Let me tell you the story of how I narrowly managed to avoid making a crappy logo. I am doing a logo design for a gaming website, and I instantly thought of all the cool texturing and gimmicky things that I could do with it. I think it is a fairly common situation to be in when you are working with the gaming genre.
I thought of things like imprinting the website name on an arcade red coin slot, or even making it look like an embossed polished brass/metal stamper. Very cool effects to be sure, but after I did some quick tests to see how they would turn out, they just turned out way too complicated.
With my primary background in Print, I realized that the logos might look really cool and gaming-like in an Ad or blog post images. However, it would be inflexible at best when placed in different media or even different places around the website. And scalability would simply be horrendous.
That is exactly why I like working with Vector for logos. I quickly loaded up Adobe Illustrator and thought about gaming and gamers. I needed to distill all the ideas and perceptions of the topic into a symbol that is instantly recognizable and contextually memorable.
The thing with Vector graphics, is that with less or no texturing, the logo’s colour scheme is easily adaptable to different placement scenarios. Light background, dark background, red, pink, blue, yellow, green, whatever. The way I set it up, all I had to do was change the colour of the symbol that I’ve chosen with one click. I left the wordmark itself in greyscale so I would not have to change that, and it’s nice to have some constant in the logo anyways.
Of course, I also had to make sure that all the text and lines were sufficiently thick so that it could be scaled down to a minuscule size and still be legible. Nothing kills a sponsorship logo placement quicker than a poorly designed logo that becomes unreadable at smaller sizes.
After that, just cross your fingers and hope the client likes the design. If you know the client is picky, may I also suggest doing so over a friendly drink or two.
Got any more good logo tips? Would love to hear about it.
I know nothing about logo designing, however, I do think that you are smart and creative.
I think you’re BOTH very talented and creative~