Designing a logo

When designing a logo, your goal is to create a distinctive symbol, that people will associate with a brand. It doesn’t have to be related with the name of the company, what they do, or anything really. All that matters is that it is a unique symbol, easy to reproduce, that somehow transmits the design values of the brand - it has to transmit the right “energy”.

Besides that, it is important to test your logo in as many settings as possible. Try to scale it down, to scale it up, put it on a dark background, a light background, a colorful background, make it monochrome, put it in a t-shirt, put it in the corner of an image, put it in a building sign, in a letter, in a business card, etc.. You want to create a symbol that can survive all that and still feel unique.

Once you start doing that, you’ll quickly discover that you want to avoid details such as shadows, gradients, small details, relying on colors, etc.. Geometric shapes are great, because they allow you to reuse the shapes of your logo in other brand elements, and easily make them feel like they belong to the same story.

At the end of the day, you’re just creating a symbol, that, once it is seen hundreds of times, will immediately be associated with your brand.