Logo Design Process 2024 - Start & Grow Your Logo Design Business | Adnan Farooqui | Skillshare
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Logo Design Process 2024 - Start & Grow Your Logo Design Business

teacher avatar Adnan Farooqui, Graphic & Web Designer

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Lessons in This Class

    • 1.

      Welcome To The Course!

      2:11

    • 2.

      Introduction To Logo Design Process

      2:28

    • 3.

      Different Types Of Logos

      5:07

    • 4.

      Tools Used For Logo Design

      2:40

    • 5.

      Understanding The Design Brief

      4:07

    • 6.

      How To Conduct Research

      3:36

    • 7.

      Brainstorming Logo Design Ideas

      5:44

    • 8.

      Sketching Logos

      2:16

    • 9.

      Designing Concepts On Adobe Illustrator

      4:14

    • 10.

      Choosing The Right Font For Your Logo

      7:23

    • 11.

      Choosing Colors For Your Logo

      6:19

    • 12.

      Making Final Changes To The Logo

      3:38

    • 13.

      How To Present Your Logo To Clients

      3:14

    • 14.

      How To Create Mockups For Logo Presentation

      4:45

    • 15.

      How To Find Clients

      10:42

    • 16.

      Should You Generalize Or Specialize?

      2:42

    • 17.

      How To Find Clients On Facebook

      3:56

    • 18.

      How To Find Clients On Instagram

      3:56

    • 19.

      How To Find Clients Through Referrals

      1:38

    • 20.

      How To Find Clients On Local Outreach

      3:31

    • 21.

      How To Find Clients Through Your Portfolio

      5:41

    • 22.

      Pricing, Negotiations, & Contracts

      18:31

    • 23.

      Logo Design Project Case Study

      8:15

    • 24.

      Best Adobe Illustrator Tips & Tricks

      7:36

    • 25.

      Thank You & Next Steps

      1:09

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About This Class

Designing logos is very simple. But designing good and professional logos isn’t as simple as it looks. A logo is worth more than just drawing some cool shapes. 

It feels awesome when you get a new client. But that feeling goes away when you realize that you don’t know how to approach the project. This happens when you don’t have a proper design process in place. 

With a clear process, you’ll know what to do EXACTLY in order to deliver that perfect logo.  

This is what I’m going to teach you in this course!

From start to finish, I’ll lay down a foundational process that you can follow for your logo design projects. This will help you work more efficiently & design logos that your clients will love. 

Are you ready to get started? 

Meet Your Teacher

Teacher Profile Image

Adnan Farooqui

Graphic & Web Designer

Teacher

Hello! I’m Adnan Farooqui and I am a Graphic & Web Designer. I currently run a design agency based in Chicago. 

Design is something that has always been my passion and in my design journey, I found out that business is also something I love. So guess what? I merged both of my passions and started businesses around design.

I want to share all of the learnings that I have from these past 6 years in the Design Industry with budding designers just like me 7 years ago. I aim to help designers keep designing and make a living out of what they love doing.

You can check out my Logo Design course on skillshare and stay tuned for more upcoming content from my side

 

See full profile

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Design Graphic Design
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Transcripts

1. Welcome To The Course!: Hello and welcome to the logo design process by grid rule, my name is Adnan photo gear and I'll be the instructor for this course. Logos are very powerful and important for any brand. The healthy audience identify and recognize a brand. It's really important to design logos that catches the attention of the audience. And believe me, it's not as easy or simple as it looks. But if you follow a proper process, logo designing can be very fun and effective. In this course, I will walk you through my entire logo design process and how I agree IT, professional logos for clients, and how you can get your first-line and also maintain an active stream of income in clients. You will learn how to understand your client's requirements so that it would design a logo that is tailored to the audience and business goals. I'll just show you how you can kind of brainstorming ideas for inspiration and how you're going to bring those ideas to life, human sketches. Then you learn how to transform those sketches into digital designs. Next, you'll learn how to find the right color for your local. Will also be working with day to choose the right font for your local. You'll also learn how to present your logo to your client in an effective manner. Next, I will show you how you can find client as a beginner and how you're going to keep a steady stream of lines to make this a full-time income, you will learn how to negotiate and close deals with flags and how you can manage the contracts and payments as a designer. Lastly, I will share a case study about a real try and project that I did. Who's show you how this process actually works? I'm extremely unhappy that you have decided to join this course. Before we begin, let me introduce myself properly. I have been a creative professional for over six years now. Throughout my creative journey, I have worked with clients from all across the globe on Branding, Web and other design projects. When I started logo designing for clients, I used to struggle a lot, but as I progressed, I learned how to work efficiently. And actually you did a proper workflow and process. And this is the exact process that I'm going to share with you guys in this course. I'm going to make sure that the time you spend in this course will be full of practical knowledge and effective tips that will help you become a better logo designer and hopefully make a living doing this. So without further ado, let's get started. 2. Introduction To Logo Design Process: Since you'll be learning about the logo design process, it's important before, so understand what is allowable. Our logo is a combination of text and images that helps the user identify a brand new project. Simply, a logo helps the user to recognize or identify the van. It could be a graphic mark, an emblem, artist symbol. Now, the important question is, via law was important, voice their significance in our lives? Well, logos had been a part of our history for decades. They help us recognize objects, businesses, people, and even communities. In today's world, our logo has become an essential form of visual identification or any business. Logos also help you boost brand favorite reality. They not only help identify our business, but also in building brand recognition. A logo distinguishes a business from its competition. The last reason why logos are important is that they can be everywhere. A logo can redistribute or an advertising, marketing, packaging, products, social media and so many other places. So in a way, logos can help it the market and north of Business, I am products. But there's something important that you need to know. Our logo is not a brand. A lot of beauty professionals make the mistake of thinking that a logo and a brand are the same. They're not. While a logo is a representation of some symbols and text, a brand is much more than that. A brand is a customer's gut feeling about a product or service auto company. In other words, a brown is your business's reputation from the perspective of a customer. My Dino, a brilliant designer and the author of the book, The Brand Gap sees your brain isn't what you say it is, it's what they say it is. Now that you know, the difference between a brown and a local, let's talk a bit about what makes a logo powerful and iconic. Every designer has their own definition of the perfect logo, but all of them have some common touchpoints. A good logo should be simple and recognizable. So will the customer can understand it. It should be distinctive and stand out from the competition. It would be appropriate for the business and the industry. It should be timeless and fresh so that it doesn't look, I'll do two years down the lane. And lastly, which would be versatile and scalable so that it can be used in different contexts or use cases such as unproved and billboards and on different devices. The next time you design a logo, make sure that the logo checks of these quality markers. 3. Different Types Of Logos: Now that you know what a logo is, let's discuss more about logo classification. Each type of logo has a different purpose and use case. We will discuss it in detail in this video. All logos can be classified into one of the following categories. Symbol marks, word marks, monograms, combination marks, and emblems. Symbols are pictorial marks are icons or graphic based lupus. This type of logo represents a brand in a simple yet bold and iconic banner pictorial map logos are often leads by air, by real life objects, or they could be abstract. These types of logos are very easy to remember. Some examples of pictorial marks are Apple's logo, Nike, and Twitter. Pictorial marks are symbols are generally used by established brand who most likely so globally. The reason behind this is that a pictorial logo can be recognized easily without words. Symbol marks are ideal for brands who want to deliver a message to their audience in a quick and clear manner. But bear in mind that such logos can also be misunderstood. The brand is small or doesn't have a very clear target audience. This can cause a disconnect between the band and its audience. Also, if the business expansion in the future to serve different audiences and pictorial mark would not represent the brand. For example, if you're designing a logo for that according restaurant, later on they decide to serve Chinese, Indian, or Middle Eastern cuisine, then the logo would not so well in representing what their brand is about. The second type is word marks. Word marks are text-based logos that mostly consists of initials, monogrammed acronyms are the count, meaning this type of logo focuses on the business's name displayed in customized typefaces. When the brand's name is catchy and memorable, a wordmark is a great way to incorporate the name in the logo. So example, Uber, Google, and Coca-Cola. They're simple, clear, and require 0 guessing from the audience. Another characteristic feature of word mouse is that they're very versatile and they can be used in different contexts very easily. The type face of word marks to accurately represent what the brand is about. Word marks are ideal for use by new brands. Having short and catchy names, they will help them get their name out very easily. But when designing a word mark logo, you try something new or creative, or else it would come off as a genetic local. Monograms is a third type. Monograms are also known as later marks or logos form by using the initials of a company or by just using a single letter. Mcdonald's, edge view and nasa are some notable examples of mono dams. They combine the abbreviated initials, for example, ikea, or use a single letter like McDonald's, mole grams. I have every typographic that can make Lindy are hard to pronounce brand names into easily identifiable ones. These types of logos are best for brands having long and hard to pronounce names, but they can be used for other lines. Also, you can combine the initials of a brand or use the first letter to create a monogram logo. The fourth type is combination marks. A combination mark is a logo that combines a word mark with a symbol, picture or Moscow. It is a very versatile type of logo that can be used in multiple ways. For example, the symbol alone can be used without the text and people will be able to identify or just a word mark can be used and it would still be recognizable. Also, people link your name with your logo because it is incorporated within the local. The best example of this type of logo is pisa of a well-designed combination mark looks good. Even if separate parts of it I used a combination mark could vote for any kind of business as it's very versatile. The last type of logo is the emblem mark, Starbucks, Harley-Davidson, and BMW are examples of these types of logos. And I'm Lamott is a little girl that includes the name of the brand enclosed inside a symbol or a shape. Just late badges or seals, emblems give a very traditional and authentic look with the brand. They are generally used by schools, universities, and government organizations. You would see some exceptions here and there. Those are the most common places where you'll see an emblem. Mock. Emblems have a lot of detail in them, which is a reason why they're quite dangerous. Legibility comes into question when an emblem mark is scaled down, just think of an emblem mug on a business card. It would not look good and will be very hard to recognize. All the details that make the logo special will not be clearly visible. Which is why these days of logos are not very common. I think carefully before you decide to design an emblem local. So these are all the different types of logos. Now, how do you know which type of logo to design for your client? Will a monogram work out or combination mark or should we go with the letter mark? It can be very overwhelming to choose the right logo style. Deciding the type of logo for a brand. You should always be certainly bang its audience and its competition very thoroughly. Don't worry though, we have an entire video dedicated to that. Also, you should explore the different types and not limit your imagination to one. But do keep in mind the pointers actually mentioned about each type of logo. 4. Tools Used For Logo Design: Now we're going to take a look at the different tools that are used for design LOCOS. But before we get into that, let me introduce you to the concept of vector and raster graphics. In digital design, there are two types of images. Vector and raster are actually made, is made up of tiny squares called pixels. On the other hand, vector images are made up of points and lines to create curves and paths. So you must be wondering, what's the purpose of having these two types of major and why is it important in logo design? Well, Rhapsody majors get pixelated and show up. Steak is type of edges which gives it a blurry and bad luck when to scale or Zoom the image. Here I do Nike logos. You'll notice the image on the right side looks pixelated. Image on the left side looks perfect. The right one is irrational image, and the left one is the vector image. Since vectors are not made up of pixels, they don't get pixelated when resize. In fact, Victor images can be scaled up infinitely without having any clarity or pixelation issues. This is why you should always work with vector format when designing logos. There are some special tools for making Vector Graphics. Adobe Illustrator, affinity Designer, and quartered or are the most popular ones. The software that I'll be using throughout this course is Adobe Illustrator. It's a powerful vector graphics tool from Adobe. It's by far the most widely used graphic design software around the world. It has all the tools for creating parts, curves, shapes, patterns, and everything else that you can imagine. Also, it has now become the industry standard for doing any kind of graphic design book, including logo design. But I do have these monthly subscription model can be a bit pricey, especially if you're just starting out as a designer. If you are a student, you can try grabbing this word and discount. But if it's still expensive for you, you can look for other alternatives. And that's where Affinity Designer comes into the picture. Affinity Designer is also vector graphics software, very similar to Illustrator. But the advantage of this offer is that it's very affordable even for beginners. And you don't have to worry about using Affinity Designer as it's very similar to Illustrator in terms of its features and functionality. Also, you can always switch to Illustrator anytime return. Anyways, we won't go into depth about these two design tools as it's out of scope of this course. But I have like multiple resources below that will help you get started with these design tools very quickly. Lastly, I wanted to mention that you might come across many online Logo Design Tools then achieve all even tree. But if you wanted to become a professional logo designer, you should stay away from such tools at any cost. 5. Understanding The Design Brief: So a potential client approached you for a logo design project and he sends you a design brief. What do you do now? That's what this video's about. First, let's talk about water Design Week means our design brief is a document describing the design world that needs to be done. It's usually prepared by the business owner person who is commissioning the work. Design briefs come in all sizes and shapes. They can be formal and needed, or they can be short and informal. Every client you encounter in your creative career will have breathes written in different ways or formats. What's important to you as a designer is understanding the design brief to figure out exactly what the client wants. So here's a design brief that we created for an example project. The company name and the description. We are in upcoming social media platform that lets the users quickly share what's happening around him. With the Arduino YouTube algorithm, users will be able to visualize how many people have shared a video or a squint in their area. Our target audience is primarily people in their 20s. Job description. You must create a logo using the given information. In this brief, you prefer a logo that is adaptable and can be used in different contexts. The logo will be used both on web and print for advertising. Taken to account the company's values and preferences and make sure it will work for the plan. Use cases. We want to convey a sense of activists fun, and you would pull us with our branding. This is how a typical design brief looks like. This one is rather short and precise. One of the reasons you pick the short brief is to show you how to navigate through a brief and extract information that will help you design the right logo for your client. The first thing you need to do is read the brief multiple times you properly Socrative. I want you to forget that you are a designer for a second and look at the brief form, the client's perspective. This will help you understand they're coming from and what are their goals or aspirations with the project? Look for keywords and phrases in the brief. A good idea is to note down the important keywords. What I prefer doing and then recommend you as well, is cleared a must-have list from the brief. The list will contain all the must-have requirements of the client. So let's go back to the brief we saw earlier and try to create a must-have list. I'd recommend you pausing the video and really think before you write down anything. Okay. My must-have list looks something like this. Come in him, squint. Target audience, people in their 20s. The visual look and feel they're looking for us. Fun, youthful, less inactivity. The use cases are web and print. Now we have some information to work with. We had the name of the company that will be used on the logo. We know about the target audience, the visual look and feel. They weren't in the design and where the logo will be used. But that's still not enough. You know, about the brand and what kind of logo div on. But there's still uncertainty about their design preferences. You need more information from your client so that you don't keep bothering them with questions about the project. And the best way to do that is by sending a logo question. Is it a simple document with questions about the client's design preferences? You can download this exact template from the resources section and edited as you like. But you wouldn't want to send a questionnaire to your client in a Word document or PDF format. It's best that you use something like Google Forms where the client can instantly answer your questions. I sinned questionnaires using Google Forms whenever I've worked with length, it's fast and convenient. Also edit and revise the questionnaire for every client. You don't have to ask the questions that are irrelevant and out of the scope of the project. You also don't want to repeat questions that you already discussed with your client previously. The goal of the questioner is to bridge the gap between you and your clients visual language. This will help you later on in the project as you will know what the client expects from you and you will learn about their design taste as well. 6. How To Conduct Research : Once you have enough information about your client's requirements, it's time to move on to the research part. A lot of designers make the mistake of thinking. They know everything about what the client wants and when the client doesn't like what did present, they're confused and often Andy and decline, this builds up resentment between the client and the designer. And what happens is you lose interest in the project and stop putting your best into it. It shouldn't be this way. A lot of this could be easily sorted by conducting research. Research is a crucial part of the logo design process and it must not be ignored at all. It will help you understand what UX design, why to design it, how it will affect the brand. You shouldn't completely rely on the information the client has provided to you. You need to dig in deeper and truly understand the business. Start with answering some important questions about the business. What are they? What is their product? Why do they exist? What are their goals? What personality like? A lot of this information will be provided to you via Klein from the logo questionnaire. It will help you understand your brand and exclusion. Besides this, you also need to research the competition. Tried to understand the target market thoroughly by making a list of the competitors, make notes of what their brand looks and feels like, what kind of visual language they have, and how do they communicate with their customers. Lastly, you need to understand their target audience. You can do this by creating user personas. If you don't know what a user persona is. Here's a short definition. A user persona is a fictional representation of an ideal customer offer business. Bustle nose are usually created from the data collected from multiple people. In a logo design project, you can either collect this data from your client or maybe asserting their competitors. Here's a user personas now aggregate it for the example project we discussed in the previous video. This persona does an excellent job of explaining the ideal customer. You choose, the individual demographics, gold needs frustrations and daily activities. To create a user persona by yourself, you should add the following key information. Introduction, also called the header. This section should contain the name, image, and a short summary of the individual demographic profile head you add the personal and professional background along with the environment. So things like age, gender, ethnicity, education, job, occupation, and devices they use, their interests all go here. End goal. The end goal should consist of information about what the individual wants to accomplish. This is the real meat of the user persona as if the motivating factor that inspires action. In our case, Rachel is to use the screen tap to connect with people around them, day in life. Lastly, adding us an idea of the individual's daily life, I had some narrative to the context on how they would interact with the brand audits products. Creating user personas can be confusing though, because there's a lot of guesswork involved and you don't know if you're correct. It's always best to discuss the user persona with your client to see if you're on the right page on what dating that ideal customer looks like. Now, you're done with the resource, its name to piece it all together. Before you move on to the brainstorming phase, I always create a band research document where I know down all my findings and research. This helps me organize all my research and access it easily whenever I want to. Here's an example of how my brand to source document looks like. You can download this template to create your own research document. You can also find a user persona template in the resources section of the course to create user personas really quickly. 7. Brainstorming Logo Design Ideas: Brainstorming is a very fun process because this is where we explored different ideas and concepts for your logo. It's a vital process that helps you find good ideas to sketch. To begin with brainstorming, you need to first create a mood board where you can save all your ideas and inspiration. You can do this by creating a folder and storing images by saving all ideas as a presentation, or by creating a board on Pinterest. I tried all the methods over the years and finally settled on using Pinterest as it's quick and easy to grow and save ideas. So on Pinterest, you can create boards where you can pin ideas. Pinterest also lead to categorize the pins, making it easier to sort through different concepts or ideas. Now, you might be thinking, what ideas do I save? Well, you can see, if anything, anything that relates to the logo you want to create. But let me walk you through a proper process. First, you should make a list of words related to your brand. If you go back to our example project, we could come up with so many words to associate with the brand. The first thing about this brand is it's a social media app that shows you stories on a map. So there you have it. The first word we have is maps. Now let's find words associated with maps. I'll go ahead and save it for maps, synonyms, and see what we get. Let's see what we have on the first few pages. We can see words like picture, drawing, Atlas, graph, tracing on this list. Let's write down these words somewhere. We have the following words that are associated with maps. Drawing, picture, compass, graph tracing. The adverb is we're going to design the logo is a video-based app. Let's search for some words associated with the term video. As you can see, there are tons of synonyms that we can use. I really like the words Record a broadcast. I, I hope you're getting a drift of how you can find word to associate with the brand. Let me show you one last example where we will pick the word. You follow the same process as we did before. Or you can come up with your own words or synonyms. For example, when I think of you, I get terms like enthusiastic, fresh, active, draw in my mind. Let's go with these words and create our list. We have three main words, maps, we do and you'd, and we have come with the following word associations for each term. It's time to find some visual ideas for these terms. So let's fire up wind test now. And so it's where ideas that relate to maps. You can search for anything like maps, design, map icons, map logo to find ideas. I search for map, I found some really cool icons and designs. This one in particular looks interesting, so I'll save it to the board I created. Pinterest also gives you the option to save up in, in this section of the board. Since our world doesn't have any section, let me quickly create one called man's. There, you have it up in a save. Now let's look for some more ideas. I feel like we can find some great ideas for the term atlas. So let's search that. Wow, these are some really nice images and can serve as inspiration. Let's save this. Now you can easily find a visual images for terms like maps and videos. But what about youthfulness or fresh? Let's look at some ideas for these terms as well. And search for the term you'd full logo to find some inspiration. And you can see there are so many great logos. They have bright colors and the fonts are bored. They feel energetic. So this gives me an idea of how I can design a U2 learn French logo for the app. Squint at it. Go ahead and save some of these men collecting ideas. You don't also have to fully rely on the design brief or what the client wants. As a creative professional, it's your job to think outside the box to come up with unique ideas that your client would not think about. For example, a nullcline tree. We saw that the client wants a logo for a social media ad. What does the social media app do? It helps build communities. This was not mentioned anywhere in the brief, but it's very apparent in this case. When you take your time to think about the clients and business, you'll observe many things that were not covered in the brief before. Perhaps it could be because the client things there'll be apparent to you or the don't think it was necessary to mention it to you. Regardless of what the reason is working your mind just a little bit will help you uncover new ideas for what logo to design. In this case, we realize that we can find ideas around people and communities. So let's do one last search on Pinterest. Before I wrap up this video, Let's search for community icons to find some visual imagery that relate to people, connections, and communities. As you can see in the reserves, we have different images. This one on the left is people holding hands. That's nice. Then scrolling down you can see images of people together holding each other united and knowledge. Let's save some of these ideas to our board. Now, a couple of important points. You don't have to always search for only logos when looking up ideas. Tried to find anything that relates to the brand. For example, if you're designing a logo for a boating company, look up images of boards and how they look like. The closer you are to the source material, the easier it will be for you to come up with original ideas. Another thing to keep in mind is not to discard any ideas during the brainstorming phase. No matter how crazy the idea is, just save it. You can always discarded data. The goal of the brainstorming process is to collect as many ideas as you can. Lastly, there's no limit on how many ideas you can collect. Collect as many ideas as you can until you feel like you have enough. Once you feel the creative juices flowing in your body, telling you that you can sketch some really cool ideas. You can stop. And then you can move on to the sketching part. 8. Sketching Logos: Now that you've completed the brainstorming process and have some basic ideas in mind for the global, let's bring these ideas to life on paper. The best way of putting your ideas out of your mind is by sketching them on paper. Pen and paper provides the most flexible and fastest way of getting your ideas out of your brain. By sketching your ideas, you need to make sure of a few things. First, always use a dot matrix notebook, just like this one for drawing. As it has these squared or drips that didn't help you make the shapes in a uniform and clean manner. You can find these notebooks on stationary or on Amazon. For drawing smoothly, I recommend you use either a pencil or a micron pen, like this one. You can find these on Amazon quite easily. I've added links to some of these in the resources section. Now, since you've already done brainstorming and research, you might already have some ideas in mind. So take your time and think about those ideas before sketching them. This will give you a good mindset for the sketches. I usually say it in a calm place for 45 to 60 minutes to get my creative juices flowing. I also set a target of drawing as many sketches as possible in that particular time. So just sketch out ideas without focusing on any details. Also drawn by multiple variations of each idea. This will take your mind to new places and you can explore them later on. Your main purpose is to get everything out of your mind as quickly as possible and not worry about the small details. Also, if you look at these concepts I sketched, you'll notice that I have added some words to describe them. I do this because it lets me know my thought process while I was sketching that idea. As you can see, these sketches are just free hand and of the main advantage is that pen and paper have no boundaries. With human face ID using digital tools, you can express yourself easily and be quick with this process. So I've sketched a couple of ideas for the squint local. As you can see, these relate to maps, videos, and communication in general. Now, not all ideas who sketch will be good. And that's fine. From all the ideas you sketch, one of them might have the potential to become an iconic logo. Isn't that amazing? And in the next video, we will transform these rough sketches into digital form. 9. Designing Concepts On Adobe Illustrator: The next step would be converting your sketches into digital designs. We will be using Adobe Illustrator for that. And I'm going to show you the entire process in this video. I assume you already know how to use Adobe Illustrator. But if you are new, let me walk you through the software real quick. First of all, this is how Adobe Illustrator looks like when you create a new document. On the left sidebar, you have the tools such as the Move Tool, the Pen Tool, The Shape Builders, etc. There are additional tools such as the align and transform tools, right at the top panel over here. And on the right side here, you have the colors panel, the layers panel, and also the other tools. When you select an element in Illustrator, it will show you different options at the top panel. These options change according to what element you have selected. For example, if I select text editor and I will have options like the font, size, alignment, and other settings. At the topmost, you have the menu bar, where you have all the various menus, which we won't go into much detail, but you can always explore them on your own. Let's have a look at a few important tools that you will need while designing logos. The first one is the selection tool, which selects any element on your art board. Right below that is the direct selection tool, which selects the path of any object you click on. This tool is used for editing or changing the anchor points of the shapes and objects. Next, we have the pen tool, and this is the most important tool of Illustrator or any other vector software. Using the pen tool, you can draw just about anything that you then imagine. It creates these anchor points when you click and you adjust these anchor points to change the curve according to your needs. Learning to use the pen tool is not very easy and needs practice to get better at drawing shapes using the pen tool, you should try out this really interesting game. It's called the Bezier Game. And it helps you practice and get better at using the pen tool. It gives you different shapes to draw with guidance. Okay, back to Illustrator. Now, next up is the shape tool where you can draw some standard shapes like a tangle, ellipse, triangle and polygons. And then you have the text, brush, eraser and gradient tools, which are pretty self-explanatory. Lastly, there's another important tool called the Shape Builder tool right here. The shape builder tool is a very useful tool to combine and cut shapes according to your needs. Now, I think you're very familiar with the interface of illustrator and some of its tools. But if you've never used Illustrator in your life, I highly recommend you watch some tutorials or courses. You can learn it from the resources link under this video. Coming back to our sketches now, we will first Kathy sketches using a smartphone camera and then we'll export the scanned files to your computer and then add them to Illustrator by dragging and dropping them just like this. Now, you can go ahead and scale these sketches according to your liking. You can also reduce its opacity of it. So you can see it, but it doesn't come in the way of your work. So my sketch image is in place. Now I love this image by pressing Control plus 2 or Command plus 2 on max. Now, for this logo, I will first draw the boundaries using the shape tool. I will draw a circle just like this. I will trace the other parts of our sketch using the pen tool, just like so. Click on the starting point, decide an anchor point, drag the handles and adjust the curve and continue until the shape is complete. I'm using as few anchor points as I can make my shape a lot more uniform. And also it will be easy for me to edit it later on. You can also draw these parts by using shapes. Now, we have converted our first sketch into a vector file. I will go ahead and draw vectors for all the other sketches that I like. That's how easy it is to convert your hand-drawn sketches into uniform, good-looking vectors. 10. Choosing The Right Font For Your Logo: After designing your logo on Illustrator, it's time to work on the typographic. Picking the right phone that blanks with your symbol is important for a good logo. Typographic is a very intimidating subject for new designers. But I'll walk you through the basics so that you can be confident when working with type. The first thing you need to know is the different types of typefaces. But before we even jump into that, I'm sure you will be wondering what the heck a typeface even is. You use forms, right? So what is a typeface then? A typeface is a particular set of glyphs that share a common design. For example, Helvetica is a typeface. Now, many designers, even professional designers, have a misconception that fonts and typefaces are the same thing. Well, they're not among designers. The word typeface and font I used interchangeably, but they both have different meanings. A font is a particular set of glyphs within a typeface. For example, Helvetica bold is a form of the Helvetica typeface. There's nothing wrong with calling a typeface or font. But if you want to become a professional designer, it's better to understand and establish the distinction between the two. Okay, so back to typefaces. Typefaces are classified into many different categories. For the sake of this course, I'll focus on only three types. Serif typefaces, san-serif typefaces, and script typefaces. Serif typefaces. Serif typefaces are classic and original light bases dating back to the Roman times. They are named serif for the little feet or stroke at the top and bottom of the letter forms. Today, you see them everywhere, mostly on print copy, such as in books, magazines, and newspapers. Some examples of popular typefaces include Baskerville, Playfair, display, and Times New Roman. Serif type faces are not very common logo design, but recently they have become very popular. These typefaces are very suitable when you're designing an elegant, our classic local. If you look at some popular logos, you will see that they have a serif typeface. For example, if you take a look at the Rolex logo or these are our logo. These iconic logos have serif typefaces and look so beautiful. The second type, san serif typefaces, typefaces without serifs are called sans serif type faces. Compared to its sedative counterparts, san-serif typefaces are much more decent and convey a sense of simplicity and functionality. Some examples of these typefaces are Helvetica, Futura, and Sofia pro. Whenever you look at a san-serif typeface, you'll see how the lines are smooth, clean, and simple. This is one of the reasons why serif typefaces are used a lot in logos. Chanel, Google, and Microsoft are examples of brands that have sans serif typefaces in their LOCOS. Recently, many popular brands have redesigned their local and switch to san-serif typefaces. The most notable examples are Google, gap, Burberry. So why have these big brands with great logo switched to a simpler san-serif typeface. Well, san-serif typefaces work well on multiple mediums and contexts. Not to mention they look more modern. If you compare the old and new Google logos, which one would you prefer? For me is definitely the new one. You know why? Because it's clean, modern, and simple. It works well on our devices that come in all sizes and shapes. The last but not the least, our script typefaces. Typefaces that mimicked handwriting, called Script typefaces. The best example of this is the Pinterest logo. These typefaces feature curves and swashes in the letters, which makes it look handwritten. As you can see from these examples, script typefaces are great for locals. Many big brands like version, Coca-Cola, and Wendy's feature script typefaces in their logos. When working on logo design, you can use a script type if you want to add some personality or life to the logo. Now, let's talk about where you can find good fonts for your logos. There are many resources out there where you can find both premium and three forms. So here's a list of websites where you can find great fonts. You can find a more detailed list as a PDF in the resources section of this video. Let's go back to the squint logo and find a good form for it. I'll first look at Google forms, the best resource to find three points for your project. As you can see, I'm on the Google Fonts website and there are so many great forms. One great thing about Google Forms is that you can type your text and preview it live while browsing for forms. So let me go ahead. I'm types grant before we bow. So forums. You can also change the form size and apply filters to narrow down your search. For this logo, I feel that a sans serif typeface would fit well with our design. So you click on the categories button and de-select all the other categories. Now, Google Forms is only showing a san-serif fonts. I also want to see how the forms will look in bold style because that's what I prefer for this local under the font properties. And he built a thickness slider and set a preferred thickness. This much looks good. This font looks good. It's bold, looks energetic, and will blend with the symbol we designed earlier in the video. So let me quickly now notice want on my laptop and then we'll play with it on illustrator. Okay, so I downloaded the font and we're back in Illustrator. As you can see on my screen, I have multiple forums. Add it to my art board. I write the comforter form we picked from Google Forms, but I also had many other good forums in soil that I want you to experiment with when working with logos, it's always best you try multiple forms with your logos before you pick one. So I have all these forms and now we're going to narrow them down to one form. I like these ones in particular. So I'll move them to a new art board or you can delete the ones you want to discard. I prefer keeping them on my art board so I know the options are tried. So I have selected these three forms. Let's position these next to our logo and see how it looks. As you can see, these ones blend really well with our design. Let's try different variations of positioning. Our symbol. You can move your symbol at the top or left, whatever you prefer. But most of the time positioning the symbol on the left is the safest way. Also keep in mind is spacing between yours and we'll add the text. You don't want to space them out too much, that they look separate. And you shouldn't also space them to close, otherwise it wouldn't look clean. You can also play with the spacing while experimenting with type. The end goal should be to create an eye-catching and readable logo. 11. Choosing Colors For Your Logo: It's time to add life to your logos by adding some color. Working with colors seems quite easy, but if you want to design professional logos, there's more to it than just adding any color you like. When designing a logo for a business, you need to take into account their personality, look, feel, and audience. I know this may all seem too overwhelming to you. The best way to start and understanding color is by understanding which psychology. Do you know that men and women see the current read differently? Or that people can get afraid of certain colors. This is all because of how our brain conceives colors. Color psychology is a fascinating subject, as many different studies had been done by different scientists all around the world. Some interesting findings revealed by these studies are colors affect people's behavior, mood, and stress levels. Colors influence 85 percent of purchase decisions. The, and the most important fact for a logo designer like you, the logo color is the first thing a customer will notice when they see your brand. Every color in existence is associated with different meanings, emotions, moods, and behaviors. Here's a color wheel chart showing the different meanings and moods of colors. As you can see from this chart, each color has been associated with different meanings. For example, people associate the color blue with trust, honesty, and authority. Companies like Dell, HP, Intel, nasa, Walmart annually. We use this color as it relates to their brand and products. They want their customers to trust and believe in there perhaps. Another example is the color red, which is quite interesting as it can have multiple meanings, right, is oftenly associated with anger, danger, or destruction. But on the flip side, it is also associated with energy, excitement, and passion. That so many food brands like KFC, Coca-Cola, and lays use this color. But it's not just food brands. Companies like Netflix, YouTube, and a tendu also use these colors. In both cases, the red color works for these brands to incite the feeling of excitement, passion, and energy in their customers. Let's go back to the logo we were designing for squint. Which color do you think fits best for this brand? The brief mentioned the logo should be energetic, fresh, and active. So the color red or orange works best for this brand, right? But the color blue or green could work well too, as they represent trust, honesty, and growth. This is the point where many designers get confused. Judging by color psychology, different colors might be suitable for your local. But you don't have to completely rely on color psychology. It should simply serve as a tool in guiding you on which colors could work for the logo you are designing. At the end of the day, you should always consider the brine and its audience first. When choosing the right color. You should ask yourself, what virtues or feelings do you want to highlight in your logo? You should look at the personality traits of the audience, of the brand, the user personas we created earlier in this course will be very useful and understanding the brand's audience. Also remember that you don't have to pick only one color for the logo. You can always mix and match colors in your logo and add flavor and diversity. Let's add some colors to this logo. Now, for this demonstration, I'll be focusing on this concept only, but I'll also be adding colors to the other concepts to see how they look. First, I'll experiment with shades of blue Android to see you it blends well. I could either pick a color directly from the cola because in Adobe Illustrator, or I could find some color inspiration. Just like we collected images during the brainstorming process, you can find pig and save colors the same way. My go-to tool for finding color inspiration is Adobe colors. Here you can find great collab islets or combinations. You can either enter the color name to find inspiration or entered different moods or emotions. Let me so is the term energetic to find color ideas. And as you can see, there are some red and orange color. There are also combinations of red and blue that always look good. You can either save these color in your liability in Adobe colors or download the entire ballot as an image. Here are some more tools for finding color palettes for inspiration. So after searching for color ideas, Here's what I found an added these colors in Adobe Illustrator. Now let's apply these different palettes and see which one looks good. Ideally like this combination with the logo. The logo has enough contrast and also represents the brand's personality. Well, I'll just make some small changes in the color to make it perfect. Let's experiment with the shapes to find the right fit. You can do this by changing the RGB values like I'm doing right now. Or there's a handy tool called 0 to 255, where you can just enter the color code and it gives you all the different lighter and darker shades of the color. You can also use this tool to create your own color palette. So back to our logo. Let's add this shade of color and see how it looks. Perfect. I think we found the right color for a logo. Now for the word mock, many designers use pure black. It's not a bad thing, but I recommend using either grays or dark shades of your primary colors to avoid creating a very sharp contrast. In this case, we have this color in our logo symbol. Let's find a dark shade of the color and apply it to the wordmark. The reason I do this is that adds more harmony and don't feel like separate parts. When important thing when working with colors is that you should try different colors and experiment with them. Also, take a look into what the competitors are doing. It gives you an idea of what the audience in this industry likes or is used to. 12. Making Final Changes To The Logo: At this stage, your logo shapes and colors must be finalized. But giving the logo some final touches before delivering it is a crucial step. Once you have settled upon a font and color for the shape, there are a few things you should look for and make sure they're properly done. Let's go to US quaint logo. First of all, I will make sure that the curves are smooth and clean. Also, try to find any irregularities in your shapes. You can do this by switching to the outline mode on illustrator by clicking the command plus Y key or Control plus y if you're on Windows. After fixing the curves and any irregularities, I will use the grids and rulers to check the dimensions of the shape, to check if everything is in proper size or not, make sure your logo is uniform. I'm proportionate. After we finding an adding fine details with the shape, it's time to work on the wordmark. You can adjust the kerning accordingly based on what looks the best on glocal. You can also play with the spacing according to your liking. Once you're done, convert the text to outlines and fix. This is not necessary, but it gives you more control over the text. For instance, you can play with curves or individual letters. It allows you to customize the font and add some personality to it. But only do this if you have a good knowledge of topography and if you know what you're doing, after I have perfected the shape and the text, I will zoom out a bit and adjust the spacing and layout of the two with each other. As mentioned in the previous video, you have to keep just the right amount of space between the logo and the text. I use rulers to see the alignment of the elements with each other and then just look at them to see if they look good visually. Your logo should be optically balanced. It will take some practice, but as you work more and more with logos, you'll learn how to find the sweet spot between the two. So your logo is now ready, and the last thing left is to export it. I usually create multiple variations of the logo. For example, a colored version, a grayscale version, and all white version. I also save these versions in three formats. The first is AAAI format, which is Adobe Illustrator format. The other, our PNG and JPEG formats. There are two types of colors you can export your logo and CMYK and RGB. Cmyk is used for print and RGB is used for them according to the use case of the logo. And you can export them in these colors. Depending on the logo, you can have multiple styles of the logos such as vertical position, horizontal position, or icon only. So you should export all these tiles of the logo. Here I have two style and I will export them in all colors and styles. Before I end this video, I have a quick tip for you. Always export your logo highs into a well organized folder. This makes it easy to manage and handover the logo to your plank. Once all your logo files are organized into a proper folder, you can deliver the file to your client. The best way to handover the logos is by sending them in a zip file. But if your client prefers any mode of communication, then you can follow that. The end goal should be to ensure a smooth handover of the logo to your client. And that's a wrap. I hope you found this course valuable and you learn more about the logo design process. Just remember, you don't have to follow this exact process. This course is to help you understand how a typical logo design process works. You can always create your own process and workshop, whatever works for you. At last, I'd like to thank you for taking your time to watch this course. If you have any questions, you can always message me on my social media or e-mail me. Thanks for watching and have a great day. Goodbye. 13. How To Present Your Logo To Clients: One of the most important parts are designing anything is to present it in the right way. No matter how good your logo is, if you present it poorly, it will not impress your client. Let's say you've designed a couple of good logos. Now the first question is, how many concepts to present to your client? The answer is simple. You should present at most only three concepts because you don't want to confuse the client. Let's say you're out in the market buying a new television. You have a slight idea of what you want, but you don't know exactly what you want. You ask the salesperson to show you the best models. He shows you 10 different television sets and says All of them are the best. How would you feel? You'll probably feel confused and unable to make a decision? That's called a choice paralysis or analysis paralysis. It's when you're presented with so many choices that you're unable to make a decision. Now, imagine if this happens to your client, you vote hard to design the best LOCOS, But to ruin it all by presenting too many concepts that they end up choosing none. That's why it's important to present only a few conceptual your client. Now, you have to make a choice for the client from those tens of logos and pick the best 23. After that, you have to showcase these concepts to them and get feedback. Usually, I prepare a presentation explaining the meaning, process and details or the logos. This helps them understand your perspective and the meaning behind the logo. It also helps the client understand the purpose of the logo and vortex times for when presenting a logo. You should also show real-world applications such as our business card on the website in print, et cetera. This helps decline understand how the logo would look in real life. You can do this by using mockups. There are plenty of great websites to find mockups. Here are some of them. Lastly, how you present your logo is also important. The best way it is in person or on call. It helps you observe their reactions and response more clearly. Another benefit of present degraded person or on call is that you can quickly respond to their feedback and answer any questions you have. But if that's not possible for you, you can just turn over the presentation to them directly. The presentation you prepare for the logo should also include the design gold. This will let the client know that you have designed a logo with their grief and goals in mind. Also tried to structure the presentation in a way that tells a story. This creates a huge impact on the overall presentation and how they perceived the logo. So you need to structure their presentation properly and preferably in a form of a story. There's a free presentation template in the course resources section to help you create convincing logo presentations. Lastly, if a client is having difficulty understanding the concept, eight your time and explain it to them. Show them your perspective and thought process so that they can understand the logo. In some cases, you might also receive negative feedback. And even the request for revisions. When this happens, Don't take it personally. Take notes on what the client didn't lie and what changes they want. The more you understand what digit in life, the easier it will be for you to work on any changes. In the end, your client knows their business better than you. 14. How To Create Mockups For Logo Presentation: In our logo presentation video, I talked about using mockups while presenting a logo to your client. But why are mockups so important? Well, using mockups in your logo presentation is very beneficial. The first reason is that it helps you present your work in a professional manner. There's a huge difference between presenting your logo like this and like this. As you can see, a mock-up makes the logo look more real, which brings us to the next benefit. Mock-ups helped decline. Understand how the logo will look like in real life. Showcasing a logo on a business card, coffee mug, billboard, or packaging will allow the client to experience what the logo will look like to their customers and how it will impact their business. This will greatly influence their decision. And in most cases, clients loved the logo when the seed on a mockup. So how do you create logo mock-ups that will impress your clients? I'll walk you through my process and I make a few mock-ups for this point logo. The first step, and I can't stress this enough, is to find high-quality mock-ups for your local. There are thousands of mocker templates out there, but almost half of them are generic and low quality. If you wanted to showcase your logo in the best way possible. I recommend using only and only high-quality mockups. I usually look for mockups on vital elements. It's a subscription-based service and is very cheap compared to other alternatives in the market. I always find high-quality data sources here. Whenever I need them. You can find a link to Envato Elements and a few more great resources for finding mockups in the description. Since Quinn is a social media app, I'll try to find some relevant mockups. Always remember to use the 11 mock-ups for your projects. You want to make sure your client connects with the logo the moment they look at democracy. And that is why using a mock-up that is relevant to their business is important. So was Quinn. I'll pause. So it's one, some smartphone mockups to showcase what the logo might look like when a user opens the app. As you can see, these are some really beautiful mock-ups. Ideally like this one, as it has multiple scenes for the mockup. Let me quickly download this mockup. Now, let's search for some of those ion mockups as they would be relevant to us when up, again, here are some great mock-ups. I wanted to pause here for a moment and mention that you should always use multiple mockups of the logo. You want your presentation to tell a story and using mockups or different applications can help you do that. So I've downloaded a few mock-ups. Now, let me import them on Photoshop and edit them. The mockups are now open in Photoshop and isolated them one by one. You'll notice that each mock-up comes with proper layers and sometimes even instruction on how to use them. That's one of the advantages of using high-quality mock-ups. In the first mockup file, you can see there's a layer in Photoshop saying your image here. Now, depending on your mockup file, it could be different. But in general, you'll find a layer in your mockup file with a similar mean. Double-click on that layer and it'll open the smart object file. Here. All you need to do is just drag and drop your logo. You can delete or disable or their lives on this file so that only your logo is visible. Once you've done that, you can resize accordingly and save the smart object and come back to the main file. You will see that your logo file is successfully added to the mockup. Now, you can adjust the logo size, color, and other settings. Many mockups come with options to tinker with the brightness colors or the background color. In our case, this mockup file has the option to change the background color. I can change the background color to something similar to our brands. Global colors. Do keep in mind that there's enough contrast between the background and the mockup element. Once you're done, click on the File menu and then export your mockup files in high-quality. That's how simple it is to create mock-ups for your logos. I created other mockups for my logo here, as you can see on the screen. Now, when it comes to adding the mockups to your presentation, it's important to tell a story through your mockups and give some context to your mockups by adding text and this idea mockup. In our example, I've added some text saying a user opening this Quinta app on their smartphone. This tells a story and it helps decline and understand how the users would interact with the logo. In the logo design presentation template, you will find examples on how you can add and structure your mockups in your presentation. 15. How To Find Clients: So you've learned how to design logos derived with, but how do you find clients who will actually buy your logo design services? In this video, I am going to answer the same question and teach you how to get your first line and build a steady stream of lines. Let's get started. In order to get your first client, you'd have to work pretty hard because you would need to make people trust you that you can design a good logo that represents your brand well. And to be honest, this will not come easy. Even when I started looking at the Designer, it took me awhile to line my first ever climbed to solve this problem and help you get your first-line easier? I have one golden D4. You see, it's very difficult to make a stranger trust you and pay you for designing logos. But what if you could design logos for people who already know you? That's right. To get your first client. Usually reach out to your friends, relatives, neighbors, teachers, or anyone who has their own business and need a local reach out to them and let them know that you can design a logo for them. And you want to improve your skills by working for them. And you can even offer to work for free. I know many design experts are against working for free. But when you're new with no experience, working for free on 2x3 projects can be very beneficial for you in the long-run. Working for free can help you gain experience, learns something new, and most importantly, get some exposure in the industry. But if you don't want to work for free, then the best way of getting your first five clients is to offer your services for very minimal rates and make sure that you give your best to those profits as they can help you build your portfolio, which in turn will land you more clients. Okay, so you've got your first few clients. What's next? How do you build a steady stream of clients? You can always look for clients in your acquaintances. But that's not a long-term strategy to rely on. You need to build a steady stream of clients for your business. The first place you should look for clients is on social media. And to be more specific, Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram. Let's discuss each of these in detail. For Facebook, you should optimize your profile innovate so that anyone who looks at your profile knows what you do and what you offer for this, post your work on your profile and be active on it by sharing stuff about your work and services. Also, keep connecting with new people every day. Another effective way of finding clients on Facebook is by joining groups. You can join all kinds of groups on Facebook. May even find potential clients. Don't get me wrong though. You don't have to join logo design goods because those would simply be flooded with designers like yourself who are selling something. What do you need to do is look for active groups where you can find people running their businesses. For example, you can join a local restaurant owners group and then connect with people on the group, get to know them and eventually tell them about the services you offer. This will definitely learn you quite a few lines. Just don't try to directly sell yourself as Dag will definitely get you blocked. Moving onto LinkedIn, the same story repeats it. Optimize your profile, innovate that whoever visits your profile knows what you do. Keep it very simple and straightforward. Connect with a lot of people, communicate with them and engage in their posts. And remember to connect with people who can potentially be your clients. This is because linkedin has a limited number of connections you can have. So adding a school friend to your profile is not the best idea. Instead, you want to connect with people who would likely be interested in buying your services. For example, you can connect with Project Manager, sea level employees, startup, business owners, et cetera. Those are the ideal type of people you want to connect with and potentially close deals with. Lastly, coming to Instagram. Besides having a professional business profile here, described very clearly in your bio, what you do and how you can help others. If you have a portfolio, do mention it in your bio link. Regularly post your work so that you're active on Instagram. Follow others and engage with their content. Basically, do the things that you will do on Facebook and LinkedIn. Getting clients from Instagram would be a bit more challenging as compared to the other two platforms. But you should always try it as you don't know what will work for you. The next place to look for clients will be freelance back forms like 50 or 99 designs, Upwork, et cetera. You can sign up for these platforms and create your profile there. Based on your profile, you can find clients who will be interested in working with you. Fiverr has a system where you list your services and the charges up front and clients looking for those services can get in touch with you. 99 designs has a different working model where customers post their projects as contest and designers can submit their entries for the contents, the most appealing designed to decline remains and is given the amount decided for the contest. Work, on the other hand, runs on a per file basis. Client scores their projects, and then hire freelancers having appropriate skills. They also hire freelancers directly just by looking at your profile and reviews. If you want to learn about any of the techniques and platforms we have discussed, you can go to the links provided in the description and dive in deep. Let's talk about the next and one of the best ways to get clients, witches by reference. Yes, you can get a lot of clients who refuse. This works because people get referred by people who have already worked with you and like your work. So the chances of finding clients who they're flows are much more effective than any other method. This is why I recommend working on two to three projects for free when you're just starting out. This can create a chain of efforts and helps you climb up the ladder of more hyping clients. Trust me, this works like a charm. Most of the clients I get right now are to refuse. You can also try local outreach. You get onto Google, Yelp, social media, et cetera, and search for local businesses in your city. Then you search for their contact info and drop them on message. To take this a step further, you can also look at their current logo and prepare a presentation on how you can improve their logo and branding. You can even show your presentation in person. This method is also very effective and easier because there isn't much competition when you tried to find local plants. For example, you can search for a list of vehicles in a certain look at their branding. And if you think you can make an improvement, add them to your list, reach out to them and let them know you can help their business through your design services. Another way of finding new clients is by creating a portfolio of your work on platforms like dribble and Behance. You can even make your own portfolio website to showcase your process and book. You should do this once you have done at least two to four projects so that you have something to show on your portfolio. Having a portfolio also helps in convincing applying to say yes. By shading your portfolio with a potential client, they can see the quality of your work. And beside, if you're worth their time and money, also, Portfolio platforms like dribble and the hands even have their own dedicated job like phones to find clients. So having a portfolio here opens another source to find lines or your freelance business. The last method, attending conferences and events happening around you are the world. And I'm not just talking about design elements. You can add in any event you want where you think you can find potential fans. Such events are a great place for networking and finding potential designs. If you don't want to go out during COVID, well, you can join a virtual event, which are quite popular these days. The advantage of virtual events is that you can join a lot of such events from the comfort of your home. Take your time, planned everything, and implement all of these ways. I hope you find a lot of great opportunities through these methods. So what's next? You have a couple of good projects on your portfolio. And you have had your hand at all the methods and also found some good plans. What comes next? You need to keep getting these lines consistently so that you can make a stable career out of this. In order for you to get clients consistently, you have to be organized and have a clear process of finding. Thanks to do this, make a list of all declines and their projects in detail. Write down everything such as the date, price, and declined source. Once you have this list, half of your work is already done. Because it will give you a clear overview of what methods work the best for you and what didn't analyze what claims help you make the most money and where they came from. Looking at this list will give you so many ideas and answers. All you need to do now is doubled down on the matters that book for you. Focus less time on the methods that didn't work well or at all. This will help you optimize your plane flew and help you get climb steadily. But what if you're still not getting any clients? Well, if you're facing any problems, you should definitely join the grid room community on Facebook and share your queries there. It's important to remember that there is no secret hack of getting lens. You just have to network and connect with new people, talk to them, and try to help their business in the best way you can. Before you move on to the next video, I want to mention one more thing that most of the designers forget. Always and always. Keep your portfolio updated. So it gives your best works in the best possible base and regularly update your portfolio. Site. A habit of updating it every two to three months so that you have something new visual case every time. That's all for this video, I will see you in the next video, which is probably the most important video in this course. 16. Should You Generalize Or Specialize?: By now you have an idea of how to find lines for logo design projects. But I want to give a complete action plan that you can implement right away. Before I going to do that, I quickly wanted to mention something. When you're a new designer, you will most likely take on any logo design project if the price is right. And there's nothing wrong with that. But if you want to establish yourself as someone highly skilled, I would recommend you to specialize in my industry. Here's what I mean, a sort of designing logos for all kinds of businesses. You can pick one specific industry and just focus on that. So for example, if you can specialize in the tech industry and work only on doors and projects for startups and tech companies. Or you can specialize in the health and beauty industry and work only with beauty brands, magazines, and influencers. The bottom line is specializing or niches down to one industry can help you establish yourself as the expert in light industry. But you might be thinking, if I niche down, I'd be losing 99% of all the potential science. When you're right, when you niche down, you'd be losing a lot of potential chains. But here's the thing. Being a generalist means there are a hundreds over the logo designers out there who can do the same job as you. You may be a good designer, but besides that, you're not doing anything special to your client. On the other hand, if your niche down and specialize in one specific industry, you'll be recognized as a go-to designer for that industry. Sure, you will still face some competition, but you'll still be considered better than all the generalists specializing in one industry also means you can charge more money for projects because you are an expert in that industry and not just another logo designer. And once you become established and it'll be new industry, clients will come to you for projects instead of the other way around. Now, specializing in one specific industry is in very easy and takes time and effort. But if you're starting out today as a logo designer, I would still recommend you to niche down. The next question is, what name should you choose? The answer is simple. What kind of logos? Like designing the host? What makes you feel the most creative and working on logos. If it's designing luxury style logos, you can focus on specializing in designing logos for luxury brand. If it's soft and delicate logos, you can focus on health and beauty brains. Just think about various strengths lie in logo design and big data. But if you're still confused during Wudi, in the resources section, you'll find a list of 100 niche ideas that you can choose to specialize in. But what if you don't want to specialize? Well, there's nothing wrong with that. You can work on all kinds of logo design projects too. If you haven't traveled choosing an edge, you can work on a few Leonard Logic guys. First two, it's figured out extends and specialties. 17. How To Find Clients On Facebook: Facebook is still one of the best platforms to find clients for logo design projects. You can find clients who are willing to pay $1000 or even more for low bools. Before you put any effort into finding clients on Facebook, you need to have a good favorite profile mentioned in your bio that you are a designer opened operations. If you're targeting a specific industry, you can also mention that here are some profile bio ideas that you can use for your Facebook profile bio designer, helping early-stage startups with logo and branding services. I'm a designer open to work on logo design and branding projects. Logo designer open to new projects. Message me for a free consultation call. As you can see, all those bios are very simple and short. And that's how you should keep it. See what I did in the last video. I added a call to action so that if any potential clients check your profile, they load that you offer a free consultation. This increases the chances of them reaching out to you for your help. Besides your profile bio, you should also have a clear profile picture showing your face. A professional headshot will help you appear as a professional who is reliable and knowledgeable. Once you Profile Setup, start joining Facebook groups relevant to your industry. Target client is early-stage startups. So it for startup founders and click on the Groups tab. As you can see, there are so many groups of startup founders and business owners. You can even find local groups such as this cropped off learned in startups. Before blindly joining every group you see open a few groups in a new tab and take a look at them. You want to look at two things. First, the number of words in the book. It doesn't matter that the group has lot of members are not. As long as there are people posting in the group, it's a good indicator that the group is active. You can find this number by clicking the Andi about that in the group and scrolling down to the activity metrics, you'll find information such as the number of host today, both plasmin and total members. Second, you need to check the quality or the post. For example, if you look at the poles of this group, you will see that it's full of spam and self-promotion. There's no one commenting or engaging with the post in this row. You have to stay away from such groups as they are a complete waste of time. On the other hand, take a look at this group. It's quite active and there are people looking for all kinds of work, such as developers and designers. This is the kind of group you should be a part of. I hope this gives you an idea of what to look for when searching for Facebook groups. Now, find at least three to five groups, but you can find potential clients. You don't have to be a part of a hundreds of groups. If you find only do 23 perfect groups, you can easily find clients here. Well, finding and joining groups, especially to keep track of them. To make things easy, I have created a sheet for you where you can keep track of groups you joined. Now that you've joined these loops, it's time to interact. Don't directly start promoting IT services by sharing any links that will get you band instantly. Instead, interact with other members of the group. Post helpful comments in the group and try to showcase your expertise. Don't think of these people aspirin in Chile giants. Think of them as people who need some help. So everyday spend 10 to 15 minutes engaging with people in all the groups you've joined. Make long thoughtful comments that will help the members of the group. Besides coming thing, you can also post in these groups by sharing some helpful advice or tips. This will help you establish yourself as someone knowledgeable. Your goal should be to establish yourself as the go-to designer in that group. If anyone needs any design help, they will reach out to you. They will tag you in both asking for help. They will message you. Once you keep doing this for the next ten to 15 days, people will start noticing you. And when that happens, you'll get messages from people who would be interested in your services. This way, you can find potential clients and find projects to work on using Facebook. 18. How To Find Clients On Instagram: Instagram is a super valuable platform for designers. Finding lines on Instagram is somewhat similar to Facebook, but an Instagram finding clients is all about outreach. The action plan for Instagram is super-simple and very scalable as well. Before that, it's important to have a proper profiling. I already covered this in the pipeline, so overview video, but let me cover it real quick again. First things first, you need to have a proper bio that describes what you offer. Include a call to action in your bio to make people take some action. Here are some bio ideas that you can use for your Instagram. I help beauty and fashion brands with branding and logo design hit me up to discuss your project. Designer working with td for new startups on branding and logo design projects. Dme for a frequency of rotation. Do you need a professional logo, DME? You can find more by ideal in the resources section of this video. Now that we have a By already start posting your work on your profile. If you're a new designer, we know times I'd recommend you to work on some practice projects and post those to your profile. You can write three practice project assignments in our course, I highly recommend you to work on those to build up your portfolio. Now, it's time for the real book. There are countless ways to find clients on Instagram, but my favorite is using the reverse hashtag technique. With this technique, you basically search for hashtags and find accounts that might be interested in your services. Let's say you're a designer working on with beauty and fashion brands. So I look for some hashtags relevant to my niche. Let me search for hashtag hairstylist. As you can see, there are so many hashtags for hairstylists. I'll click on the first, as it's the biggest. Now, you can either browse books in the dark post tab or the recent time. Now click on any posts you like and check out their profile. For example, I found this profile, as you can see, it's a pretty good profile with lots of followers. And from the profile picture, it seems that they have a logo. Let's say I want to offer my design services to them so that I could redesign the local. I'll simply send them a message saying, Hey there, I just came across your profile and love your posts. I'm a designer who specializes in working with beauty banks and design projects. And I feel like a brand's logo can be improved a lot. If you're interested, I'd love to discuss some of the ideas I have or your client's logo and identity. Would you be interested in a quick 10 minute call? In many cases, you'll also come across businesses that don't have a logo. For an example, here's an account upon by searching for the hashtags and could candles in India. This account sells handmade kindness and it seems like they don't have a logo. All you need to do is reach out to them saying, Hey, did I came across your profile and loved the work you're doing. I noticed that you don't have a logo for your brand. I'm a designer who helps small beauty banks with design projects and feel like a brand could do a lot better with the logo and branding. Scented candles are very popular and with the proper logo and branding, you can grow your business much faster. Let me know if you're interested in a quick coil where I can share some of the ideas that have for your branch local. Thanks, always try to keep them as short and to the point in your message, you have to mention how you can help them and give them a call to action, such as scheduling a quick coil or chat. This technique can also be used for finding local lines. You can search for local hashtags such as with passion, New York makeup artists, London street food to find local businesses in your idea and reach out to them. So it's going to at least 30 minutes every day finding account that might be interested in, in your logo design surveys and reach out to them. You can directly message them or e-mail them if they have mentioned it in their bio message 22 2035 accounts daily. And you'll get at least three to four responses from people who would be interested in. 19. How To Find Clients Through Referrals: I also talked about how referrals are helpful in getting new clients. If you have already worked with a few clients, you should definitely ask for refunds. The best way to ask for reference here by sending an email to your previous clients. Here's a template that you can follow. Hey John, I hope you're doing well today. I'm so glad to hear that the logo I designed for your brand, it's helping you generate more business and customers. It makes me so happy that you're working with you. I was able to make a significant impact in the growth of your business, giving you look identical. You, I wondered if you know any friends or colleagues who are looking for any brand name or logo design help. I would love to help them out and achieve the same results as you've got it. Thanks. This is just an example of how you can reach out to an existing client for it as root, you can find motoring mode temperatures in the resources section of this video. When asking for referrals from previous clients, it's important that you keep the email short and simple. Be direct about what you're asking, which in our case is electrode. Depending on how many clients you've worked with in the past, you can use this technique to find at least two to three new clients or even more. Here's your action plan for finding new clients to make a list of all the clients you've worked with in the past. Analyze and see which one had the best and happiest experience working with you. You might want to reach out to those clients first. Send your email to these clients. If you don't get a response, make sure to follow up. Doing this will surely help you get clients. As I get most of my clients through their friends. Also, you don't always have to send an email to ask what it actually, based on your relationship with the client, you can either call them, are directly message them as well. 20. How To Find Clients On Local Outreach: Reaching out to local businesses around you or even in other cities and countries is one of the most effective ways of getting clients. You can reach out to them in many different ways, including e-mails and calls. The benefit of doing this with businesses in your city is that you can physically go to them and have a meeting. Meeting physically automatically takes the trespasser stage way up. Compared to e-mails and calls, humans connect so much better than person, and thus, it increases your chances of closing the deal more easily. Let's first find people to outreach to. Firstly, you need to make a list of potential clients in the city or region that you're targeting. For example, let's take my 32-bit New York. Now, I have to make a list of local businesses in New York. I prefer to do this in a Google sheet depending on the nature selected for yourself. You would look for businesses working in that niche. For example, I will consider my image to be beauty and spot, to find businesses in the beauty and spark category, I will go on to Google and search for those bars in New York or beauty salons in New York. Now scroll down a bit and go to the snippet from Google businesses and click on View all here you will find hundreds of witnesses operating in your niche along with their exact location and contact details. You can even go to their social media or websites to take a look at border grinding looks like and if you can actually help them improve it. If you feel it's a bit competitive, then you can narrow your search down even more. For example, beauty salons in Brooklyn, you just have to make a list of these businesses with their contact details and other information. Also to make it a bit easier, go to the second, third, or even the night vision of the search to find businesses that aren't as popular right now and can use your head as the one on the first page would mostly be very well-established, but you never know. So keeping the well-established one on the list won't do much harm to other than Google. You can also go to Europe and other similar alternatives in your country. Do the same searches as we did on Google and put the eligible ones on the lesson. This is a repetitive process and you need to keep adding to this list when you're done reaching out dividends already on the list. Okay? So you have a list of potential clients and their details. What next? How do you contact them and convince them before reaching out to them, I would recommend you to look at their business first and do a little bit of research. I know it would be a tedious task, but this gives you an edge over the others when you contact them. If possible, you can even prepare a presentation or video highlighting how you can help them out and how your services will help them grow their business. The more effort the scene putting in, the more chances you have for closing the deal. Now that you're fully prepared to go and get that line, Let's look at all the ways you can reach out to them and what should be your action plan for this? You can send them an email with all your selling points and the researcher data about how your services can fix their problems. You can even attach the video of EPT in the email. The second way is to call them and give them a free consultation. The third, and in my opinion, the best way is to go to them and meet them in person along with all the stuff that you have ready for them. The main idea is to build trust and show them that you are genuinely trying to help them solve their problems and grow their business. You should not come off as a salesperson or someone who is too desperate to make some money, help people genuinely and provide them value. And the money will follow automatically. 21. How To Find Clients Through Your Portfolio: Your portfolio plays an important role when you're trying to get new clients. It helps you focus all of your best work and the processing for low for designing. This makes the client understanding skills and thought process very clearly, your portfolio should show who you are and your personality in a unique way. You should also display all of your best worlds. Also, you don't need 50 projects in your portfolio. You just need to do three good projects and actual case your best qualities. There are three ways of making your portfolio as a designer. Behance, Dribble. I am personally portfolio website. Behind is the best place to find design inspiration and also one of the best places to showcase your work. You can create projects where you can showcase your work and your process behind the work. In order to get clients from Behance, you need to first put your best projects on your Behance profile. Your profile should be regularly updated and it should clearly state what you do. After creating a profile on Behance me. Sure you're active on the platform. Keep interacting with people on their profile and also interact with others on Behance to the more you interact with people, the more are the chances of people taking your book out. If you provide as active, you will start getting views, likes, and comments on your projects, which will boost your projects and they will be displayed more and more people. When this happened, clients looking for designers and Behance will have a higher chance of stumbling on your profile. And if they like your work, they can directly message you on Behance or any other links that you have added to your profile. Another way of getting clients from Behance is to the Behance your platform. You will find all kinds of designs or on the platform, and you can search for your specific design field. You find 11 jobs. You can filter through the job types. If I'm not looking for a full-time job, you can filter out part-time jobs and freelance jobs. If you're just starting out, you can even look for design internships here. You can also filter these jobs by countries, cities, and create a field. Dive in and find the perfect roles or projects for yourself, and then apply for them. If you have some good projects on your profile, I am sure you will be selected soon enough. Let's move over to dribble. Now. Dribble is somewhat similar to Behance, yet it's a bit different. Dribble is more of a social media for designers than a portfolio platform. Anyways, you can still get some pretty amazing projects using driven to talk hosting and being visible and drivel, you will need an invite from someone already using drivel. People often give away invites on Facebook groups and even driven. Once you've invited, you can pause and you post will be visible to people searching on dribble and on the inspiration and explore operators. Follow these same steps to make your profile on Dribble, keep it clear, and put your best work on it. However, driven is a place where you can even upload all of your work and make it as a social media handle for your designs. The key thing to get people on the profile is to make the dribble shorts as catchy as possible. As you can see, all of the top designs are very catchy and click worthy. You should post regularly on drivel to get some traction to your profile. The sweet spot, according to me, is blue shorts will leak. You can go lower or higher depending on himself. Put in a description about the design for each short, include your process and the requirements to if possible. Also, I include my social media links and ways to contact me in my description as well, uploading shorts on Dribble, making sure you include as many delivering tags as you can. Because these diets help you rank for those terms on drivel. Hence, bringing in more views on your shorts. For bringing in more activity on your profile. I have a few pointers for you. Post regularly. Follow other designers like dashboards and comment on them. Keep liking and interacting with others daily. If you do all this, you will start noticing that you're getting more and more activity on your post to. There are many clients who search for designers on Dribbble and you can even move them. So we're a little behind. People who like your work will start conducting you from your profile. And rebel also has a job platform. Just like Behance. You're going to find projects fitting your profile and apply on them. You were needed rebel pro subscription though, if you want to apply for freelance jobs, even if you're not looking for clients when we portfolio, you should always update your portfolio as it plays a key factor in showing decline your work. Apart from double and behind, you can also create a personal portfolio website for showcasing all of the work in one place. As I mentioned before, your portfolio site or display a unique character and all of your best foot. Keep the messaging on your website very simple and clear for clients. Show them what exactly you can do for them and how it will benefit them. Here's a great logo design portfolio, website, iPhone, user niche down on your website to give your visitors a feeling that is specialized in that specific niche and hence making you appear as an expert. One thing that you didn't do on your site to get more juice from it is offering of reconsolidation call. You can put up a calendar for that and take their emails so that later on you can reach out to them. This is also called call to action, but I have to give you a disclaimer before you start building your portfolio website. The website won't magically bring in more clients. For that to happen. You will need it to get traffic on the website, which is a tough task for bringing traffic. You have to promote it to different channels such as social media. And I see you. I won't go into that as it's out of scope here. So that's one thing you should have in mind before starting with your portfolio website. 22. Pricing, Negotiations, & Contracts: It's time to talk about pricing, negotiations and contracts. This is the most important video in this course, as it will help you grow your business as a freelance designer. This is the part where most designers fall behind because they lack the skills of pricing they were, and negotiating with clients. But as a student of this course, I can guarantee you that you'll have to go through this because the strategies and tactics you learn in this video can take you from charging $5 to charging $1000 or even more for locals. Isn't that amazing? So when it comes to pricing, the first thing you need to learn is different pricing models. There are many different pricing models out there. But in this video, I'll talk about the three main pricing models. First one is oddly base pricing. This is one of the most simplest and common pricing models for freelance designers. As you might have guessed by the name you charge by the hour of work to do in the hourly pricing model. So if you're working on a logo design project and it takes you two hours to design a logo. And your hourly rate is $30. You will get paid $360 for designing the logo. Sounds good, right? Wrong. This is a terrible idea. Underpricing is divorced method to price your design for. The biggest reason is that that hourly pricing you're undermining evolved tremendously. You're assigning a value of time, do your skills, which is wrong. Let me give you an example. There are two UX designer who have the same RDD, I'll say $50 and R. Both of them are working on a logo design project. First designer is numeral design and is an experience. And the second designer, on the other hand, has quite some experience working on a logo design projects. The first designer explaining two hours in total to design the logo. He gets paid $1100 for the project. The second designer takes only eight hours to design the logo. He gets paid only $400 for the project. You see the problem now. The second designer who is way more scale or the job gets paid less even though his work is better. His only crime was he completed the work faster. This is why pricing is not good for your business. Whether you're just starting out or have some experience designing logos, you'll never be able to charge what you're worth with this approach. Your work will always be bound to the amount of hours you work. So never and I mean, never, ever charging hourly rate for designing logos. This brings us to the next pricing model IS project mispricing. In project-based pricing, Utah has a fixed flat fee for the project. So a client asks you to design a logo and you tell them you charge $700. That's basically what project-based pricing is. Now, on the surface, this pricing method looks cold, right? Well, project-based pricing is definitely better than hourly pricing, but it also has some demerits. With project-based pricing, you can often underestimate the amount of effort it will be required to design the logo. You basically pull up fixed price out of thin air by making assumptions on how much time you'll have to work on the project. And based on those assumptions, you code a prize to the client. This way, you're undervaluing yourself. But project-based pricing isn't that bad at all. If you know the scope of the project and exactly how much effort or time it will require. You can use this rising method for pricing your products. But you'll probably not use this method to, when you learn about the next method. The last pricing strategy that I use and I recommend to everyone else, is value-based pricing. With value-based pricing, you charge your client based on the value they get from the work you do for them. Whenever you work with a client, they're not buying your time. They're buying a solution that can help them with their business. And this solution can be worth way more than what you're getting paid for. Let's say you design a logo for a client for $300 using project-based facing, this logo in turn, help declined generate over $10 thousand in revenue. How would that make you feel? I would feel pretty bad to be honest. And you probably would do. You would say to yourself, My logo, help them make over $10 thousand and I only get a $100 for it. That's not fair. This is why In strategies like early and project-based facing is a bad idea for your freelance design carrier. So similar to project-based pricing, value-based pricing is also a fixed fee, but with value-based pricing, you charge based on how much value you bring to your client. So if a project brings that line, $10 thousand in revenue, you can charge 20% of that, which is 2000 dollars. And most of the clients would definitely be ready to pay $2 thousand to make $10 thousand. The biggest advantage of value-based pricing is the cost Daniel client base has nothing to do with how long or how much evoke. When using value-based pricing, your mindset always be that your client is charging you for the value you bring, not the actual work you produce. But there's one thing you should know about value-based pricing. It requires a lot of estimation of effort and reward. And that becomes difficult when designing logos, because it's not always easy to quantify how much profit or revenue a low Googles and Late for the business. In cases where you have clients who are unable to give you a quantifiable estimation of how much a logo would help them. You'll have to stick with project-based pricing. But in most cases, you can use value-based pricing to set your rates for a project. So these are all the different pricing models. And know what you're thinking now, how do I set my rage for logo designing? How do I know what to charge? I have a really helpful strategy called the MAR strategy, where MAR stands for minimum acceptable rate. This strategy will help you determine the minimum amount of money you should charge your clients for your work. Remember, Nadia, MAR will not be your actual rate. It would only serve as a reference for pricing Each project UK. Let me show you how you can calculate your MAR. First, you'll have to calculate your expenses. You must be thinking, what do my expenses have to do with my logo design rates? If you see this, we want to grow as a freelance designer, it's important to take into account all of your costs and expenses. This could include both your private and professional expenses. Don't worry though, we haven't advanced sheet where you can enter all this information and it didn't help you calculate your MAR. You can download this sheet from the coils is also section. So calculate all your expenses, anything such as your internet fees. So fair cost, subscription costs, and other utilities. This will help you determine how much money you're actually spending every year. After calculating your expenses, calculate your sales fees and taxes. Now, if you're just a shorted, you may not be paying taxes. But if you're working with clients, you are most definitely going to pay a sales fields. This seals we can be in the form of commission from a third party platform, such as a book or a transaction fee from payment gateways like PayPal. Calculating this number will give you a clear idea of how much money you'll be losing and sales fees and taxes. So far, you've calculated your expenses, taxes, and sales. Please use these numbers to calculate your break-even point. In simpler words, break-even point is the number where your total costs or expenses are equal to your revenue. This is the amount of money you'll have to make just to break even based on how big or small this number is for you, it will surprise you. It certainly surprised me when I first calculated my breakeven point. The next step is to calculate how many days you work in a year. You should calculate this as precisely as possible. Whether you are a student, full-time freelancer, or someone with a day job, calculate your working days based on how many days you'll be available for your logo design work. Here's a simple chart that you can use as a reference. As you can see from this chart, you can remove days for vacation, weekends or holidays, et cetera. You'll find this chart in the sheet as well. After calculating your work days in a year, calculate the hours you work daily. If you don't have a proper set of working hours, tried to come up with an approximate number or make a log of what you do every day to determine how much time you actually spend working as a freelancer, you must also consider the time spent personally and clients communicating with them, administrative work and all other business works in your working hours, let's say you worked with many days in a year with six hours of daily. Based on this information and your break-even point, you can easily calculate your hourly rate. Do keep in mind that this is not your MER. This is just the amount of money you need to break even. To calculate your MER, you have to add a profit margins off about 25 percent your minimum hourly rate. This will give you your minimum acceptable rate. This is the rate at which you'll be able to break even and make some profit while designing logos. Of course, this rate isn't ideal, and it is just to give you an idea of how much money you should charge. As I already discussed earlier in this video, you should follow value-based pricing and avoid hourly pricing. But we calculate the MAR because it gives you a starting point for pricing your services. With value-based pricing, your rates will be different for each client. Let me now show you how much to charge lines based on their business, project scope, and other factors. The first thing you need to do is ask them about their goals. Have a clear and honest conversation with them about why they want a logo and what they want to achieve from this project. But responds like our logo is outdated, so we're updating it isn't enough anymore. You have to dig in deeper and ask them questions about their business. Ask questions like, why do you think you need a logo? How will the logo impact your business? What will this logo help them achieve your business goals and targets for your business? And how will a logo help you achieve those targets? These questions will help you get to the core of their problem and understand what they want. Sometimes clients won't know the answer to these questions. In such cases, you have to be patient and help them find an answer. Once you have some understanding of their goals, discuss the metrics of the success for this project. How would the client defined if the logo is helpful for their business? Again, I just fonts like the project is successful. If we like the logo isn't what you should be looking for. Try to get a quantifiable metrics for success. I know this is going to be difficult as it's not easy to quantify the success of a logo. But you can ask questions such as vary with the logo be used. How much impact with the logo have on your business? Suppose the line says, the logo will help us grow and social media. Then the followup with the question, how much when Zack growth affect your business, will it help you bring more traffic or sales to your business? If yes, then how much quantifiable metrics such as engagement, customer satisfaction, since revenue can help you determine how much the logo can help you apply it. Defined one or two metrics based on which the success of the project will be due to mind. And use this data as a means to propose a price to your plane. Do not forget your MER here. Propose a price considering your MER, I'm devalue your vocal bring to decline. For example, let's say your MER is $50 per hour. And suppose it takes you 30 hours to complete a little well-designed project. So your MAR translates to $1500 per project. And based on your conversation with the client, you found out that your logo could bring an additional $18,500 in revenues to their business. Now, you have two numbers here. Your MAR of $1500 per project and 18500 of revenues your work could bring to your client. At this point, you have to decide how much you should charge so that it's fair to you and your client as well. If you calculate 20 percent of 18,500, that's $3,700. That might seem a lot, but it's pretty reasonable given the value you're generating for your client. So should you paste $3,700 for your clients? That depends. If you are a new designer with no experience, then the client will not pay you that much amount of money. But if you have a good track record of working and can demonstrate your expertise, we apply and then you probably wouldn't have a hard time missing declined for $3,700. Your instincts will also help you determine whether the price for the project is fair or not. Ask yourself, do you feel confident charging this much amount of money? Can you deliver on the value your client is expecting from you? Is your pricing unfair to you or your client? At the end of the day, the MAR and value-based pricing are just tools that will guide you to price your work more appropriately. But it's your confidence in your skills and your cell that will help you determine the exact price usually charged for each project you take, regardless of how much money you decide to charge to your client, you won't be able to convince them if you've waited to negotiate. There's a quote by just two carriers that goes like this. In business as in life. Don't get what you deserve. You get what you negotiate. So how do we negotiate with clients to get them to say yes, and most importantly, get them to say yes to your pricing. The first tip I have for you is to drop the price first. Because whoever makes the first offer is usually effective in negotiation. And there's a strong science behind this, which is called anchoring. Here's what it means. Whenever making a decision, people strongly favor the first piece of information they receive. The orient, their subsequent evaluations around this information, and it anchors how far their final decision can go. When you drop the price first on your client, their reaction mostly reveals if it's in their budget range or not. If they get shoved in surprise, then they will most probably expecting a lower price on top of dropping the price first, you should also drop a price higher than your client expects. Because then even if the client negotiates and asks you for a lower price, it will still be closer to your quoted price of what you actually wanted to charge. So here's an example. You want to chart with $1000 for a logo design project. And you quote a price of $2400 to your client. Now, even if you lower down the price, you can still be able to charge at least $2 thousand or something closer than that. The next piece of advice for you is whenever you're quoting a price, always quote a price range instead of a fixed number. So instead of saying, I will charge $1300 for the project, say this project will cost you around 1700 to $1300. This gives the client an idea of the price range you work in and gives them a clear signal that this is as low as you can go. And if you didn't notice here, say the bigger number first, by, because of the anchoring effect. During negotiations, a lot of designers make a mistake and try too hard to sell themselves. But you shouldn't be doing that at all. Always remind your clients that they are not buying a product or service from you, but an investment for their business. This is very easy to do, especially if you're offering a logo design service, remind your client that a logo is not a commodity or a product that can be purchased and change often let them know the importance of a logo and the impact it makes on the business and its customers. This will help them recognize that they're investing in their business by getting a new logo. And other helpful tactic during negotiation is offering multiple packages. This can help you charge more and give the client options so that they choose to work with you. Lastly, always be helpful and empathetic during negotiations. Don't act and behave like a soulless person who's desperate to sell something. Try to understand your client and their problems and any hesitations they have on working with you. The more genuine and open and helpful you are, the easier it will become for you to connect with the client. Once the client is ready to work with you, the next step is to finalize all the nitty-gritty details of the project before you send over the design contract and begin your work, it's important to finalize the following details. The project cost timeline, revisions, deliverables, and payment timeline. The first four are pretty explanatory, but it's very important to be clear about the payment schedule. Usually, you should always ask for a 50 percent upfront payment before the start of the project. This ensures security and shows whether the client is serious about the project. After finalizing all the details of the project, go ahead and create a contract. I know it sounds like a boring book and a waste of time, but you should never take any freelance design project without signing off on track. Always begin your work after the contract has been signed by both devices. Creating a logo design contract isn't rocket science at all to today. There are many tools out there that can help you create a fully retail contract in just minutes. Some of the tools I use and I recommend and go. Web Apps, FreshBooks and Canva. With tools like AI and go and wave apps, you can create and save your contract directly to your client. Whereas when they're designed to like Canva, you can only design an export the contract. You will then have to send the contract manually regardless of what tool you use, here are all the things you should include in your contract. You can find a logo design contract template in your course materials that will help you create your own contracts. Very fast. Project details, deliverables, process, project summary, Payment timeline, project terms, ownership rights, confidentiality, termination, acceptance and signature. Make sure you're as specific as possible in your contract and use a clear language to avoid confusion and ambiguity. Although a logo design contract should be detailed, make sure it's still short and concise. A contract of around four to five pages is fine. Anything beyond ten pages and you have to cut some things out. Once you sign your contract with the client. Do mention about the upfront payment so that they know the Voc won't begin until the first peer mentors made. That's all about pricing, negotiations and contracts. I know there have been a lot of questions you might still have for pricing your work. If that's the case, I highly recommend you to join the gradual community that you can ask any questions and good fast responses from me and other designers in the group. You can ask how much you should charge for a project, what to include in the contract or anything you want to ask. The doors for this community are open for you. And I would love to have you in there. 23. Logo Design Project Case Study: So I've shared my entire logo design process with you from concept to presentation. But let me share a case study from a real life project that eyelid to show you that this actually works, you will get a clear idea about how I got the client their goals and however worked on the project. The client we're talking about here is a real estate investment company based in the UK. They help people invest your money in real estate in order to get the most growth possible. The name of the company is fair investment group. I got this client through a reference from one of our previous Lane, who also happens to live in the UK. They liked my work and referred me to this new client. This will a complete branding project, but for this course, I will only talk about the logo design process. For this project, their goal was to have a logo that resonates well with their target audience, which is mostly people who want to invest their money. They wanted to convey a sense of luxury with the brand, so the customer gets a sense of exclusiveness. They also specified the logo to be in luxury sheets like silver, gold, maroon are green. They were very clear about their user personas with me and what audience they wanted to 1000. And so what we know now is that they wanted a very modern and luxurious branding without losing the feeling that they are an investment company. Coming to my approach for this project, I started conducting brainstorming and research to soak myself in with their business and customers. I looked at several logos from similar businesses in the industry to understand what they do and what their customers like. In this project, I spent a lot of ours just looking at Pinterest, dribble, and Behance. I made collections of the best ideas of good frame. I also had a look at some later associations for their initials. And they had an idea about merging the initials into one shape. And the next step was making a mood board for the inspiration I just collected. I personally made my mood board on Pinterest. But you're going to make it in a very uncomfortable. After completing the research, brainstorming and mood boarding, I had went on to sketch the ideas. I sat down with all of the ideas on paper, no matter how bad I taught differ. They wanted to be very thorough with their sketches. So I took a bit more time, about two to three days to complete these sketches. That makes day. I jumped on to Illustrator and converted the sketches I like into vectors. I heard about dangled well shapes, which I liked a lot. Most of them were initials being merged into a single shape. I explored abstract shapes and other shades of logos too. But somehow the initials felt a bit more appealing to me. I then explored a lot of forms, serifs, sans serifs. But as they wanted to brand to have a modern field to it, I decided I would go with a sensitive point. I appeared all of the shapes were different forms played around with them. And it took me quite a bit of time to finalize three ones EPS we explore further. Once the concepts of finalized, I had to look for colors. I tried so many color combinations from the mood board, from the color picker tools for them all side-by-side spent Rs on deciding which one looks the best. And then finally, my mind had one shape. I wanted the branding to have the luxurious dark green, which symbolizes money and wrote, and I wanted to pair it with golden, copper or silver shades to show luxury. These were the final concepts are presented and I put them on mock-ups for giving the client a good idea about the real-world use cases. We had a couple of rounds of revisions because the client wanted a very specific shade of green and a vote with them until we landed on that sheet. Also, gold was their toys for the complementary shape. And this was the final logo for their brand. I haven't heard a few other things I made as part of their rounding such as business cards, invoices and later. So that was the complete project. Let's talk a bit more about the pricing and negotiation. What was the budget for this project? How did I convinced and negotiate with them? What does the contract look like? And everything else you're wondering about. As I told you in the pricing and negotiation video, I always drop the price first. I proposed to them a price of about a thousand over $1300 for this project. Initially, they had a bit of hesitant, but I explain to them the value I will provide to their company and how this law, who will help them achieve their goals? It would be specific. I assured them if the properly brand your company and they're going to attract a lot of customers, which in turn will help them generate more revenue. Eventually, our personal negotiation, we settle upon a price of $900, which I was happy with. I created a contract with all the terms and conditions, send it over to them to get it signed. And it also charged 50 percent upfront payment for the project. Here's the exact contract I made for them. See how clearly and precisely I have mentioned everything. Don't worry. As you can find this contract template in the resources of this video and make your own line contracts for communication. I always had phone calls with decline and I will share my screen with them at times to show them what I'm working on and if I needed any feedback, in my opinion, meeting the line or having them on the coil is the best possible way of communicating. But if for some reason that's not possible, you can communicate via email or messaging applications. It all depends on worse than most comfortable for both of you. Talking about the results, the client was extremely happy and satisfied with the logo and branding and even offered me to design the website. This logo is now being used on all the printed branding and everywhere else in their company. The client, like my work so much. We ended up building a long-term relationship and they're still working with me on many other projects. The key here is connecting with them, understanding your problems and goals properly. The more open, honest, and empathetic you are with your client, the easier it will be to work with them. So make sure you talk to your clients and honest, unhelpful way. And don't come off as someone who's just working on the project to make a couple of bucks. That's all about this case study. And here are a few takeaways that I have for you. Always understand your client and what they're looking for. Make sure you understand them as if it was your own business. Try to help them, instead of selling them something. Always tried to help them find solutions to their problems. Talk to them about their project as an investment rather than a commodity. Explain to them how the logo is an investment in their business. Just like renting office space for their business is beanies, respectful and professional. Always be kind to her plane. This can help you build a healthy, long-term relationship with the flying. Bit goes a long way and can open up more doors for you in the freelance journey. Be bald men talking about money. Be up front about your charges, and don't let the fear of losing decline make you agree to work for less. And don't forget about decline after the project. Keep in touch with all of your previous clients, even after the project is finished. Ask them for their feedback and how your work helped their business. Sometimes the best opportunities come out of your existing clients. And that's all I have for you in this case study. I hope you like me getting new deal about a real project. I did. If you please, any problems while designing new logos, or if you need some feedback on those concepts, you should definitely check out the Facebook community for which you can find the link below in the group, you can find me and other members of the group to help you out. 24. Best Adobe Illustrator Tips & Tricks: Do you want to work faster and improve your workflow while designing logos? If yes, here out a few tips and tricks you can use in Illustrator to make your life a little bit easier while designing logos. Let's get started. When you create a document, you can choose any size you want and also specify the number of artboards you want. Here. I haven't select the CMYK color option because the logo will be used. Cooperate. Let's hit Create, and there you go. Illustrator created all of the artboards you needed, and also align them perfectly. Having multiple artboards in a single document saves your time from moving back and forth between multiple documents. You can use the Artboard tool here to move your existing artboards around or create new artboards. And violin have the tool selected. You can hold the Alt or Option key and drag on any artboard to duplicate it. You can rename these art boards as you want. In Illustrator. You can customize your workspace according to your needs. While designing logos, there are a lot of tools on the screen that are not needed. So you can add or remove different panels you don't need. Here's a cool thing. You can even save your custom workspace in Illustrator so that you have a separate logo design workspace and other workspaces for different roles? I have one for logo design. Let's switch over to it. For logo design, I prefer to keep my workspace like this. I have the toolbar here, as it always is. I keep the right side panel clean for logo design. Icky, the character and paragraph panels here on the top, as I need quick access to my fonts and typographic roots. Next is another very important time probe. I have the Pathfinder and alignment Vandals. The Pathfinder is a very important tool that you will use a lot while designing logos. It would either be this or the shape builder tool. Both of these tools work similarly. It depends on the situation. Very well used them. Let me show you how to use the Pathfinder. Let's create a square root here. Now, I will make a circle. Now I want to cut out the circle from the center of the square. I will place it on top of the square and then select both of them. Now, let's click on the Minus Front in the Pathfinder panel. As you can see, the square has a circle cartography between now. But for a vendor comes in very handy in creating complex shapes. I also keep the alignment panel in the same tab group as the Pathfinder. This comes in very handy when you need to align the elements on your artboard. Let's say I wanted to make sure that this logo is aligned to the center of the text. I will just select both of them and click the horizontal center line button. Now, I will group them and the aligned function applies to the complete group. So now I will click on the Horizontal Align once more just to make sure everything is in the center. And then I will also click on the vertical center line button to keep this group. I had the exact center of the artboard. This was just one application. There will be several instances when this tool will be very useful to just quickly align things however you want them. Next panel have is the color and swatches. These are pretty obvious. You would definitely need to pick colors for your logos and these panels will help you do just that. Nothing complex here. However, I prefer, once you have finalized the colors, you can make small square just like these here, and then give them the exact colors. You find it like this. This will help you pick the colors quickly whenever you need them on any object. I also have the layers and art board tabs in my workspace. The layers tab will help you keep everything organized and help you see all of the liturgy made at all to them as you like. The artboards tab shows all of the artboards you have in the document. You can also add new Artboards from here. Last but not the least, I have a couple of panels here. The shoulder, just fun click and they're not used very often as compared to the other ones. So I keep these here. I had the stroke panel, gradient panel, and transparency panel. Do you get irritated when you need to click and hold on a tool to select another tool like dependable or even the shapes to when you can create new toolbars and Illustrator where you can add any tools you want. Just go to the Window menu. Toolbars. Add New. I believe my toolbar and name and click. Okay, now I would like I need to learn on to this toolbar. You can move this model quick toolbar anywhere you want. For example, I will keep it next to this artboard. So it's easy for me to switch tool. One more helpful tip is using grids and more importantly, smart guides. The grid helps me draw geometric shapes and sometimes even other shapes properly. I recommend you to use it while making anything that needs to be precise and logos need to be pixel perfect. I can say that the grid to be visible from this menu. Now, let's configure these four answers. Go to the preferences menu, and then we'll do the guides and grids. This menu is for the normal grid and guides. I can select how I want them to be colored, how much spacing I need between degrade boxes and how many subdivisions I need insight each grid box. Let's go to the smart guide settings now. Enable these checkboxes if they aren't enabled on your device. Let's click Okay to save our settings. Now, let me show you the magic of smart dates. If I draw using the pen tool, I will now get these pink guides, which tell me if I'm drawing correctly or not. David, let me draw anchor points, aligned exactly two other anchor points. You will get these smart guides by using a lot of other tools. Also. Another thing that I see quite a few people struggle with a stroke and how it looks when the shape is scale up or down. Let's make a square. I will give it a stroke. Now, minor scale the square and the square root. It stays the same and it does not scale along with the shape. And dismisses them are design and men scale. It doesn't look how we want to do to fix this problem. Select the shape, go to the Object menu, and then click Outline Stroke. Now let's see what happens when we scale it. Stroke scales according to the size of the shape. Perfect. And I want to give you one last tip. And that is who use keyboard shortcuts? There are so many shortcuts for tools and all of the things in Illustrator. You can see the shortcut for everything written in front of the option itself. Just like this. More than that, I have included a keyboard shortcut cheat sheet in the resources section of this video, where I have combined all of the important shortcuts that I use frequently while designing logos on illustrator. I hope you found these tips useful and they help you make better law was more efficiently now. 25. Thank You & Next Steps: Thank you for watching this course and being a part of the grid rural community. We thrive to help budding designers like yourself and help you achieve success as a creative professional. Now that you have completed the course and you know the complete logo design process, the next step for you is to implement this process on your projects and design some awesome Logos. Implement all of these strategies yourself and see what outcomes you get. And don't forget to share your work with us on the grid rule Facebook group. You can get feedback on your designs and anything else you would want to ask. Me and other members of the group are always available to answer your queries. Just remember, you don't have to follow this exact process. This course is to help you understand how a typical logo design process works. You can always create your own process and workflow, whatever works for you. Also, you can download all of the resources provided in this course at the bottom of this video, I have also included all of the presentations from the videos below. I hope you found this course valuable and you'll learn more about the logo design process. Thanks for watching and have a great day. Goodbye.