Cool logos may be easy to create, according to some people. They must also be efficient in transmitting the proper brand image.
Logos are a small subset of branding that can make a big difference. Unique logos help consumers identify a brand and are sometimes all they need to see to know what brand it is.
The best logos quickly, briefly communicate the brand’s identity, tone, and goals to any viewer. The logo is usually the centerpiece of any branding and marketing scheme, so a lot of thought and care goes into logo designs.
Almost any designer can create a logo, but truly great logos require time and care. The process mixes creative theory, design skills, and skilled application. Dozens of ideas can be explored and later tossed out. You’re looking for what will become the central focus of many designs, so it’s important to get it right. Here are some logo design ideas.
Avoid Clichés
You’ll see fads in logo design come along every few years. Take a close look at these modern logo design trends. Sometimes you’ll find a bandwagon worth jumping on, at least in part.
However, don’t allow these fads to dominate your logo ideas. Creative logo designs are worth their weight in gold and you should never let these fads put into you into a creative straightjacket.
Take note of the fads, see what works about them, and keep it in mind as you design a creative logo. Avoid letting your sole logo design inspiration become one of the common clichés floating around.
Be clever and creative to create cool logos
With the clichés in mind, remember to make your cool logo unique. It can be hard for brands to do this, and all too frequently a lot of modern logos stray very close to plagiarism. Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, but it will not go over well in the world of logo design ideas.
Plagiarism, or even seeming plagiarism, will do your professional reputation no favors. Since the goal of even a simple logo is to distinguish a brand, mimicking the work of others will not help your branding campaign.
Once something appears online, there’s simply no way to guarantee it won’t be used in some shape or form in another forum.
You’re not just trying to avoid imitation and plagiarism in your creative logo design. You’re also making something unique that can become something of a cultural icon. The Mercedes logo isn’t a car. The Virgin Atlantic logo isn’t an airplane. The Apple logo isn’t a computer.
Utilize Visual Double Entendre
The top logos will use a technique best referred to as visual double entendre. What does this logo idea mean?
Two images are wrapped around or overlaid over each other to communicate an idea of concept. It can be a clever way to communicate your brand’s identity and purpose.
Go to a supermarket and take a look at the logo examples all around. Some of the most recognizable and awesome logos use this technique. Play with different forms of visual double entendre while creating your logo concept and see what you can come up with.
Lean about cool logos
Modern logo creation has a fairly storied history. Logos examples really are all around us in the modern world.
Good logos are all about communication for the brand. The best logo design is visually enticing, smart, unique, and above all delivers its intended message.
This result can be hard to achieve, requiring an immense amount of time and effort for even a simple logo.
You may end up slaving away for hours or even days on a project you though would be simple.
It is worth it, however, because the best logo designs are enduring, memorable, versatile, and fit the brand perfectly. Take the time to take a look at what works and what doesn’t.
Understand Your Brand
As the image and introduction to a brand, a contemporary logo must sum up that brand in a single image. Jot down what you think of the brand. Consider creating a mood brand based on the culture, purpose, and ideology of the brand. Try using a site like Logopond for some logo inspiration. Don’t look at just the aesthetics of the inspiration for your cool logo.
You want to figure out how to communicate a deeper meaning with simple logos. Researching other visual brands can be helpful, but designers need to be careful not to take the inspirations too literally. Any design work must be original and map directly back to your client’s unique brand attributes.
What is your brand trying to communicate with its slick and awesome logo? Is the brand driven by utility, or is it trying to evoke some emotion? Is it a quirky brand or a contemporary one? What do the typical consumers of this brand care about? What does the brand want to be?
You do want to pay attention to graphic design logo trends, but you also need to stay true to your brand’s goals and attributes. Cool logos are fun to make, but you need to remember that truly cool logo designs also achieve their intended effect.
Every logo has a history, meaning, and purpose. For example, Apple’s apple logo is missing a ‘byte’. Wikipedia, one of the more complex yet simple logos, is globe of puzzle pieces covered in glyphs from different language’s alphabets.
Australian Pork uses what initially looks like a pig’s snout, but upon closer look is also the continent of Australia. All these logos are fundamentally simple in design, but they circle back around to their brand’s core philosophy and goals.
Know Your Audience
As branding centerpieces, the best logo designs attract customers with their visual appeal. Your logo is communicating the attractiveness of the product and company to the target audience. Market research is vital. Involve your client to make sure your understanding of the brand and the target audience are the same.
You need to make sure you are on the same page as the company before you start on your logo design. Using kiddy lettering in a comic book style logo for a classy perfume, for instance, is probably not going to attract the target audience, and therefore will likely not work for your client.
Talk with your client before you being on the long, hard process of logo design. Get their idea of who they are, who their audience is, and what their research points the brand towards.
Develop Your Personal Creative Process
All designers have their own approach to a project. It’s rarely linear and is highly personal. With this in mind, there is a general process, outlined below. Use it as a skeleton and outline for developing creative logo designs.
- Design Brief– Talk to your client. Make sure you have all the information you need, including the philosophy, culture, and history of the company; data from market research; information on the target audience; and the client’s overall vision.
- Research– Educate yourself on the industry or niche of the brand. Look at the competition as well as your client’s history (if they have any). Make note of what makes a successful logo in this niche and what does not work so well.
- Reference– Look into design-related inspiration related to your client’s needs. Check out current design fads and trends. If necessary, create a mood board or jot a list of ideas and/or emotions you want your logo to evoke.
- Conceptualization– Develop your logo based around the information you’ve gathered. Come up with multiple ideas, including variations on the same core design concepts.
- Reflection– Take a break and let your brain cool off from the heat of the actual work of designing the logo. Let the idea mature and evaluate your work in light of it.
- Presentation– Pick a few of the logo designs to show to your client. Get feedback and then do edits accordingly. Take critiques graciously and professionally. Ever hear the phrase ‘kill your darlings’? Be prepared to sacrifice your ideas for your client’s needs.
For very difficult, complex, or large projects, you may run through this process several times.
Learn From Others
Cool logos That Work
With the above rules in mind, you can now see the difference between a successful and an unsuccessful logo. You can understand not merely what has made a successful logo, but also why it is successful, giving you a nice insight into what makes for an awesome logo.
Let’s take a look at few of the most successful cool logos currently in use. The Nike Swoosh is instantly recognizable. It was designed in 1971 for only $35 by Caroline David. It works without color and is easily scaled.
As evidence by Nike’s wide range of shoes, clothing, and accessories, it works in a multitude of colors, as well. It is a simplistic and fluid image, created to look like the wing of the Greek goddess of victory, Nike, for which the sports company is named.
Take a look at other successful brands. Look into their logos, their goals, and their history. You can see how they intertwine and contribute to working very well with target consumers.
Logos That Do Not Work
Just as you can learn from success, you can learn just as much, if not more, from failure. It can be hard to find immediately recognizable bad logos, as a smart brand will usually catch on to an issue and change it.
As you start to notice the principles of good logo design, you will start to catch the bad ones as well. Poor logo designs tend to be too busy, unreadable, or on occasion even unintentionally inappropriate.
A “good” place to see these are for young small businesses or short duration charity events, who are often looking for ways to save money and therefore don’t pay for graphic designers.
Understand Your Competition
Research your brand’s niche before you even start brainstorming. Look at what the brand’s competitors are doing with their logos. Clients usually provide this information as well, but it helps to cover all your bases and follow up on their research if you have time.
Take a look at all the logos in same niche and compare them. You might find some entrenched conventions. Sometimes, you can use these to help you work off of familiar visual associations.
However, there are a lot of success stories where creative logo designs deliberately broke from conventional norms. It was because of their originality they succeeded. When doing your research, and later when incorporating this information into your design process, remember this fact.
Remain Flexible
Once you have an approach in place for creating amazing logos, remember that it’s not locked in place. There’s a sort of grey area between strategy development and design.
A strategy can easily fail once you attempt to you start to use it; the old difference between theory and practice. Ideas that you visualize may not work as well as you thought, or you might find limitations you did not initially foresee.
On the positive side, a visual solution can suddenly manifest from out of the blue, changing your whole plan around. Stay flexible and don’t get caught up in your strategy, otherwise you may grow quickly frustrated as your project progresses.
Ask the Right Questions
As you develop your strategy, all the while remaining flexible about it, there are some important questions you should ask. These questions will help you steer your strategy along the right course and fill in the blanks, especially when unexpected elements arise.
As of your brand:
- Why are we here?
- What do we do? How do we do it?
- What makes us different?
- Who are we here for?
- What do we most value?
- What’s our personality?
Custom type in cool logos
Custom lettering can really make your logo feel unique and special. Logos too frequently pull out fairly standard fonts that make the company name look better than everything else. If you’re getting paid for your work on this logo design, your clients are probably going to expect more effort and personalized concern.
Custom type will also help your logo remain unique. It will stand out, since unique font will not blend into the crowd, nor will it look like something created lazily in some cheap graphic design software. It’s difficult to mimic custom, hand-drawn fonts, so you’re less likely to have your logo stolen if you use them.
Take a look around you’ll see the coolest logo use custom type. It’s something you really should integrate into your design.
Choose the typeface wisely
Your font choice can and will affect the feel of your logo. Both companies and designers are well aware of this.
In the last few years, sans serif font dominated logo design, especially apparent as many logos were very minimalist. You can see this with Pentagram’s rebrands for Windows, MasterCard, and the University of Arts London. Google broke the mold a bit, switching for a similar but friendlier version of sans serif.
This sort of trend can be useful for informing the direction of your design, but don’t let it box you in. Serif font may be the right fit for your logo, but something more stylish or professional may work better. It all depends on the direction of the market and your client company.
Illustrated Bespoke Type
Hand-drawn types can fit your brand much better than a digital, premade typeface. A good example of this is Coca-Cola, a product with a very well-documented design history, evolving over the course of more than a century.
Unlike Pepsi, which left behind its hand-drawn scrawl in the 1960s, Coca-Cola has kept its iconic font since the late 1800s. It’s likely that, if it did change, there would be an uproar. The font is Coca-Cola’s logo, and may well be one of the reason it, not Pepsi, with its modern sans serif, is the market leader.
Illustrated fonts can offer you a timeless and amazing logos. Look into a few design concepts with it, if it might fit your brand.
The KISS Principle to create cool logos
KISS: Keep It Simple Stupid. This is a major guiding principle in designing awesome logos. For one thing, not all graphic designers are great typographers or illustrators. Logo design, fortunately, doesn’t require particular skill in either.
A lot of powerful but simple logos can be found everywhere, instantly recognizable and easy to fit on just about any product (like the Nike swoosh, as mentioned above). These also tend to withstand the test of time.
For an example of a simple logo, take a look at the Apple logo. An apple does not stand out; it could be on a set of children’s blocks or an icon for anything…except for that missing bite. It adds personality to the simple silhouette.
The bite can also be connected to computer bytes, for clever little visual pun of sorts. It’s an iconic image, instantly recognizable throughout the whole world and easily placed on products and ads.
The KISS principle can take your logos above and beyond, helping you make your logo stand out through elegant simplicity.
Refine to Add Personality
If you’ve decided an existing typeface works best for your brand and logo, you need to make sure it still stands out in other ways, such as color palette imagery, and tone of voice. Helvetica or another common font will fade into the background and you need to back them up with elements that really stand out.
Skilled tracking and kerning are vital when putting a simple logotype into an already existing typeface. For an authoritative and sophisticated feel, use wide-tracked type. Meticulous and tight kerning can aid in locking letterforms together as a unit.
Once you have a logotype form, you can modify the typeface to smooth links between letter forms or twist it to give a unique feel for your brand. This is certainly a nuanced challenge, but it can help you to create the right feel for your logo and brand.
Letter Combinations in cool logos
Monograms are icons unto themselves, usually seen on wedding invites and towels. Company initials can also be dressed up this way for a simple and effective brand logo. This is often seen in fashion. Yves St Laurent’s dollar sign-like emblem and Coco Chanel’s interlocked Cs are two of the best examples.
Typeface can make all the difference, sometimes even by accident—which is what happened to FedEx. Take a look at and you’ll see the arrow between the x and the e in their logo. It’s a clever twist on a simple design.
Experiment with typing the brand name and/or initials in different fonts to see what you come up with. These simple sorts of logos can be strokes of genius.
Active versus Passive
You can instill a sense of motion or activity into a logo, which has been a common design choice in recent years. It can be hit or miss, but it can work very well when it works. For instance, the Twitter logo has switched from its passive perched bird to one taking flight and soaring upward, fitting better with the site’s constant flurry of activity.
Implying motions works very well with mascot-centric logos. A leaping fish, flying bird, or running horse add more energy to the logo, especially for outdoor or sports related logos.
Tips for creating creative logos
The web offers a lot of resources for logo design, including inspiration and collaboration opportunities.
Here are some tips as you go into designing original and creative logos:
- Save your sketches— Even if some of your initial sketches won’t work for this project, keep them. The ideas developed in these sketches, no matter how early, may help you in future logo designs. You never know what might work for a logo. Keep an archive of all your sketches.
- Create mood boards or mind maps— These are tools to help you filter ideas. You can collect and mix up images and keywords as inspiration for your project’s direction. Something you can do to help you along, as well, is create that same mood board…then rip it to pieces, evaluating what made those elements effective.
- Create a versatile design— Start with assuming your logo will be a part of a long term branding campaign. It needs to look great everywhere, packing, posters, novelty items, convention Stuff We All Get (SWAG)…anything you could place a logo on.
- Use a grid— The grid is a traditional technique for creating iconic logo designs. A grid-based design can create a lasting and cohesive design, such as the Shell Oil logo.
- Use pen and paper—Pen and paper can allow you to freely flesh out ideas. You can experiment easily and you are less likely to get carried away by details than with a sketching program. You don’t need to be a great artist, you just need to get your ideas fleshed out.
- Construct vectors— After you finish sketching, take your design into a more technical realm and create a vector. This way you can easily rescale your design without complications or sacrificing quality.
- Bring it to life— Modern logos don’t just sit on the corner of a design anymore. The changing and increasingly technological world needs more dynamic logos. Think about how your logo can move in digital applications. Consider working with animators or motion graphics specialists to see how this might work.
Showcase of cool logos
Leap
Flashback
Infoxicated
The Game Shop
Idea Farm
iPOP Eyewear
Form
Aerogram
Adimurti
Bee A Maze
quit smokin’
SushiRoom
Deep Draft
Jibe
Miller Gunsmithing
Flickshooter
Branding Iron
Watch Merchant
SAV
Green Gadgets Store
Doshmo
illusoria
PT
growshare
Right Amount of Weird
doGtv
Greek Eat
Blackberry Bakery
Sweet Bar
Eminent
Bull City Learning
seahorses
Police Badge
Tucka Tomato Sauce
Meskis
Yellow Submarine
Ark
Cube
Kleancanz
Designer DNA
Ice-cream Design
Aura
Sabre Systems
FoxSteady
LeapStartup
Fontello
Badminton Academy
Orange
Warhol Cafe
EcoEgg
River City Church
milele
CROCODHILL
grabbt
Babyglory
Fish and Explore
Puppy Love
ZeroFox
Oliver “junior” Kozel
Fitness Refinery
App Sting
Dynamic Dust
ORI
Dynatable
FISHBOMB
anchor book
Arctic Fox
>
Sea Sentinel
Catfish Junction
Droplettes
Folkdeer
Cloud Clip
Electrik Company
Date
Author: Ngodup Dorjee Lama
Eight
Author: Maria Groenlund
Mail King
Author: Ian O’Hanlon
Texas Taco
Author: Jerron Ames
Lanka tea
Author: Sakide Amsheni
Devil’s blacksmith
Author: Deividas Bielskis
HandStorm
Author: Cristian Iaccarino
Revovler – City Security
Author: logotyped
King Penn
Author: Mike Bruner
Zarganza
Author: Deividas Bielskis
Diagra
Author: Filip Pietroń
Digital voodoo
Author: baspixels
Dozen Flours
Author: Jon stapp
Robodog
Author: Rodic Stevan
Gray Bull
Author: Janis Ancitis
Working mouse
Author: baspixels
Carribean Wine
Author: logotyped
Sound saviour
Author: baspixels
Big Sky
Author: Jerron Ames
Fish Food
Author: Garrett Bolin
Brand Dog
Author: Christine Lemar
Bear King
Author: Nikita Lebedev
Elephant Biscuit
Author: Carlos Puentes
Teorema
Author: Artyom Ya
TRIAD Mortgage
Author: Mike Erickson
SAFI
Author: Mike Erickson
Vivido
Author: Julius Seniunas
Radity
Author: Paulius Kairevicius
Half Life
Author: Laura Blackburn
Iron Curtain
Author: Simona Munteanu
Hermes
Author: Nestie Shu
cat
Author: Valentin Cadar
Up and Down Design
Author: Up and Down Design
Large Pizza
Author: Carlos Puentes
Ending thoughts on cool logos
As you design your logo, remember that they may not be an instant success.
It took time for Nike and Puma to become cultural icons. Don’t rush to redesign your logo because it has not hit it big right away, but rather evaluate it based on actual metrics and design principles.
The process of logo design and creation is intense but can be incredibly rewarding. Make sure to talk to your clients, practice your design work, and you can create slick, professional cool logos.
If you liked this article about cool logos, you should check out these articles as well:
- Tips On How To Design A Great Logo
- Vintage Logo Design
- Restaurant Logo Designs: Tips, Best Practices, and Inspiration
- Logos on Pinterest
The post Cool Logos: Design, Ideas, Inspiration, and Examples appeared first on Design your way.
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