Sketching Logo Designs with Confidence

1. Class intro: Sketching and coming up with ideas is often the most creatively challenging part of any logo design project. We might have an idea already, or we feel really unsure where to start. Every project is a little bit different, but your process can look the same. And having this clear framework to go off of, it will help you create stronger concepts, while also feeling a lot more confident about your designs. If you've seen my other courses, you will know that I focus a lot on strategy and the relationship with the clients. In this class, I want to dig deeper specifically into the sketching stage. Also see how we can think to create balanced and versatile and also really effective marks. I hope this course will give you the confidence to create unique and memorable designs and that you get all the tools to take on any logo design project. The class project for this class is to fill out the sketch sheet, which has 12 different prompts. The sketches don't need to be neat or even something that you end up using. It's all about getting creative and finding a workflow that you actually enjoy. If you have any questions at Make sure to leave them in the discussions tab right below. That way, I can help you out, and we can all learn together. Let's get started. I'll see you in class. 2. Brief: The very first step to a great logo is to make sure we have a clear brief. Logo designs are strategic. They are here to set the tone and make sure that the right people feel connected and really excited about the company. So how do we do that? First, we need clear project goals. Why does the client need a new logo? Do they already have one that is not quite working for them? In that case, what about it needs to change? Are there elements that they would like to keep? And if it's a new company, what are their values and who do they want to reach? Before even starting to think of ideas, I always have a call with my client to talk about their business. A lot of designers have a form for the client to fill out, and that can also be helpful. However, I think that the ability to ask follow up questions and also to build more of a relationship with your client is so invaluable as we start to work together, and our client will trust us a lot more, and we have a much better idea of what they are looking for. I've added my discovery meeting template below. So you can just have a look and see if there's maybe anything that you would like to bring with you into those meetings. Before we sketch, I also have a mood board meeting with my clients. This can be at the same time as discovery, or for bigger projects, I need a little bit more information from the client before I make them and can then put together a little bit more of a focused moodboard. With all this feedback from the discovery and moodboard meetings, it can be really helpful to then create more of an official brief for yourself. I like to set this up in Mila notes that I use to create my kind of hub for the branding projects. There are a couple areas that I like to cover for myself. Number one is, what are the project goals? And this might be things like reaching a new audience or looking more professional, for example, or even having more inclusive colors. Next up, I like to add in the moot board that my client chose and then add little comments and things annotated for what they really liked and also potential changes that they were asking. Number three is to collect images from the competitors and businesses with similar customers. This is something I've usually done when I've been creating the mood boards, but there's always a lot of things that we're maybe not focusing on for that specific mood board or things that I think might be interesting to actually explore moving forward. And finally, some quick ideas that I might have already. I often find that as I talk to the client, I get little possible directions pop up in my head, and they are just so easy to forget. So I add a little brain dump section as well. With all this preparation, we can start to actually look at our sketching supplies. 3. Word association: The very first thing I do when I sit down to sketch is to make a little mind map with word associations. That's because our first associations are usually the most obvious. And so being able to keep going and getting all of these ideas out of our head before we actually spend time sketching is usually means that we don't actually need to kind of get stuck on concepts that have already been used and overused. So, for example, let's say that we are working on a logo a flower festival. We might start with more obvious words like floral or outdoors and celebration. But then we can think a bit deeper. And from the word floral, we might get colorful, fragrant, experiential, and diverse, for example. The more we can continue to associate, we will start to get a lot more interesting words like maybe we have quiet, joy, energizing and natural growth, for example. It's not that the first words are not good, but it's helpful to keep exploring so that we really have a lot more to pull from when we actually start sketching. I usually like to push myself to sit for a continuous 20 to 30 minutes just for this word association portion because it will be really easy and obvious words to start with. Then we're going to really have to be creative and come up with clever ways to actually keep this association going. Since this is not something we need to show the client or use or anything else, we can really be a support for ourselves. Don't worry about getting kind of too out of scope. Keep it light and fun and maybe it will spark some great ideas. After the 30 minutes, take a break and then come back to the list a few hours or maybe even a day later. And I like to circle my top ten words that kind of spark the most ideas or really create that feeling that you're after. This way, you have something truly valuable to keep on your desk as you start working on the sketches. If you get stuck, have another look and see if another word might maybe be worth exploring. We are finally here. It's time to start sketching. 4. Logo checklist: So when is an idea good and worth exploring further? It can feel like a really abstract question, but there are actually some really simple criteria that I can actually use to help you along the way. Number one, check the balance and hierarchy, like we mentioned before. Number two, does it feel appropriate for the industry that your client is working in? Number three, does it follow the brief and solve for those specific goals that you set up with your client in discovery and mood Bird meetings? Four. Does it work well in large and small formats? Number five, does it work in black and white, as well as in color? These simple questions will have you determine if the logo is a good fit for this project. Sometimes a logo can be so clever and really well constructed, but it doesn't quite fit the brief. It might be for a younger audience or be hard to embroider for a company that will make a lot of merchandise, for example, if that's the case, it's not a loss. Save this idea for a future project. I like to add ideas that I never get to use in a board and then go back when I feel stuck or think of a really good project for it to be applied to. 5. Supplies: Tools, Books & Websites: Don't really need anything other than a pen and paper to sketch. But there are some really helpful tools that can make your life a little bit easier if you are looking for a little bit of an upgrade. The first one is tracing paper and a scissor. Tracing paper is quite see through. So it allows you to actually explore tweaks to the same ideas without having to redraw them. This saves a ton of time, and it's so easy to use. Next up is grid dotted paper. You're new to sketching or just like a little bit of guidance to keep your designs a little bit more structured. A dotted paper can be a great support. I like to draw out a square or circle for myself to sketch inside of it because your logo ultimately will be needing to end up in a circle format for things like social media profiles, app icons, and other digital formats in the end, anyway. If you want to sketch digitally, I highly recommend an iPad and the program Procreate. Or if you already have an Adobe subscription, you could go for their own program, which is called Adobe Fresco. Will also need an iPad pen. So for a long time, I used a generic pen, and it worked well ish, but I recently switched to an Apple pen, and it does have a lot more precision. With the other ones, they would also wear down, and then I would have to get a new one. While with the apple pen, you can just replace the tip. So it is a little bit better from that perspective, as well. Personally, I love Procreate because it feels really intuitive, and it's really easy to use different brushes that all come with the program anyway. And you can also work in a lot of different layers. It's also at the time of recording one of payment of under $20. Besides sketching, I also use it to make stationery and illustrations for client projects. So it does have a wide use case besides the sketching part. The benefit of sketching digitally is how easy it is to tweak and try new ideas without actually needing to start over worrying about kind of messing things up. Finally, I also have a stand for the iPad to make it a little bit more comfortable and ergonomic. There are lots of options for this, and they really don't have to be expensive. But it really has saved me so much neck pain. If you're just starting out, keep it simple and give what you already have a try. So besides inspiration sites like Pinterest and things, I think it's so important to have other reference points, and I love design books. You definitely don't have to buy all these design books. Lots of them are available in libraries, but I want to share some of our top ones. So I'm going to start with just straight logo design books. So this one is called Logo by Michael Ebemey and it has so many different examples. It's all categorized. Lot of them are famous, but there's so many of them that I never heard about before I read this book, so this is a great reference point. Another one is this series from counterprint called F. So they have from Japan, from Latin America, different ones, and they show more case study examples. So they have the logos, but they also show examples of how they're actually implemented, which I think is really helpful. And then we have the giant book, Logo Modernism by Jens Miller and Julius Wideman. And this one is something I use all the time. You're probably going to see me uses a lot in the course, but it just is such an encyclopedia of different styles of logos, especially helpful for abstract marks and pictorial marks, monograms, things like that. Lots and lots of examples. So it's a really good reference point when you also want to see how different marks are made in a kind of similar style, like we can look at these ones. They're in a similar layout and style, but they still have that distinction, so you can see how you can develop that as well. And then I want to do some honorable mentions. So this is a book that I like to read all the time, it's called Citizen First Designer Second. And this is just about how you can have an impact through your design work, and it has all kinds of brand identity and logo design in it. So some really, really beautiful work in here to get you inspired and thinking beyond just kind of the sketch that you're doing. This is another great example of just thinking outside the box a bit. So it's called Now Try Something Weirder by Michael Johnson, and this is a person who's worked in some of the absolute most famous projects that we see. And you can really see the sketching process, the ideation, and how they really were thinking about the projects at the time. So that's really helpful. And then finally, just because I absolutely love these examples called Designing Coffee by Lanny Kingston. And these are different examples of coffee shops and how the brands have been applied. And I just find this endlessly inspiring, finding different examples in here of how the brand's been applied. You've got colorful, you've got minimalist. It's a really, really great read. Lastly, for the supply section, I want to mention three different websites that I use for inspiration all the time that are specifically for logo design. The very first one is called Logo system, and this is just a beautiful collection of logos, but you can also see them a bit more in action with just one simple image for each one. This is a beautiful overview of lots of different ones, and you can even sort them by things like wordmark or symbol, for example. They're a little bit more in action, which is also really helpful for getting you those inspiration for other parts of the branding system. The second site is called rebrand, and it's exactly about what it sounds like. So it's basically a lot of different recent rebrands for big companies, and you can see how they've been executed, and you can see the visual identity. You can go to the website of the studio who made it. Super inspirational. Really interesting and a great way to find inspiration. And also an inspiration for your portfolio. And lastly, the third site is called Logomose. This is a straight up gallery of a lot of different marks. And again, you can filter or search here, and it's really, really great if you just want to get a nice overview, especially if you don't have access to the different design books, for example. 6. Types of logos: As a way to get some more inspiration and to help us create something that will be well constructed and long lasting. I want to share a little bit of some different types of marks, just so you can see the different strategies in logo design. Each style has its own characteristics and use cases. So let's get into that. The first format is a word mark. This is when the name of the company becomes the logo. This is really common for fashion brands. Where the wordmark could even resemble a signature. Or you just have a really clean and minimalist style to kind of show this sense of exclusivity, for example. Word marks can be minimalistic, they can be ornate. It's all about finding intentional ways to customize the different letters. So let's have a look at some examples. So here we have two ones where we're using negative space to do a simple customization to really get the message of that brand across. But in other cases, we might have a lot more complexity to it, like adding all these lines, for example, or adding little imagery inside of the word mark. Or even adding a lot of sort of this signature style of a brand. And we really do have to pay attention here so that we don't compromise the legibility too much. So we always want to keep in mind that you need to be able to understand what the word mark says if it's going to be used as a primary mark. The first step is finding the right base type, and then look for letters that represent or repeat in a way to bring in a core aspect of the brand values and that feeling that we wanted to get to the overall expression of the mark. This can be quite literal. Like in this logo design, I made for tulip and twig where we have a tulip design in the letter U. Or more subtle, like in this design I made for athleis where we mimicked the joining of tracks to show fans and athletes connecting. The second style is a logo mark or icon. This is probably the most common one that we think of when we talk about logos. An icon is a compliment to the company name, and it is perfect if your client needs something that is really recognizable to add to things like merchandise or social media content, for example, or stamp. The icon can be abstract to show the feeling of the brand. Or a little bit more literal, like representing something from the company name, for example. So a strength of abstract marks is that you can also sometimes use this general shape and concept to evolve it into something that's a bit more dynamic. So we're taking this one idea and then developing and using that shape to create multiple versions. When we have a design that looks like something else, like, let's say, a flower or a dog, it's called pictoral. If you're going for a more literal approach like this, make sure that you are a little bit more careful because the logo needs to be able to be taking on meaning over time. Work for the company as the evolve and change. For example, it makes sense for Apple and Mailchimp to have a little bit more literal marks. But let's say a scissor for a hair salon might be a little bit harder to claim as your own because it can be associated with any hair salon. The more generic the imagery, the bigger the marketing budget has to be, if that makes sense. So for smaller companies, focus on finding something really unique from their approach to their story, and that can really inspire the mark. So we can really see the balance here. This is a great example of how we're really trying to capture a specific imagery, like a bear in a pen, for example, but this is a great example of how they really made it their own unique mark because it doesn't look like any other usual bear illustration. Monograms are a combination of two or more letters and are a great compliment to a word mark as well, especially if it's a really long name. Monograms are often used for more ornate or high end brands. But by tweaking the style that you actually work in, you can have a monogram for any business. So here we're looking at monograms with two different letters, and you can see how some of them have a lot more clarity in which the letters are. So this is obviously an E and a P. Here we have a little bit more abstract with a C and a W inside. But some of these are a little bit harder to tell, like this one, for example. That I guess would have a D and a G. So this really depends on what supporting marks you have. So if you also have a really clear logo name in the sort of word mark format, then you can be a little bit more abstract with the way that you do your monograms. But if it's a primary mark, I would definitely advise to keep the legibility super clear. Emblems are like a combination of a monogram. Or logo icon and imagery. And typically, it's things like shields, badges, or other defined shapes. This is really common for sports teams and schools. And when we want to really create a sense of unity in the brand. If you create an emblem, make sure that you consider legibility for different sizes. If you want to create a design that feels like it has heritage and looks a little bit more detailed, can be a really good idea to have a second version that is also a little bit simplified for small formats. Mascots kind of fall under the logo icon group, but are sometimes considered their own kind of category. They're often a little bit more detailed compared to an abstract mark, and they also usually have a connection to, let's say, a real mascot or to a significant person in the company like the founder, for example. A common example to have is the face of the founder as part of the logo. Things like food brands that really want to create this heritage connection and the connection with the customers. So let's have a look at some mascots in a way that isn't just sports teams. There's a really great example in this one called bandit Coffee. Here we have an example of how they have this cute mascot that they're doing in different ways. And even though you have a core mark, it can still adapt to different positions and different layouts. And you also have the simplified mark here, which makes it a lot easier to use this more complex logo idea in different scenarios. Most brands have more than one logo because we need to create a logo suite that is flexible to work in print, digital, and lots of different sizes. We also need to consider different lockups. What does the logo look like with the slogan, for example? How would a stamp look? And do you have a stacked version for kind of longer company names? All good things to keep in mind as we move forward with our sketch. 7. Pen to paper: Are finally here. It's time to start sketching. Make sure that you have enough time for this stage that you don't try to squeeze out the perfect idea right away. We tend to get the best ideas when we can feel curious and exploratory rather than pressured. Have your words close at hand, get comfortable and put on some nice music. For each idea, I suggest creating a loose sketch at first. And then when you feel like you're hitting on something that could be potentially interesting, then you can start to do a lot of variations on this idea. Even if you like the first one, testing a couple of alternative layouts can really help us feel sure, or you might find something even better. For word marks, try and see the letters more as shapes. Where do you get big gaps that can create kind of an unbalance in the mark? And are there any areas that feel too tight? If you do have areas that feel really empty, you can see if there's a way to change the way that the letters are positioned. Or maybe if you can create some sort of ligature or extension that fills that space in a way that still creates legibility and that feeling that you're after. If you're adding in customizations that should represent something from the actual company, let's say, from their name or clear imagery in some way, look for the most logical place to put it. So, for example, it is usually best to put customizations either at the beginning or the middle of the word mark. Because otherwise, we can actually end up getting quite an unbalanced impression. But sometimes it's really up to the shapes of the letters themselves. For this type of customizations, we want to have a really light hand. If we add detailed customizations or change something about every single letter, it can really mess up the structure of the letters. We risk decreasing the legibility, which is really bad for brand recognition. A good strategy to check is to step away or zoom out so that the word mark is really small or blurry and then make sure it's still really easy to read. The same thing goes for monograms. We might want them to feel really unique and even really ornate, but we still need the legibility to be there for mascots, icons, and any pectoral or abstract marks. We are super focused on the feeling that we want to create and also using visual balance to create something that will it is usually a good idea to think about balance and hierarchy together as two guiding principles for really good logo designs. So I know that the concepts of hierarchy and balance can be a little bit abstract, so I thought I would sketch some examples and show you what I mean. So when it comes to hierarchy, it's usually thinking about what do we see in what order? So what are we seeing first is going to be the most important. When it comes to balance, we can think about sketching in a sort of square. So we talked about using gritted paper earlier when we were doing our supplies chapter. And we can then think about it being further divided. So we don't only have a square. We kind of have four squares with this center here where the points meet being the focus if we're doing a fully symmetrical, balanced logo. Now, the most symmetrical and most balanced way to do this would be to either have a circle or a square filling this entire space, or if you're doing something where the same thing is happening in all four squares. You also want to think about it in the diagonal, because if, let's say we would do something where we are only filling up the space in the top and bottom or in, let's say, one of the sides, we're getting kind of an unbalanced thing where let's say you would have a very heavy part here and only a little bit of stuff happening here, because remember, these lines will not be here afterwards. So I'll show you how we can think about it from an example that we did for a client. So this was a client where we wanted the design to kind of resemble a bit of a flag. And so what we did was we started by creating the central point that became the balance point. And this was something that you can see is going down and going up in opposite directions so that we get this kind of balance into the diagonal, as well. And then we created this sketch all the way to the edge here and then did the same thing in this diagonal line here on the opposite side. So by doing this, we're basically filling this part in. We're filling this part in. And we're getting the same white space on either of these sides, which creates a nice balance in the logo. Another example, let's say you're doing a letter or something that doesn't really conform as much to these more abstract shapes. So let's say you want to create something that looks, let's say, a bit like an S and kind of like a bike, which is what we did for our project. So we have these four squares, and we created something that was resembling kind of a bike wheel that was also a little bit of an S like this. So we have the basic shape with the handle, and we have the wheel itself. Now, this is kind of an interesting shape. I like this shape, but as you can tell, it's very bottom heavy, so it doesn't feel very balanced. So what we did was we added a little shape on top. And this means that we are getting a nice visual balance in our mark, but we're still keeping that core idea that we have. Lastly, let me do one more. So this is for a company where we wanted to combine the letter A with the idea of an elephant because the client really wanted to explore having a kind of more abstract version of a mascot animal. So we had this idea of using the trunk of the elephant as the part of the A that kind of goes like this. So you can see that the A comes in here, makes a nice trunk. But as you can tell, if we're going to have the ear of the elephant on this part, our initial idea was to basically fill this entire side of the elephant ear, which makes this mark feel very heavy on this side and not as heavy on this side. So how do we fix that? What we did was we basically took the exact same design, but instead of having the entire space being filled out on the right hand side, we made a small tweak. So we made sure to scoot it over a little bit more to this side. Let me just draw it again so you can see. We still have the trunk here. But instead of having this entire side filled up, we had it move a little bit over, and then we made this side here a little bit down like this. So now we still get that same idea of the elephant ear, but we are using less of the space on this left hand side here. So it feels a lot more visually balanced. And we also thickened up the way that this mark is done on the right hand side with the trunk idea. You can see how this idea feels a lot more balanced than this one. This is something that will become second nature for you as you keep working and practicing your logo design skills. If it doesn't feel obvious yet, try adding a line through your design and see what's happening on either side. Does one side have a lot more going on than the other side? Are elements bigger, and we have less white space, for example. That could make the design feel really unbalanced. Instead of scrapping your idea, try tweaking elements by making them more or less prominent in your design and see what the end result and the effect. This stage is all about experimentation. So make sure that you are really nice to yourself and you don't kind of add a bunch of pressure to come up with the perfect groundbreaking idea right away. Just focus on exploring and building out ideas as they come up. If something feels frustrating or you can't quite get where you want to be with an idea, leave it for now. You can always come back to it later, but it's good to not get stuck somewhere on an idea that you don't know if it's going to work. 8. Sketching prompts: If you feel stuck when you're designing, you are not alone. It happens all the time. So to help you out, I collected some of my best tips to help you along the way. Even when we have a great brief and lots of great keywords to play with, we can get stuck. Sometimes we could be stressed or it might be a completely new industry. And we have never actually worked in the style before. When you feel stuck, try out these 12 prompts. I added them all to the workbook so that you can try them out one at a time. And even if you're not quite stuck, it can still be a great way to just try out new styles and also get some new inspiration for your projects. When you've created your different sketches, make sure to upload them to the class project section so that we can all get inspired by each other. To help you get started, I'm going to fill in the first three with you to show you some things that you might want to be exploring. Basically, this is just a super simple prompt sheet with 12 different prompts. We really don't want to take them too seriously. You don't have to think of this as, like, a perfect sketchbook or anything. We're just making it super duper simple. So, for example, make a literal interpretation of one of the company values. Now, we always want to think about the company values, but usually our first ideas are quite literal, so I thought might as well put it down on paper. So, because we're working with a flower festival and we're thinking about kind of protecting the nature that we have and these different wildflowers, one of the literal interpretations could be to make some sort of, let's say, a hand coming here, very kind of blocky. And then to do either, like, a kind of you know, negative space situation with a flower inside or let's say have let's say, we can do this, can have the palm of the hand become like a tulip that kind of matches the fingers or something. These ideas do not have to be perfect. They don't have to be something you end up using. We're just trying to get our brain to be a little bit more creative and have a little bit more fun. So that's our first idea, a very literal interpretation of the values of protecting the natural nature around us and the flowers. So next one, trying to convey movement in your design. I'm thinking instantly when it comes to movement in nature, we have wind trying to kind of blow, let's say, seeds from maybe something like a dandelion, for example. Now, movement is something I use in a lot of my designs, and it can be very literal like this or it could be a little bit more abstract. But it just creates for a more dynamic mark. So I'm thinking for this kind of dandelion idea, I don't want to make something that is super detailed and has tons of these little seeds coming off of it. Why don't we try to create something that would be a little bit more geometrical? So we can create something like let's say we have all these different kind of shapes coming off of like this. Then we add some here, so to represent little dandelion seeds. But we make this one have a little bit of movement to it. So this where we have a kind of geometrical shape, but it's a little bit more interesting and it has a purpose of being this dandelion. You could also experiment with then rotating this and trying lots of different angles and things. But this will be a way to make a dandelion that is still a clean mark. And then, lastly, use another medium than a pen. So let's say paint, you can use thread, you could do clay whatever you want. And again, you can print this, but you don't have to. You could just use these prompts and sketch on whatever surface you like. And so I'm going to use a really thick kind of kind of crayon. It's like an oil paint crayon, just because I want really little control because I think that's going to help me be a bit more creative and a little bit less restrained. So the company name for this starts with the WU. So I was thinking, what if we try to kind of make this shape that is like a W that goes upwards. So can give it a try, can come around, something like this. And as you're using these new mediums, it's going to be a little messy, and that could open up for opportunities. Like, for example, maybe we quite like that some of these areas are a lot thicker and some of them feel a little bit thinner. So just try and play around with it. Again, it doesn't have to be perfect. There's no pressure. You can always try again, but it's just an exercise in getting our brain to kind of think of it more creatively and in different ways. So good luck with your sketches, and you can always ask me questions if you get stuck. 9. Trademark check: More thing that you might want to do before sharing any concepts with clients is to actually trick for trademarks. Most companies and especially smaller ones never actually trademark their logo. But for bigger companies, they tend to do that. And so in case your design is actually looking really similar to a big company that has trademarked their logo, that could be a problem for your client. As logo designers, we, of course, are not trademark lawyers, but there are actually some really simple ways that you can check your design against existing trademarks. The first one that I use all the time is called the WIPO Global brand database. And here you can upload an image of your mark or your sketch. Then you can search for similar looking marks based on the concept or the shapes alone. You can then scroll through the options and see if anything is super similar in a way that feels risky to actually then present to a client. You can, of course, also do a reverse image search using something like TNI to see if there's something out on Google that looks really similar. I don't really show these options to my client, but sometimes if a client has a concept or an idea that they want to bring forward that I know is really overused, I might show them search results for these ideas to show them it might not be a great fit. I've added a link down to the WpoGlobal database down in the description. 10. Class outro: Thank you so much for taking this class. I'm really excited to see your class projects, and I hope that you feel more excited, empowered and like you have a clear creative process for working on logo design. If you have any questions at all, don't hesitate to put them in the discussions tab. And if you have any suggestions for other sections to this course that you would like to see because I'm always building them out, please let me know, as well. A huge thank you again and super good luck with your projects.