Episode Transcript
Monica Pitts 0:00
Hello again, friends and welcome back to marketing with purpose. My name is Monica Pitts, and I'm going to be your guide today as we talk through some logo planning tips. Now what's really fun, is I actually have a workbook for you. Yeah, it's an oldie but a goodie, I actually made it in collaboration with one of our previous designers Sadie back in the day, and she did such a great job on this guide. And the design is pretty and all of the information is so just incredibly relevant still to this day. So I figured I would unearth it and recycle it just like I tell you guys to recycle stuff all the time, and share all this awesome knowledge in this beautiful format. With you, my awesome listeners, I've added links to that resource from all the show description. So wherever you're listening, you should see a link in the description of this podcast. But if for some reason, you can't click on it, you can hop on over to make create.com That's ma y e CR ea t.com. And if you click on our blog, then you'll see the logo tips post right there for you. Or you can use the search feature and search for logo planning tips, and the episode will show up and you can download this awesome resource. Okay, so enough about the resource, right? Let's start rolling through these logo planning tips. Creating a logo is an important aspect of marketing your company and developing your brand. It's difficult to develop a brand around no graphics and a logo gives you some graphics to solidify the way that your brand looks. But sometimes it can seem daunting. And sometimes it feels like you know what you want, but you're just having a really difficult time expressing yourself. And you're going just through a billion rounds of revisions with a designer and that ends up costing you money and time. And it just stinks. It feels very defeating. And I don't want that to happen to you, I want you to get an awesome logo. And I want you to do it in a reasonable amount of time. So we need to get our design details in order. So we need to do one of my favorite things, which is take something that feels daunting and break it down into a bunch of small decisions that you can totally make and feel confident about, which will then end up by making a bigger decision for you, which is what your logo is going to look like. So the things that you're going to make decisions about are your words, areas of emphasis, your fonts, letter, case, preference, icons, and your colors. And we're going to talk through each one of those things in this episode. So that way you know exactly what I'm talking about when I say those words, and you can express it to your designer when it comes time to make that awesome logo. All right, let's get to business.
If you're a natural born marketer, You're one lucky son of a gun. If you're like most people, marketing, especially online marketing is about as appealing as standing in a police lineup. The may create team of creatives has transformed websites and digital marketing from craptastic to fantastic since 2005, our podcast marketing with purpose make sense of marketing, so you can make purposeful decisions instead of carrying on with the same old crap you've been doing. And now your host Monica Pitts, founder of may create with another episode on how to make your marketing not suck.
So I know that I just told you that you should download the guide to take you through this planning journey. But I also want to tell you, that if you're thinking about designing your logo yourself, or if you're on a really strict budget, and don't have a designer, you should really check out the previous episode. The best least expensive way we've ever found to get a great logo. Yeah, super long title, right, but you're gonna go to the same place May create.com, ma y e, CR ea t.com. Or you can go wherever you're listening right now, and look for that episode. It's called the best, least expensive way we found to get a great logo and I gave you two really awesome inexpensive ways to get a logo. You can get it like any split. And that's what you need. Right? And awesome logo. There you go. Alright, so there's my last tip. Well, actually, no, I have other tips, obviously, because I just told you that we're going to go through all these tips to plan out your logo. So the things that we're going to talk about today are these six decisions that you're going to make about what you want to have out of your logo. We're going to talk about the words your areas of emphasis, your fonts, your letter case, preference, your icons and your colors. So let's start at the top with one your words, we need to decide what words you want to include in your logo design. Now on the surface, you're like this is such a lame step, Monica, because duh, I want my business name on my logo, but I'm like hold up for a second. Because you may not refer to your business as your full business name. If you refer to yourself as an acronym or if you use a shortened name all the time when you answering the phone, or even tell people where you work, then you might not want your entire business name on your logo. And that's okay. You don't have to have your entire business name on your logo. It's completely okay give yourself permission to put what you need to put on your logo so that when people see it, they know it's you. If your name consists of like, five different words, and you always refer to yourself as an acronym, then I would suggest building your logo around that acronym, then you can use the spot that you'd usually see a tagline on a logo, and you can spell out your entire name there. I'm going to totally throw my dad under the bus for a second. So my dad is my dad is the department chair for the agricultural and Biosystems Engineering Department at North Dakota State University. Yeah, that's a mouthful, right. And here's the deal, he has started so many different programs, he used to work at the University of Missouri, Columbia, and he would start these programs that had just the longest names ever, and he would come up with the most clever acronyms for them. And so all of the logos that we designed for those programs, were all centered around the acronyms. And then we used the long program name underneath, where you would usually see the tagline on a logo, to have the entire program name in there. So if you're one of those organizations, then please design your logo around your acronym. But if you always refer to your company, as your company name, like we always call may create may create. So on our logo, it says may create even though sometimes internally, we might use the initials MC to talk about ourselves, that wouldn't make any sense. If we put that on our logo, nobody would know who we're talking about. Other decisions that you might need to make with your words is are you going to include your LLC, or like incorporated or.com And your logo, if you're a completely online company, you might want to put.com at the end of your logo, that's totally fine. Now, if you are a brick and mortar company, it doesn't make sense to put.com at the end of your logo, even if that is your domain name, and you want people to know it. Now, to those of you lawyers and accountants out there who really feel like you need to include LLC, or Inc, at the end of your logos. You really don't unless you want to. This is a marketing piece. It's not a legal document. So don't feel like you have to put it on there. Okay? Are there words that you might want to include on your logo include a tagline. And not every logo that you design has to have a tagline on it, okay, if you don't have a tagline, it's okay, you do not have to make one up to have a complete logo. But if you do have a tagline, just consider whether or not you want to have it on your logo. Another thought is if you have a tagline, you don't have to have it on every logo that you use, you might have a logo with a tagline and without a tagline. And that's totally fine too, because in some instances, like on a business card, your logo is going to be so small, that you wouldn't be able to really read that tagline very well anyway. And so you'd want to use the logo without the tagline on the business card. And then you could put the tag line someplace else where it's nice and legible. And then if you are in an industry, where you have to have certain information legally always associated with your name, then you would want to make sure that you write that down to be included with your logo because you want to make sure you give the designer everything so they can give you a complete representation of what the logo is going to be. And it doesn't just end up looking like you slap something on at the end. So that's step number one, your word. So you're going to figure out what words you want to put on your logo. Alright, so then we move to step number two, which is you're going to look at that list of words and you're gonna decide which of those words is the most important, and which one is the least important, because you're going to outline for your designer or for yourself, where you want to put the emphasis in your design. So to decide what needs to have the emphasis put yourself in the shoes of a prospective client, like what information would you want to know about the company from a quick glance at your logo. For businesses with short names this is super easy, like our name is may create design. So it's very easy for us we want people to see may create because that's the defining name of our company. And then design would be the second area of emphasis. It's way smaller than may create it just sits behind in the corner. So it's easy for us to decide. But for other organizations with much longer names, you may want to emphasize a specific part of your name to simplify the design and not make it feel so huge and complicated. You might ask yourself, if you were to put this logo on a sign. What do you need to be most noticeable because especially on signage If you have a really long name, then none of it is noticeable. It's all just very small, and it's not super easy to read. So if you pick an area to emphasize, then people are going to have that pop out at them. And they'll know that this is where they're supposed to be. So for example, one of our clients, the Boone County History and Culture Center, now that's a long name, right? So when we were designing their logo, we tried to ask ourselves, like, what's the most important part of this name. And we decided that history and culture was the most important part of the name because Boone County and center were auxilary descriptive terms, right. So when the logo was designed, we asked the designers to put emphasis on history and culture, and then make Boone County and center smaller. So if you have a long name like them, then you'll want to decide which areas of your name you want to put emphasis on in the design. And if you want to see an example of what I'm talking about, because you're a totally visual person, you can totally do that by just going over to our blog and looking at this post. There's a link to it in your description wherever you're listening. So the second decision that you have to make about your logo is what areas of the words do you want to emphasize? Which brings me to our third decision, which is our fonts. All right, so what the heck is a font, I know a lot of you guys know what a font is, but some of you might not. So the font is the way that the words look, right? So some of them are really simple. Some of them are more round, or they're fat, or they're skinny, there's all kinds of different fonts out there, right. So I can't really describe them all here, because that would not really serve you, what I can do is I can send you out to a few places to look at fonts and get some inspiration. A few that I really, really like are Google Fonts, which is awesome, because all the Google Fonts are free, so you don't have to buy them. There are also free fonts out at da Fonte da f o n t.com. And there's also another one called font squirrel.com. And that's spelled exactly what you think it is font fo NTSQUI R R e l.com. Now, not all of the fonts on font squirrel are free. But it's going to give you some ideas that you could pass along to your designer or try to match in whatever program that you're using. As you're choosing your font. I want you to think about things like how you want your logo to feel if you want it to feel friendly, then you might pick a font that's a little less traditional and has a fun feeling to it. But if you want it to be more conservative or traditional, then you're probably going to pick something that feels kind of like Times New Roman. But for heaven's sakes do not pick Times New Roman, and you know what you don't need to pick either. Is Cooper plate, just don't pick it. Okay? Don't pick it. It's terrible. Don't even tell your designer that you want it. Don't do it. Pick something else. Please, for the love of God pick something else. And the other font that you're not going to pick while I'm on my tirade is pappy wrasse. Yes, I call it pappy Rask or Comic Sans. Just stop it. No one should ever use those fonts. Like ever. They're terrible. I saw them in a gas station the other day and I about flip my lid. I'm like, who thought this was attractive? It's not attractive. It's not attractive for a salon. It's weird. And it looks Egyptian and the other one looks like some two year old did it I don't even black. Okay, friends just don't. Don't use those fonts. If you find yourself attracted to something kind of like that, go find something better because there's something better and they've been used so many times, you're just kind of look like someone else who has absolutely no taste and design. I am insulting right now. I'm just straight up insulting.
Unknown Speaker 13:37
I think I should probably stop. Okay,
Monica Pitts 13:40
I'm taking a deep breath. Alright, so other things that you're gonna consider with your fonts is where you're gonna put your logo, okay, because when I first designed the may create logo, it had this handwriting style font in it. And then when I went to go put it on a big sign outside my first office, like four years later, I was like, oh, no, you can't read that at all. So I had to redesign my logo and pick a font that you could read from a distance. Another thing to think of is are you going to put it on a shirt are you going to embroider this logo because if you are then you don't maybe want to have something that's super, super skinny, because you're not going to be able to see it very well on your shirt, you're going to want something that's slightly fatter. But if you do really, really love that super skinny font, then whenever you're going to get it embroidered, you're just going to talk to the your embroidery professional, and have them help you make some good decisions about what you can do to make sure it looks really nice on your apparel. And my last suggestion for you about fonts on the off chance that you are designing it yourself is you pick one fancy font and you pick one plain font. You should not have multiple fancy fonts in one logo design that is overwhelming and it's not attractive. So that is the art directors rule is you're going to pick one fancy font And then pick one plain font to complement it. And your fancy font is the thing that you're going to put your emphasis words in most of the time, unless it's hard to read, in which case, maybe you should pick a different font. I don't know. Because that's the thing. Like, you may think that it's super, super pretty, but if you can't read it, it sucks. It just does not serve its purpose. This is supposed to be a brand new mark for you. And people should not have to think that hard when they read it. They should be able to read it right away. And I see logos all the time, especially for realtors and salons. I do not mean to throw you all under the bus. And actually salon logos have been improving over the years, but realtor logos, not really. They want something that's all like elegant and curvy. And when I'm trying to read your logo, I have no idea what it says. None. Okay, so don't do that. You need to pick something that's legible. Oh my gosh, that reminds me of my one last font pet peeve. Oh my god. Can I tell you can I tell you this font? Okay, Boo Dhoni. If you're looking at it on Google Fonts, it's boo Dhoni Mota don't pick that font. Here's the deal, friend. It is a cool shape. And it looks nice. But those letters get so skinny in places you just can't read them not unless they're huge. So it just it's it's just my doesn't work. It doesn't work. Don't do it? Yes, it's supposed to be pretty, but it has to be functional. It's got to be pretty and functional. That's the deal. So don't pick the stupid fonts that you can't read. Don't pick the stupid fonts that everybody else
Speaker 3 16:35
has that I hate. And, and yeah, okay, I'm done. I'm done complaining about fonts, I swear, let's move on to the next decision that you get to make, which is your letter casing. Good God, who knew I had such strong opinions about fonts? Well, I did. My designers definitely knew. But I bet you didn't know. Usually, I geek out about stuff for websites. And today it's just like, fonts Bah, Big Angry Monica with her fonts. Right. Okay, so,
Monica Pitts 17:05
letter case preference. So what do I mean by letter case. So some logos have sentence case, which means that the first letter of your name would be capitalized, and none of the other letters after it would be capitalized, they would all be lowercase, or some logos, or all lowercase, which is totally fine. And that gives it a very friendly air. And then a lot of logos are titled case, which means that the first letter of each word is capitalized, and then some logos have all uppercase letters. All right, you guys ready for me to tell you exactly what's up again, don't make every single part of your logo, all uppercase letters. This is okay. So sometimes you have to do that. And I get that because otherwise, the words just won't go together. And they and they don't work. But I feel like it's a cheap designer trick. It's an it's something that young designers do, because they can't figure out how to make upper and lowercase letters work. Here's the beautiful thing about upper and lowercase letters, my friends, when we learned to read, we learned to recognize the shapes of words. And that is because we use upper and lowercase letters where all of the letters have a different shape. If your logo uses only uppercase letters, then what you've done is you've essentially created rectangles out of all of your words. And it's not easy to skim, and it has far less personality. But you see it all the time, time and time again, because it's so much easier to design a logo with just uppercase letters, because then everything is rectangles, and they stack so much nicer on top of each other. But I challenge you, I challenge you and your designer, to at least make one or two examples with upper and lowercase letters, or at least do part of your logo and upper and lowercase letters. Alright, see Mariam, I'm art directing you again, all over letters. Who knew I had stretched strong opinions about letters? Well, it turns out I do. And I'm subjecting you to them. So give it a whirl. Give yourself the challenge. Can you create a logo for yourself that has upper and lowercase letters? Can you do it? I bet you can. And you know what, if you got to go all uppercase, go all uppercase. That's fine, too. It's just Well, I think you can do it. I think you can. Okay, so that leads me to our fifth decision, which is icons. Now, not everybody has an icon in their logo. And not everybody needs one. Back in the day when I first started designing, it was a task to make an icon for a logo because you had to make most of that stuff from scratch. And now there's all kinds of icon libraries out there. And there's tools like Canva, which is an online design program that just has library after library of elements that you can use for the icons in your logo and it makes it so much easier to find something that's close to what you want. So you can have a designer modify it and make it very uniquely yours. If you do have a strict budget for your logo though, then you might not be able to afford to have a big company really go all out and design you some crazy unique identity mark, it just takes time. It's a very intricate piece of art, even though it's small, it is very intricate, and it can be really time consuming. So I don't want to lead you away from it. But if you're on a really tight budget, probably picking something that at least semi exists from an icon library to start with, is your best bet to keep your logo on a smaller budget. Now, when I say icon, that doesn't just mean it's a picture. There's a lot of logos that have letters as their icons, especially for you folks who have those acronyms for your names, you are a perfect example of someone who might do very, very well with a letter style icon. Now, regardless of what style icon you choose, I really, I need you to really look at it and make sure that it doesn't look like something else. And that it tells the right story about your company. Have other people look at it too. There is a company in town that is a three seasons, lawn care company, and they made a logo that looks like a uterus. I am not even kidding, I can't see anything else. When I look at that logo, nothing else. So yeah, you don't want that logo to be yours. And here's the deal. I have designed logos that I was like, this is exactly right. This is the awesomest logo, and then I send them over to the client. And they're like, oh, no, that looks like this. Okay, so that's why we have other people look at our logo icons to make sure that they don't look like something else to someone else. You want it to feel right for your company and tell the right story about what you do not look like a uterus. Unless that's what you do. In which case, then, yes, please make it look like uterus. But these people don't bear a three seasons lawncare company. Okay, so the final decision that I want you to make about your logo is the colors, you might be lucky, you might already have brand colors. Or maybe that makes you unlucky because some people's brand colors make them unlucky, because they have to design with those brand colors, and they don't like them anymore, which stinks. And if that's you, I encourage you to just take a step to the right or the left of those colors. So let's say that you have royal blue, and you don't like it anymore. So could you take it a little bit more towards Navy, or maybe take it a little bit over towards turquoise, you can really adjust the feeling of your logo and not blow up your whole brand by just taking a little step to the right or the left with your color and modifying it in your color palette. Now if you're not sure what your color palette is, like, if you're brand new, then that's kind of exciting. If that's you, then I want to suggest that you go out to design seeds.com. That's d s i g n dash s e d s.com. That is one of my designers, favorite sites to find color inspiration, and we use it all the time. It's really cool. This person basically takes pictures and pulls all the colors out of them. And I find it's really inspiring when I look at it with clients because they're like, Ooh, I like these ones together, but not that one color. Oh, and then I like this color palette, but not that color. And it really helps me understand what type of feeling they're trying to get across with their logo. I have had people telling me that they want the colors of their logo to be anything from the painting on their wall all the way to their upholstery. I've had people literally bring in swatches of fabric and tell me this is what I want it to feel like. And that is so helpful as a designer to be given those types of resources. So make sure that you're sharing that. Now definitely consider the emotional responses that are created by certain colors. For example, red often evokes a sense of urgency or intense emotion, while green, on the other hand has a calming and nurturing effect. And blue usually establishes trust, yellow is energetic. So just think about what you want to say with your logo and make sure that you're using colors that are reflective of the type of energy that you want to push out. Another thing to think about with your colors is what industry your business is in. Because we see a lot of repeated colors in different industries. For example, in the banking world, we see green over and over again and we see navies and we do see some blues as well. But if you move over into construction, you're going to see a lot of red and some yellow, especially when you get into heavy highway construction, lots of yellow living over there. So just take into consideration what types of colors might make people feel a certain way or think a certain way about your logo. Now having said all of these things, I don't want you to take your logo so seriously that you block yourself from the Abyss Liddie of making a decision about your logo. There have been times where I've worked with clients and they are so incredibly invested in their logo, that they don't have the ability to just pull the plug, make a decision and move forward with the me create logo each time that we've redesigned it, I've created four or five concepts. And that's it. And I show them only to the people who I will allow to have any type of decision making influence on me, I do not show them to everyone, just the people that I will really respect their opinions, because otherwise I start doubting, and I started having too much information coming out. And it slows up my ability to make a decision. So while your logo is an important part of your brand, it's just part of the big wheel that makes up your brand. And if you don't have one, and you need to get one, I just want you to pick the thing that you feel great about, make a decision and move forward with it. If it doesn't work for you in three or four years, just like me, I had my logo for three or four years before I put it on a sign and realized, nope, that doesn't work. Because nobody ever told me that that was going to be hard to read on sign, you know that. So you can already start off in a better place than I did learn from my mistakes. Armed with the information in this podcast, and blog posts and guide, I know that you're going to have all of your decisions made so that you can very confidently enter into an awesome logo design for your organization. Remember, the big picture decisions that you need to make for your logo are the words that you're going to put on it, where you want to emphasize, like which words are going to be the most important that you need people to see, you're going to, you're going
Speaker 3 26:38
to look at those fonts. And you're going to think about me freaking out over the ones I don't like,
Monica Pitts 26:43
you're going to choose your letter case preference. And you're going to promise me that you're going to try it with upper and lowercase letters, at least for some of the words. Okay, try it. Just try it. And you're going to think about what type of icon that you feel would really represent your business and illustrate what you do. And then last but not least, you're going to consider the colors and how those colors can tell a story about your organization through your logo. All right, friends, thank you so much for listening. Hopefully you learn a thing or two. And if not, you just learned that I have really strong opinions about clearly fonts and letter gazing. But if you did learn a thing or two, do me a favor and leave me a review because your reviews help me get out in front of more people just like you who are on their marketing journey and I can help them make decisions to move forward and mark it with purpose. So thank you so much for listening. And until next time, go forth and mark it with purpose. Thanks again for listening to marketing with purpose head over to May create.com MAYE CR ea t.com Yeah, you heard me right and a y e create.com. For podcast notes and more resources to grow your business. Don't let your marketing suck. Get your pride on market with purpose.
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