offer. I've also said that a logo needs to be appropriate in the feeling distinctive and memorable. And third, needs to be simple. I agree with this, still, not saying he's wrong, obviously. So let's look at a text and I can components of a logo separately and see how examples of the design can alter your perception of the company. Let's look at the symbol first and use the hypothetical dog grooming business as the example. So this logo here is very playful and fund. The business would target families and would offer services probably with a reasonably low cost. Then if we look at this one, you know, it's on the opposite end. A logo like this for a dog grooming business would position themselves as a premium, most likely charging more for their service, targeting wealthier families and individuals. As you can see, the style of the logo symbol will tell the customers or what about the business, why it's important to understand your client's positioning. Hopefully the client will have said this if not, check their website and their social media and hopefully get a quick understanding of their audience. You can call them and have a discussion about this. But this is really about being efficient. So you want to quickly get an understanding for it and start designing. So the next step of my design process, font. 3. Fonts in Logos: So now let's look at the font. So for this example, we'll use a car cleaning service could Johnny's calculating? Once again, the font itself will describe the business positioning and the target audience. So this font here, you know, it's very fun and playful. Probably targeting families and family cause the business would charge a very affordable price for their services. And then this phone here, it's got a more premium filter. And they would charge a higher price for their services. It would target people with more luxurious cars and their customers would probably expect a lot more for their money. So now let's look at Johnny's calculating logo again, but at a secondary Fanta. So this font here shows a more personal field to the company would probably have a few clients and operate at a much higher standard. That would be a premium price with a calculating probably done by hand. And you know, it's not a rush job. This is the basic concept for logo design. A symbol and you have text, sometimes just text, which often makes your job a lot easier. Typically, I find the clients with lower budgets want an icon accompanying the text. However, it also very much depends on the business and the industry that are in. Clothing brands, for example, often don't want any symbols. This is up for you and the client to decide. Now that we understand the process of choosing a style for the logo, symbol, and font. Let's look at what I believe to be the core of branding small and medium-sized businesses. The combining of two ideas. 4. Combining two ideas: As we talked about, a logo explains the business, but what should it actually be explaining to customers? Like what is the business? Hey, comes a bit of strategy. Let's take the dog grooming business again as an example, we'll call it Johnny's dog grooming. When reading the client's email, they might specify what they do. Try to pick up on two main ideas, their service and their POD, which is their point of difference. Alright, so as an example, let's say Johnny wrote this. He says he does dog grooming and then he goes to the client's house to do it. They should be conveyed in the symbol. So the two ideas that we're combining here are the service, which is dog grooming, and that POD, which is it's at the client's house. All right, so the next question is target audience, which is up for the business to decide. Let's say the targeting families and an affordable price. All right, here we have an example of what this logo could look like. It shows the dog and a home, which explains the businesses service. And it's a fun design targeting families. And you know, it indicates that it's probably at an affordable price. So let's do another example of dog grooming, but position itself at a premium price point. This time the service is still dog grooming. Bullets have the point of difference be that it's after hours, like from 05:00 PM to midnight. So this logo shows that it's a dog grooming service, and the stars indicate that it's a night or after hours. Again, the font choices help accentuate the positioning of the brand. So now that we understand the importance of the style of the symbol and the importance of combining ideas in that symbol. Let's look at some fake client Braves and learn how to break them down into the important parts. The next section declines email. 5. The Client's Email: Hey, Good. All right, so let's take a look at some examples of clients e-mails and break it down to the important components and questions that you need to know when designing a logo presentation. What do we need to know? We need to know what is the client's name and slogan as well if that's accompanying any specification. So limitations. Who is the target audience? You know, age, income location. This will decide for the style forth, what is their main service. And then lastly, what is that PRD, that point of difference. So I normally just bring these keywords into Illustrator, so I don't forget them. By the way, Illustrators, the program that I use when designing logos. So let's give us a fake brief to work with. All right, so here we go at Jungle bookstore with the slogan, grow your mind. So the must have that the client said is it has to be green that way it fits the interior of the store. This is already been set up. The target audience is Millennials who like plants and books. And then the service is that they are a bookstore. And I point of difference is that they're a bookstore but also applaud store. So from this, we can already start to get a sense of the logo. This is actually stage one of the logo design process. Reading the client's e-mail and picking out these important words. So this is like a two-minute activity. Collapse will sometimes fill you in with a lot of details about their business that don't really matter in this scenario. Well, for us, remember this one, our logo design process is for designing affordable logo packages. The more you charge the most strategy in time you will spend getting to know and dealing with this business. However, at this stage, we're trying to work quickly and get a, you know, a key understanding of what they do and then start designing. So now that we have the brief requirements, let's look at the next step. Icon research. 6. Icons in Logos: So icon research is basically just breaking down the business into two components. You want to find out the concepts that you can play with. Maybe it's the location, it's the point of difference. It's the name of the person. The name has a descriptor enter or, you know, any ideas that you can really be creative with. Even if the logo you are creating is just text. This can actually be quite a useful exercise because you might want to include an icon in the negative space of the text, or you might want to edit the text in a way that represents the business, you know, a knife company make it sharp or something like that. So it's also good to remember than an acronym for the business can be another idea to combine with another. All right, so let's do some examples with some new businesses. For the examples that I'm coming up with, I tried to be like pretty realistic and use likely businesses that you'll work with or similar businesses that I've already worked with. So the examples we'll be using today are or not today, just in this class. I got a bunch more different ones. But the examples we'll be using a barbecue cooking class and a beach side coffee shop. The business, so the first business is called out of this world barbecue. It's a cooking class focused on barbecued meats. And we want to combine this idea with the concept of being out of this world. I pick this idea because many businesses that I've worked with have a similar name where it's kinda like describing it a bit abstract, like the best in town or extremely affordable, an idea they want to convey it. This is very different to perhaps vegan barbecue cooking class or couples barbecue cooking class. What we're gonna do is we're going to search online and write down different ideas to illustrate cooking class and in different ideas to illustrate out of this world. So for cooking class, we could write something like knife, fork, spoon, have a chef's hat, grid lines or just a grill, sausage or Cutler, or maybe an animal like, you know, sheep, pig or cow. So then for the next one, we're going to look at different ways to illustrate out of this world. So you might want something like planets or stars, comments, and rockets or aliens. So now let's join some of these ideas and see some different combinations that we can get from being creative and just mashing together ideas. The next business that we're going to work with is a coffee shop with a point of difference being that it's located on the beach front. The business is called Coast roast. So we find icons and illustrations to represents coffee or coffee shops. And then we're going to find icons to represent the beach. For this one, we'll do three icons and combine every single combination just to show you how creative you can be when combining these icons. So if a coffee, we have coffee beans, coffee cup, and the acronyms for coffee rise. And then for the beach we have an island icon, waves, and then the sun. With practice and creative thinking, you'll get better at combining iconography. You know, when trying to create a whole logo presentation in one hour, you do not want to spend time trying to force every single idea together like I've done just that. Some will work really well together and you'll find it quite easy to combine them, whilst others might be a bit too difficult. If so, just move on as we are trying to be very clever, but we're still trying to work very efficiently. So combining ideas isn't always necessary, but it's definitely something that seems more personalized. However, it depends on the business. It might seem a bit cheap for some, which I get sometimes depending on how they're positioning their business. So bear this in mind when you're designing. You often see the combining of ideas online. If you search for something like clever logo design or you know, something similar. These work well for inspiration. However, I honestly have a bit of an issue with these designs because they're often unrealistic businesses. And the two ideas that will combine look good. But no business like that would ever exist. These logos look cool and it's really fun to design, however, are really Tao. There's these type of businesses. 7. Logos that I've Designed: So I'll show you some examples of logos that I have made for actual businesses were designed to being combined. Just for quick reference, I have three businesses, but two of them. I'll talk about two today real quick. One is where I work with wildlife Parks and Wildlife attractions. And then the other eye focus on wineries and vineyards and sellers and stuff like that. So I'll show you four examples today. One is called Essay Wales is the logo. And I've combined a whale and South Australia. This is what satisfy this outline looks like by the way. It, It's very kid friendly, it's inviting, it's farmed, and it describes the business very well. So for the next one we got a penguin night tours. The business is called pentanol penguins center and they offer penguin tours at night. And, you know, there's a penguin, the stars, you know, it's penguins. It's probably at all. It's at night. So that works again very well describes the business. It's a bit more contemporary than the essay. Well, one, That's what the client wanted. And, you know, they're not just targeting families, this one. So I think they wanted to be a bit more and contemporary. So this next one is good viscous coffee. Their whole thing is chemistry and coffee. And, you know, I talked to him and he was like, I want to combine the idea of showing that you, our economy described the story he had. It was just a bunch of scientific looking equipment everywhere. Any really took craft into creating the best coffees and the science behind it. So you, he was strong on like wanting to show combining chemistry or like kinda like a science lab with coffee. So that's how I created this viscous coffee. And then for the last one that I'll show you, I worked with a vineyard code, Vikings vineyard. So they're Swedish and they really wanted to show their Swedish heritage. So their brand was called Viking vineyard. And I had to find a clever way of showing in the brand that they're a winery or a vineyard, they sell wine. And that the Swedish. So my idea was to combine these and to have, you know, kind of ship, that of Viking ship that's made out of a wine bottle. So I hope you found these interesting. These are like real-world examples of me doing it. And now that we've got an understanding for that, Let's jump to the next section, which is finding the right font to accompany this new amazing icon that you've created. 8. Finding a Font: All right, it's time to find the right font. This part of the logo design process is very important, but it can be done quickly. I recommend using a free font sites such as deaf on Google fonts, font space or others, type the name of the business at the top and gets grown. So when choosing a fun you wanted style to represent the brand. So even if there is no icon, you would get a quick understanding. In your logo, you want to use maybe two fonts, three out of very maximum, but really ideally keep it at two. Keep it simple. Obviously, other things to consider are, is it legible and it's made small? You don't want it too intricate because it will look messy when it's made small. And sadly, most of the time, your logo will be seen as very small, either on a website, social media, on print. It will be like in the corner. So make sure it can be read when snow. So to illustrate the difference that font makes, let's look at the business name and see how you could view it differently depending on the font. So here we had business coaching in different font. So let's scroll through and find maybe five different funds that you think would work well for the brand. You can also quickly look at competitors or businesses doing the same thing in different countries to get ideas on font choice. All right, so it's time for the next lesson. Let's go. 9. Logo Layout: All right, that was a quick lesson, but we've talked about before in this course. So hopefully you understand what to do there. And now it's time for the next lesson layout. So you've got a great icon and you've got a great font doing the right layout for these, those are super important. Clients wanted to see two main versions of the logo, the vertical and the horizontal. In other words, they want the icon on top and the text centered underneath. And then the logo on the left, on the icon on the left with the text left justified. So finding the right size and ratio of texts to ICANN is very important because the logo might snow, might mean you can't read the text if the icon is much bigger and comparison, this part of the process should be very quick using the aligned tools in Illustrator and having a good judgment on sizing means this really shouldn't take that long. The next step is creating the PowerPoint presentation. 10. Logo Presentation: All right. You've made five original logos for the client. Now it's time to make these into a presentation. I typically follow this structure in my PowerPoints. First page, you have the client's name. Second page, you have your business details and you'll contact details. Then the next slide, Logo 1, the slide after that logo one, add with the mockups. The next slide logo to slide off that, that logo do with mock-ups, so on and so forth. And then the last page, you have your contact details once again. So this layout is easy to digest for the client. It reminds them of who's making the logo. And it kind of acts like a watermark. Kind of not really, but you know what I mean? So you've placed the logos on these slides, and now it's time to add the mockups to each of the logos in order to bring the logos to life. As we talked about these mockups for the logos, really help sell your designs, your designs. Burma and the client seeing these for the first time, a lot of mentioning heavy from back back from before a few lessons ago. He actually talked about how much of the logos they show in that are actually the logos of the companies are using nowadays when the client first sees the logos for the first time, that unlike them, it takes a while for them to get used to the new branding because a lot of the time companies have a carbon branding and they're very like, you know, this is our logo. We've had it for X amount of years. So it really helps to put them in a business card or stationary or whatever. It just helps sell the idea and help them use a bit of imagination of what the logo could look like in real-world application. The next is now to create the actual mockups that I talked about. So for the mockups, Let's Hmm, that's a separate lesson. Let's jump to that. 11. Logo Mockups: Creating the mockups. Mockups are basically drag and drop files where you can have an image sit realistically on another space. I use Photoshop. And this is the most popular program for mockups, which is very useful for me. I recommend having two mock-ups for the clients. Your choice of mock-up was sometimes depend on the business, but to save you time on searching and downloading mock-ups for every client, I recommend finding two or three that are pretty versatile and worked for almost every client in every industry. So a safe choice is maybe like an A-Frame entrance sign, you know, business card, T-Shirt or like stationary, something that every business could use. This will save you a lot of time in the long run, I shy away from objects like mugs because clients might see the logo illness and think this is unnecessary for me. So maybe not feel as inclined to like the logo. Also shy away from choosing a mock-up that requires more graphic design work for you. For example, with stand up banner will require other graphics on the banner since you weren't just have the logo on the standard banner. So now you're designing standard banner or for free as well, which is completely unnecessary and not efficient, which is kind of the name of the course. So here are the two mock-ups that I'm going to use for this presentation. Hypothetically then mockups that I use in most client presentations for the sake of efficiency. Remember no client expects mockups of logos. This is really a nice extra touch that will bring a lot of value to your customer, but also help you out as they will find it easier to imagine your logo being used practically. So the business card and the Tisha click on the file, swap out the logo, hit Save As dropped it in the presentation. It's that easy. So I don't have the statistics on this, but the presentations that I do with the mockup over that a mock-up heavily impacts on whether a client likes the logo or not, is the same quality of designs just with mock-ups used instead. Honestly night and day in the conversion rate of clients picking a logo from the presentation and wanting changes to, I think as graphic designers, we often romanticize the idea of logo design. You know, this sounds really nice and it would make logo design a lot more fun. However, I haven't seen many talks about the fact that you are a business. Time is money. And the quicker you get the work done, the more you can do. This can mean sacrificing quality. But honestly not always. This is a one, our logo presentation for clients with smaller budgets, obviously. So clients with larger budgets, whatever you seem appropriate, will require more time. All right, so now you go five logos with mock-ups for each of them. And there will beautiful, by the way, Fantastic, well done. And now you've got this beautiful presentation. So what's the next step? It's the last step. It's the sending of the email. So first you export it to a PDF, and now it's the sending of the email. So time for the next lesson. You'll never guess what it is. It's the sending of the email. 12. Email the Client: All right. It's the last topic running of the e-mail. I don't have too much to say about this topic to be honest, be friendly, be on brand to yourself and talk about how much you try to meet the needs of the client. This is not about you, so don't write like, I think I did a really good job on these designs. You want to write, you know, I believe that I met your breath and created original brand identities that work well to convey what you're all about. It's always nice to sprinkle in a comment like, I really like your business. So it was very exciting to work on this project. Obviously, don't lie if that's completely outlandish. If it's a tree removal company and you're probably not going to lie. I've always wanted to work with you. So just don't flat out lie to them either and then finish off the email with I look forward to hearing from you. Not I look forward to hearing your feedback. It's a very slight difference, but feedback opens up the discussion to multiple rounds of changes which you obviously want to avoid. Your pricing should stay the amount of rounds of changes that you allow the client. But, you know, because i've I've made the mistake multiple times where in the past I've had unlimited changes. Fun fact, if you tell someone they can have unlimited changes, they will have unlimited changes. So another thing, just depending on your price point, you know, the more you charge, the better it is to present the designs in person or on Zoom. But the lower the budget, you know, this PDF that we made, that will be fine. So boom, you're ready to send off that e-mail. It's only taken one hour to create a full custom logo presentation. The designs are great, they meet the client's needs, and you did it all very efficiently. So I've used this process on dozens and dozens and dozens of times and it works very well for me. So to finish off this logo designed efficiently course, I want to do a full one hour recording of me actually following this process. So I'll get a fake brief and I'll show you how a real example of this works. And it's done in one hour. So get a coffee, sit back, or you could follow along at home and try to do the same brief in one hour as well. So if you choose not to watch the full hour OF MY designing to a brief in the next video. I just want to say thank you so much for watching. I really appreciate it. And I hope you've learned a lot. I really do feel free to do it if you don't. I hope you enjoyed the schools, are really appreciate you watching. I'm Elliot. Thank you again for watching logo design efficiently. And best of luck with your logo design journey. 14. Thank you: There we have it. That is the full one hour logo presentation course. If you made it this far, I just want to say thank you so much for watching. I really do appreciate it. Honestly, I've loved making this course. I thought it was really fun. I'm very, very passionate about logo design, and I'm super passionate about working efficiently and making sure you can do as much in your day is very much as possible. Work-life balance is important if you want to be able to work less hours and have more time to take off. That's great. If you want to work more hours or no, sorry, do more in the same amount of hours as you already do. That's also great. I really think, you know, just working more efficiently. It's just benefits. It's just better. You might be stressed. I was sweaty but I think that's just because I'm recording. And I knew that I can't pause it like I can do when I was doing the full course. The can I just say the amount of times that I said the same sentence or 1000 times to the camera, I was losing my mind. So I couldn't do that now. So I hope you like this. It was really fun for me to make. And if you like it, then please just send it to someone else. Send it to a logo designer, friend, Senator, send it to your grandma, send it to your dog. Just send it to someone. I would really appreciate it. So thank you so much for watching. Send me your designs that you did in one hour. I want to see your presentation. And the first, I don't know how big this is my first Skillshare course. No one might watch this, but safe it does. All right, Are the first quite a few people that sender send their presentation to me. I'm going to write back and give you a review of, uh, you know what, for the first 10, I'll do a video of me reviewing your presentation. So actually record myself reviewing it. I think that could be helpful for you. Maybe. Again, I'm not an expert or anything. I don't have a degree in this. I do have a Bachelor of Business Marketing, but that at where I did a in that class, in that core, sorry, I had a beginners to graphic design. I found that class quite easy. I hope you send me your presentation. I'd find it really interesting and hopefully I can help you out with it. So thank you again for watching. I had a great time. I hope you had a great time and I'll catch you in hopefully my next course. 15. My YouTube Channel: If you like this course, you might also like my YouTube channel, creative juice without pulp. In that channel, I talk about creativity, I talk about graphic design, and I'll talk about advertising. I'm passionate about all of those subjects, and that's what the whole channel is about. I actually have a series where I interview industry experts in advertising and we talk about how to get into the industry. We talk about honestly that geniuses just stop listening to me install listening to them, golden YouTube channel and check it out. And all the other videos are all about advertising and graphic design. And I'm just generally being creative and learning how to be a content creator. So I'll hope you like this course. If you want more of me, I don't know why, but if you do, we'll thank you and go to the YouTube channel, check it out, hope you like it. I'll see you there.