How to Design a Typographic Logo with a Personal Touch
Featured Image: iStock/Alexey Yaremenko
A text-based logo that is arranged and styled in a manner that supports its brand’s essence is known as a typographic logo. Unlike other logos that contain symbols and pictures, such logos are known for their simplicity. A professionally designed logo is used to transmit a brand’s identity and brief the audience on what industry the brand belongs to.
As words hold a massive amount of power, you are good to go by adding some creativity to your logo. Adding your touch to the logo can play a significant role in communicating the story of your brand and therefore, making it appear as special. With your brand name as your brand logo, it won’t be hard for your business to build strong brand awareness.
What to Know About Typographic Logos
Some of the biggest brands in the world, like Google or Etsy have typographic logos. They are minimalistic, modern and can be incredibly creative as well. Before we start discussing how to add a personal touch to typopgrahic logos, let’s talk about some of the factors to focus on before you start designing.
Understand your Brand’s Position
One of the foremost steps in creating a logo is to identify your unique brand identity. You must be aware of your brand’s purpose, personality, and your target market. Exploring your brand will help you understand the place of your brand and what makes it unique in the market, thus giving the introduction to your logo. Also, this way it will be easier to select a typographic style that lines up with the desired visuals of your brand.
Research your Niche
When a brand enters an industry, it becomes essential for it to study its market and the competitors it is surrounded by. To make your logo stand out from your competitors, you must learn about their logos. You can gather data on various business logos in your industry and learn how well your competitors have used the elements of market trends in their existing logos.
You can also collect information from beyond their field to identify new changes. This research will help you recognize the uniqueness of your brand and how distinct your logo is from the rest. Assemble ideas from nature and incorporate them into multiple design styles to bring a new and personal touch to your logo.
7 Tips to Design Typographic Logos with a Personal Touch
Here are a few great tips that you can apply to design a typographic logo that includes a personal touch and makes your brand stand out from all the competitors.
1. Choose the Right Typographic Style
You must choose a typeface that aligns with your brand’s identity. Having a classical touch in your base font can attract a large number of audiences. There are a variety of elements that come into play here such as the colors, visuals, and the style in your logo. You must ensure that it’s readable and appears legible on all digital and print mediums.
We see various examples of typographic logos around us every day such as Google, Starbucks, Disney, etc. So when designing your brand symbol, you can take inspiration from some of the timeless wordmark logos and see how they make an impact on their audiences.
Image Source: ZillionDesigns.com
The above logo is a good example of a typographic logo. It has a combination of font styles with the name being highlighted in a clean and modern one, and the following word in calligraphic style.
Image Source: ZillionDesigns.com
Whereas in this logo, the core message of the brand can be understood easily. The letters in this logo are well-spaced and add personality to its overall look.
2. Customize for Personal Touch
To add a personal touch means to be creative enough to use your handwriting style instead of using different applications. In the world of automated designs, the involvement of handmade features adds a human touch and exhibits uniqueness.
Creating a logo by giving it an artistic feel can truly give a sense of belonging and a personal touch. A brand can add styling to its logo such as handwritten typefaces as well as calligraphy. The handwritten font can be simple yet elegant, representing the validity of your brand.
Image Source: ZillionDesigns.com
The above logo provides a unique touch to its design as the name appears in a handwritten style. It is likely to evoke feelings of happiness and togetherness. Also, the bird above the text has its impact on the logo in an attractive way.
The logo itself showcases a simple yet elegant texture with the flowing script and draws attention to the typographic successfully.
3. Use an eccentric color scheme
Color in the logo is what attracts the audience in the first place as it makes your logo stand out in front of the others. You should find out all there is to know about color psychology in logo design and choose a color that is unique so it can be considered as your distinctive feature. The colors you select should provoke positive energy and bring out suitable emotions that align with your brand.
The right color can enhance people’s perceptions and the impact of your brand in their minds. A personalized color palette must ensure that it connects with your brand name and also provides a professional sense instead of coming across as quirky or random.
Image Source: ZillionDesigns.com
4. Negative Space Application
This is a quite creative strategy used in designing a typographic logo as one can personally use the space in between letters more cleverly. This way you can add various symbols and shapes within the letters, hence making the logo look meaningful and fascinating. You can consider different typography tools in Illustrator to create wordmarks with negative spaces.
With this creative approach, it is easier to intrigue the audience and encourage them to explore the hidden variations within the logo.
Image Source: underconsideration.com
This typographic logo features the shape of a wine glass in the ‘C’ and the letters immediately draw attention to their styling.
5. Originality in Ideation
While it’s a good idea to find inspiration from competitor businesses or brands, you should make sure that your logo idea is original. Build upon that to create a design that has mass appeal and tells people exactly what your business is offering. There’s a lot that you can do with a typographic and add a personal to it as well. Just think Coca-Cola!
Now, before decoding typographic choices in famous logos, let’s take a look at how you can be original with your wordmark or lettermark. Well, there are quite a few ways. Customize the font to add your spin or choose a funky color combination that stands out anywhere instantly.
Just make sure that your logo conveys the brand message accurately and is adaptable to different digital and print mediums too.
Image Source: underconsideration.com
6. Include Storytelling Components
A remembered logo always goes far off than aesthetics. It briefs a remarkable brand story. The story can be related to your brand’s origin, goals, and objectives, or a historical event that holds significance. Whether it’s a shape or a symbol integrated with a letter or line art merged with the name, the typographic logo should generate a deep connection with your crowd. It can also be a narration of your brand’s past experiences and journey, and so adding more depth and sincerity to your logo.
Image Source: underconsideration.com
7. Play with Imagery
When it comes to type based logo designs, you can be as creative or experimental as you want. Create a simple image with the letters or words as you can see in the logo below. The ‘E’ forms a beer glass and tells the audience about the business in the first look.
You can incorporate such imagery within the typographic to design a memorable logo that is also simple and minimalist.
Image Source: ZillionDesigns.com
Typographic Tools Used to Create Extraordinary Wordmarks
To add a personalized touch to your logo, typographic tools must be used to ensure attractiveness. Here are some tools you must follow to enhance your wordmarks:
- Path tool: This tool helps in writing the letters on a flat surface and a consistent path is chosen. You can create wordmarks that are within or outside a shape or settle on a shield.
- Vertical tool: It assists in adding words and texts across the Y-axis. It adds a contrast and hints of personality in the design of the logo. All the tools are used from Adobe Illustrator.
- Kerning and Trailing: Sometimes you see texts jumbled up together or far apart from each other and might be considered as disturbing by some people. Kerning is used to avoid negative spaces in between letters and if not done correctly, the texts might appear as undecipherable. If done in the right way, it can benefit making the logo stand out in the market. This indulges in creating a suitable distance within letters creating a balance.
- Envelope Deform: This is appraised to be a fun tool. It allows you to add various texts in different objects, forms, or any shape you created. In this, you add the text above the object which the object wraps around itself.
- Warp: It is a very useful tool and can be similar to envelope distortion. It helps in changing your letter form into another. It comes with basically built shapes and forms that you can easily choose to bend your text into. The text remains flexible and can be changed with the shapes.
- Appearance panel: This is the most important and magical tool indeed. Using this you can create any style and effect for your logo like 3D types, outlines, wraps, etc. The features in this tool collaborate with all the above tools and by mixing these tools you will be able to create mind-blowing wordmark logos.
- Pathfinder: This tool works personally on individual letters making it easier to change their shapes, slit out parts, and modify them. This can be a highly precise tool and neater than the rest.
- Gradient tool: In other words known as color tool. It helps in making the logo stand out and align with your brand name. It conveys the message of your brand’s character and personality.
- Immediate selection tool: This tool enables the shifting of angles and curves of individual letters. You can make the curve turn into any shape or object to provide a more balanced look. It provides customization of wordmarks with a variety of options.
Conclusion
In conclusion, creating a typographic logo with a personal touch ensures a remarkable journey leading to exploration. The use of creativity and various strategies in an accurate manner can ensure a unique typographic logo. The process of adding a personal touch is to convert letters into a perceivable symphony that attracts the audience, leaving a memorable mark on the brand’s personality.
