The Branding Series | Logos

We're almost finished with The Branding Series partnered with Creative Market! I'm quite proud of myself for staying consistent in getting these posts out every other Thursday at 12 PM EST (even during the crazy holiday season!).

 This series will stay up for a long time, if not forever, I may even add even more info and create a workbook out of it!

The Branding Series || Logos by Maker-Monologues.com

So, today's lesson will be creating our logos. It depends on your graphic design know-how and how elaborate or simple you can go or want to go. Since this is a DIY series I'm going to walk you through how I created my logo for my jewelry business, which is a bit more elaborate, and also my plans for my Maker Monologues logo.

You'll want to use a vector software like Illustrator or Gimp (a free version) to create these logos because you need to be able to resize your logo without losing any quality. You'll need to put your logo on your website (big) and also put them on business cards (super small). 

Before we begin, we're going to go back to our first lesson; The Full Picture to review our answers and plan accordingly. I already decided on my fonts and logo for MM when I first started the blog. I decided on a simple text logo with a font I purchased from, none other than, Creative Market (who has a plethora of fonts to choose from!). I didn't want to use a font that's readily available for free to everyone for my logo.

The font I chose for MM is a beautiful, paint stroke-like font called Spelling Night. This font pack came with 2 Spelling Night fonts; one with swirls and one without swirls. I combined both.

The swirls were obviously too much but I knew I would love to add just a couple of swirls to either end of an alternative logo I had in mind. So I typed out an M using the Spelling Night Swirl font and erased the M to isolate just the swirl.

I then made the background of the swirl transparent and saved it as a PNG so I could use it as a layer without covering my other work. I typed out MM in the regular Spelling font then took the image of just the swirl and added it as a new layer over the MM and connected it to the end of the first M. Then I copied that element, flipped it, and connected it to the other side of the other M. And that's how I created my alternative logo.

For the arc text I used a tool called Text Along Path on Gimp, here's a great tutorial for it. 

I plan on making my main logo in a copper sheen, one of the "colors" I choose for my color palette. I couldn't choose between that or a watercolor logo using my brand colors... If you have a favorite let me know! 

When creating your logos, you want to create a main logo, 1 or 2 alternative logos, and a favicon (that little logo you see in the browser tab) which is 16x16 to 32x32 pixels. This is my tiny favicon. It's hard for it to show up since it's so tiny. 

The reason for alternative logos is becasue there will be times where my circular alternative logo will be better suited for a graphic design over my main logo. Sometimes you need to be able to squish your logo into a smaller space so my other alternative logo is just Maker Monologues stacked on top of each other.

Let's talk about how I designed my logo for my jewelry business.

I took just 2 elements and just placed them together and added my brand colors.

I wish I could remember the vector pack I purchased for my floral part but Creative Market has tons you can choose from. The crystal pack I used was called Crystal Gems Illustration Set

My jewelry is very raw, organic, earthy so I wanted to reflect that in my logo. I opened the crystal into Gimp, took the paint bucket tool and turned up the threshold, and changed the color of it from black to a dark henna brown. I had to zoom way in to fill in all those tiny dots and lines you see (I know today that there's any easier way to do this in one click if you'd like to know please leave a comment, it's a lot to explain).

Once my crystal was the color I wanted, I opened a new tab for the floral element. I just took my paintbrush tool and zoomed in and painted, pixel by pixel, the flowers, and leaves. Once I had the floral element how I wanted it I made the white background it was sitting on transparent then saved it as a PNG.

Then I clicked back over to the tab with my crystal on it and opened my floral element as a new layer, putting it in place on the right side of my crystal. I then copied that floral element, flipped it, and placed it on the left side of the crystal. The ends of the floral "branches" would stick out from behind the crystal so I clicked on the layer for the florals and just erased those branches creating a seamless logo.

If you'd like me to walk you through any of what I just explained just leave a comment below and I'll probably make a new blog post with photos to explain everything. 

I hope this was helpful and you're now better equipped to make your own logo. It doesn't have to be hard and it doesn't have to look like everyone else's either. I just took small elements from different vector packs and puzzled them together in a way that's unique!

Don't forget to use the hashtag #MMBranding on Instagram or Facebook so I can see what you're creating!

In 2 more weeks, I'll be publishing the last blog post in this series where we'll be gathering all this hard work to create a Brand Style Guide! I'll be creating a template for you so you can easily drag and drop all your elements into it!

If you have any questions at all please feel free to comment below! Happy holidays!