- Hey everybody, this is Roberto Blake.
I'm at RobertoBlake.com helping you
create something awesome today.
So today I'm gonna talk about the logo design
process and I'm going to attempt to explain
it in under five minutes for you guys.
I'm gonna make it a lot clearer and concise
than I think I did in my previous video, but I
think it's also gonna have some new information
so if you've seen the previous, this is still
gonna be very valuable for you.
A lot of people, whether they're graphic designers
or your clients, actually underestimate what the
logo design process actually involves and is.
Logo design is not just picking a font of your
choice, your favorite color, and then some image
or symbol, slapping those things together in
Photoshop and going off to the races to put
it on your website and your business cards.
It's not how it works by any stretch of the imagination.
Logo design is more involved than that and
this is not just an upsales point to say that
it's worth more because it absolutely is but
what you need to understand is that logos
have to be scalable, so for a logo to be
scalable, it has to be done in vector artwork.
That means no Photoshop.
It has to be done in something like Adobe
Illustrator or CorelDraw or some other vector
program, older ones are like Macromedia
Freehand, a free one is InkScape.
So scalable vector graphics mean that whether
it's a business card or a billboard, it's
gonna be super sharp and it's gonna
be crisp, and it's gonna be right.
If you've ever seen a logo on a business card
or website and it's super pixilated or grainy
or it looks dull, the reason is that it was
probably done in a raster program like Adobe
Photoshop that really wasn't meant for logo design.
When you see bevels and fancy over-the-top
3D stuff and glossiness, and so on and so forth,
that's Photoshop stuff, and it might look cool
but when it's time to slap that on the side of a
truck or on a billboard, it's gonna be a problem.
So you need to be able to do logos appropriately.
That means using the right program, that means
a logo designer who knows what they're doing,
probably not somebody from Fiverr,
is going to have Adobe Illustrator with the
Adobe Creative Cloud, or an equivalent program
and it's going to be vector artwork.
So that's number one.
Number two, logo design needs to be, for print,
CMYK or Pantone process color or Spot color.
This goes to something called digital print
production, which I will cover in other videos.
But the idea is that someone in logo design,
one of the last thing they're doing is the print
production process, and that's if your logo's
going to be on your business cards
or your signage, you know, the glass
outside of your office, your sign hanging
from the door, whatever it is, that's what
needs to happen using CMYK print.
That is not the same as RGB, which is what
displays on a computer screen, that's
red, green, blue; CMYK is cyan, yellow,
magenta, and then process black.
So that's what they need to understand and know.
And if you're not a nuanced and sophisticated
enough person in graphic design, someone
who either understands it very intelligently
or went to school and learned the formal process,
the odds are you've never heard of those things
and so that's where bargain shopping becomes
problematic when it comes to logo design.
When it's time to do them for your website,
they do need to be RGB and they need to be
about 72 dpi, this is resolution.
Print is 300, web is 72, so those are things
that an actual seasoned web designer will
know and understand and be able to do for you.
So the process for web design involves, one, being
able to do the research, understand what the logo
needs to be for the market, and that might
include also understanding what typefaces
are appropriate and what colors are appropriate.
Your favorite color is irrelevant as a client.
I'm sorry, it is.
The color that's appropriate is the color that
speaks to your market, it's what speaks to you
making a stand among your competitors
correctly but still stand out, but still fit on the
shelf that say "Yeah, that belongs here," right,
and it also might have to do with your audience.
Your favorite color might be hot pink, but if you
have a 60/40 split of male to female in your
audience and demographic, then that's
not gonna fly in most cases.
You need a gender-neutral color that will
work for everyone, so you might need to go
with a deep purple, or you might need
to do with a cornflower blue or something
like that, just as an example.
Your favorite color is irrelevant unless
we're talking about your personal brand,
in which case it's everything.
So I would say that a logo designer needs
to understand that, be able to speak
intelligently to those things, do the appropriate
research, be able to communicate with clients,
and that's a whole part of the process.
The other part of the process is then going
from concept, and that means the sketches,
the typography, the color scheme, to the digital
execution that we talked about in Adobe Illustrator.
Then from that revision process of going back and
forth with you over the digital execution to the
final production, whether that be for print or for
web, and delivering the appropriate files.
The appropriate files are often going to be png,
which is transparent background so you can put
it on any color background you need to; eps if it
needs to be for high-resolution print and be
scalable, you're gonna get those source files
if you're paying for them, and again,
that's the problem with bargain shopping
is you'll get the flat files, the png, and not
the source files, the eps or Illustrator file.
So being cheap excludes you from getting
what you really need for the long-term to be
able to protect your logo and your brand.
And then there's, of course, the assignment
of the rights, that you own the rights to the
image, because otherwise even if it was that
you paid them, the artist retains those rights to
the image and it's their copyright, not yours, if
you didn't pay for those rights and it wasn't specific.
So you need to get that in writing and you need to
have that understanding when you go in, and that
means you're probably going to pay a little more.
So those are things that you need to
understand about the logo design process.
I hope I've made that very clear and that you
understand what logo design really is about now
and it's not as simple as "I like this font,
"I like this clipart, this is my favorite color,
"let's put them together and put it out there."
That's not what logo design is.
It's a very nuanced and specific process.
It's very sophisticated and that's if you want
something for the long haul and it's gonna
convert business and customers and clients.
That's what you have to be looking at
and that means it's an investment.
So I hope you guys understand, whether you're
a designer or a client, a little more
about the logo design process.
If there's questions, go ahead and
leave those in the comment section below
and I'll try and answer them.
I know I probably didn't keep my word about
keeping this around five minutes, but I had
to get the right information out there.
I'll probably try and do a quickie video of
logo design explained and I'll probably try
and shoot for two minutes on that video.
Anyway, like this video if you like it.
Don't forget to subscribe, check out the
other awesome content on the channel.
As always, you guys, thanks so much for watching,
and don't forget, create something awesome today.