You don’t always have the resources to hire a designer to create a logo for your blog so you are left to your own skills on the photoshop or windows paint even. After our recent highlight of some of the most creative logos in the Latino blogosphere we decided to write up this quick post about taking the reigns to one of the most important pieces of creative that defines your blog. By keeping the process simple you’ll be able to “design” a pro looking logo for your blog and no one will be the wiser, well except maybe the designers!
Coming up with an awesome-enough logo isn’t that hard especially when you keep your font simple so doing it yourself shouldn’t be out of the question for someone who doesn’t have design experience. Many of the steps we go over are the same steps the pro’s use, except they know how to wrangle the font into a truly unique logo and do what they do.
Remember you can always add to it later, make it flashy, add colors, tilt letters, add effects…or when you’re ready you can hand over the font you like over to a designer to create your logo officially, officially.
The most important first step is finding the perfect font that will serve as your base. Some of the best logos are plain black fonts, so go into this process under that mind set. Some folks get lost in wanting to use all their “official” colors in the logo. That’s not necessary, not right off the bat.
What you want is that plain font logo that you can keep as part of your blogs official assets.
Now off to find the perfect font. So you’ve already typed in your blog’s name into photoshop or other image editor and scrolled through all the default fonts that come with your computer. These defaults are stored in your Control Panel >> Fonts folder. Remember this folder you’ll need it a little later. So you’ve scrolled through them all and you didn’t picture anything you liked. Please keep in mind some of these basic fonts power some of the best logos out there. They are the most basic fonts and those are usually the best to work with. So keep your mind open to that idea of simplicity.
You didn’t want any of the default fonts, ok. Let’s take a trip over to Dafont.com the fonts wonderland. Not all the fonts you’ll find here are free. You’ll need to keep an eye the usage license. Choose a category, type in your blog name so you can see the font in action. Browse forever until you find the perfect logo.
Some things to avoid while browsing dafont. Don’t get a really intricate font that will be hard to modify. Remember you have to able to easily resize the logo from a big size down to a really small size for different projects you might be working on and you want the logo to look as good as a small logo as it does as the bigger size logo. You want the logo to be readable! If it’s so fancy that people can’t read it then…it’s not the right font. Keep it simple, pick a plain block font.
Finally! You’ve found the font you want, or like many of us, you’ve picked up several fonts that you can’t choose between just yet. After downloading the fonts, save them in the Fonts folder we mentioned earlier. Head back to your image editor, and scroll through the new fonts and have a field day.
When you’re ready to pull the trigger on a logo, You’ll want to create and save large sizes of the image file, in a pdf or at least a very large jpg, gif, or png file. Take not of the font name and store that somewhere in case something happens and you can’t remember the font name. There’s nothing worse than having to look for that obscure font you found years ago. Do the same for your official colors, and save your hex color codes.
Now that you have a basic style logo set, you can go back and get creative and try filling your colors, stretching, twisting, turning your logo, add drop shadows. Tinker with it until you realize, hey the plain single color font IS the best version of my logo after all!.
Once you have your final version. You want to consider making button versions of your logo, favicons, social icons and such. Usually you’ll want to take your blog names initials. So that’s on detail to consider, your font should have distinct initials so that your icons and buttons also keep the same look and feel of your main logo. This way you’re staying consistent across all your creative. To get an idea of how you should consider all your assets together, I found this assets page on the About.me website.
