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Practical ideas for designing your own logo: colour psychology, branding basics, designing for every screen size, and lessons from famous marks.
There is a bear standing in the Toblerone mountain, an arrow between the E and the x of FedEx, and the number 31 tucked into the Baskin Robbins initials. Famous logos are full of these small jokes and secrets, and the best of them are also simple, well-colored marks that would work even if nobody ever spotted the trick.
Georges Vuitton drew the LV monogram in 1896 to stop people copying his father’s trunks. More than a century later the same pattern works on a luggage tag, a billboard and a 16-pixel browser icon, which is a better result than most logos designed last year can claim.
People react to a logo’s color before they read a single letter of it. Coca-Cola red and Tiffany blue are doing different jobs, and the difference lies as much in shade, saturation and context as in the hue itself.
People decide what they think of a brand in seconds, and the logo is usually the first thing they see. That is why companies spend thousands, sometimes millions, on a mark that might end up as a single curve or a bitten piece of fruit.
Every business needs a logo, and it no longer has to cost hundreds of dollars. A logo is the mark people see before they read anything about you, and free AI tools can now produce a clean, watermark-free one in minutes.
Apple’s first logo, in 1976, was an engraving of Isaac Newton sitting under a tree. A year later it was a rainbow apple with a bite out of it. Most famous logos have a story like that somewhere in their past, and the changes say a lot about the companies that made them.
The Nike swoosh, the Apple apple and the McDonald’s arches have one thing in common: you could draw any of them from memory after seeing it once. That is the standard a new logo has to meet, and it is harder than it looks.
Most new business owners get to branding late, somewhere between building the product and chasing the first customers, and then try to fix it with a logo. A logo is only the visible end of a brand. The work that makes it stick happens before anyone opens a design file.
