With this rapid development comes competition, and with that, the need to stand out. It’s why visuals now play such a crucial role in online marketing, and none more so than your logo. And with the average American seeing up to 10 thousand adverts a day, we’re looking for ways of filtering out this visual overload, so we can choose content relevant to our wants and needs.

That’s what a good logo does. It engages and connects the audience it was designed for.  It’s always a quality strategic move to hire a good design company and let them do their magic. But it is a possibility to do it yourself, and in this post, we tell you how to do it. By creating a logo for your WP site in 6 simple steps.

1. Find Inspiration for Your Logo

The first steps are often the hardest. And yours are choosing a logo design that resonates with your target audience and finding the inspiration you need for creating it.

Fortunately, there are proven strategies that make both of those a walk in the park:

1. Brainstorm Ideas for Your Logo: The purpose of brainstorming is to take what’s in your head and get it out into the world. It’s not a time for self-censorship, instead, allow your creative juices to flow and write it all down, regardless of how ridiculous you think it is. As sometimes, it’s the craziest of ideas that make it into your final design.
2. Think Like Your Audience Thinks: Once you’ve got your ideas down on paper, you can start adding essential design elements that are proven to attract and connect with your audience. Like colors, fonts, and shapes. But suppose you’re unsure of who your audience is. In that case, you can discover more about them by conducting a target market analysis.
3. Build a Mood Board: A mood board is a visual presentation of your logo concept consisting of colors, fonts, shapes, and imagery that reflects your business’s style and personality. You use it by creating basic designs that are related to the fundamental ideas of your business. And it’s also a great way of getting other people involved, receiving feedback, and most of all, it’s a lot of fun.

2. Check out the Competition and Consider Your Target Market

Your competition and target market both require the same approach, and that’s research. Let’s take a look at why.

• Conducting Competitive Research:

By researching the leading competitors in your niche and steeling (sorry, I mean borrowing) ideas for your logo, you’ll begin to notice similarities. Those will be color, logotype, fonts, and shapes, and your competitors are using them because they’re proven to work for your market.

But you could also find ways of standing out from your competitors by incorporating the essential design elements and then going in a completely different direction. For example, if they’re all serious and traditional, you could get recognized by adopting a fun styled logo and a modern design approach.

• Conduct Market Research:

Market research is all about understanding your customers by gathering analytical data showing their needs, motivations, attitudes, and behaviors related to your business.

The more you understand your consumers, the better you’ll be able to market your business directly to them. And by understanding their needs, you can create your products and services to fulfill them, gaining you a competitive advantage over your competition.

3. Choose Your Color Palette

While conducting your competitor research, you may have noticed specific colors that your competition uses repeatedly; this is due to color psychology.

Color psychology is the study of colors and the influence they have on our thoughts and behavior. And it’s one of the most crucial elements of branding and a key player when choosing your logo colors.

It doesn’t take much research to discover the color that sends the right message. However, the ones you use for your logo must also be relevant to your marketing niche and target audience.

For instance, if you’re running a gym, orange is a color that conveys vitality and fitness. On the other hand, an insurance company would opt for blue to represent honesty, security, and leadership.

Whichever colors you decide on, apply these rules:

• Brand Relevant: Your logo must match the color palette you’re using throughout your brand. Such as your website, merchandising, etc. It’s about creating a consistent connection that consumers will recognize regardless of where they see your business.
• Use as Few as Possible: The golden rule in design is simplicity. When it comes to your logo, you achieve that by using two or fewer colors. It’s why 95% of the world’s brands use only two.

4. Start Creating Prototype Logos

Now that you have a concept in mind, with the design elements chosen based upon your audience and market place, it’s time to create a logo prototype.

Professional designers advise us to start by sketching it out in black and white, creating at least six samples, and doing it quickly, so you don’t overthink it. Once you have your first ideas down on paper, you can start making minor adjustments to the position, spacing, and font thickness to create balance.

Next, you want to see how your logo will look in a digital format. And if you’re happy with your logo’s design at this stage, you can either use software like Adobe Illustrator or hire a designer to bring your logo to the digital stage.

However, if what you have on paper isn’t exactly what you had in your head, you can use a logo generator to find market and consumer-related logo ideas and see several versions of how your logo would look both digitally and on physical merchandise. It’s also an excellent way of bringing your logo to life so you get a feeling of how it will look when completed.

5. Get Feedback

It pays to get feedback before you make your final decision. Since our choices are subjective, what we might think is the perfect-looking logo might not hit the right notes with others.

You do this by having your sample logo reviewed. And while family and friends are great, they’re not the most reliable resource for feedback. Instead, you should solicit feedback from impartial 3^rd parties, and you can do that by distributing an anonymous survey.

If you adopt this approach, ensure that those taking the survey are of a similar demographic to your target audience.

6. Finish by Revising Your Logo’s Design

Once you’ve received feedback, your next step is to make some revisions. If you hire a design agency or a freelance designer, they usually provide three revisions as the norm. However, if you require more, always agree upon the extra cost per revision upfront. And that’s one of the benefits of using a logo generator; they provide unlimited revisions.

Finally, check out how your logo will look when you use it on your website, and you do that by trying it on a WordPress staging site.

The post Creating a Logo for Your WP Site in 6 Simple Steps appeared first on WP Pluginsify.

Today, it’s possible for anyone in need of a logo for their business or any other organization to design one using an online app and to begin using it in as little as ten minutes. But it wasn’t always so.

Before the internet came to be used widely, businesses mainly had to rely on local designers to create logos for them. It was a long-winded and frequently expensive process. The coming of high-speed internet, cloud storage, and online design apps changed that in a very fundamental way.

Now it’s easier than ever before to create your logo with online apps that give you access to a wide range of design templates and styles.

A Brief History of Logo Design Evolution

Without stretching the truth too far, we could see pub signs and the shingles that medieval professionals used to hang over their doors as the predecessors to modern-day logos. They used memorable but straightforward designs, combining images and text to symbolize a business and to attract clients.

But it wasn’t that easy to find a painter – artists in those days were mostly underpaid and led a nomadic life. So if you were a pub owner needing a sign, you had to wait for a painter to show up in your area, and then provide him food and drink and housing until the sign was completed.

Fast forward to the nineteenth century and the origins of the modern era of advertising, and things became a little better organized. With mass production came the idea of branding and of building a strong customer base through brand recognition. Professional artists began to turn their hand to logo design, and by the early decades of the twentieth century, they were in high demand.

Some of the most famous and recognizable logos today – like Levi Strauss, Chanel, and the New York Yankees – date back to the nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries.

However, well organized, the world of the logo design was still very limited until the internet came to be widely used. Before the internet. You had to find a local designer to make your logo because sketches and designs had to be shared and approved in person.

Sending designs through the mail was too cumbersome, except in special cases. Then along came the internet and digital design, and today we have digital branding companies that can do everything for you.

Transition to the Online World

To begin with, the internet made it much easier to find a designer. You were no longer limited to working with designers in your immediate location. If you saw an online portfolio you liked, you could contact the designer with your design brief and get started. The widespread use of the internet made it possible to work with designers who might be located anywhere in the world.

Designers used graphics programs to create logos and to share the image files via email. In the early days, of course, these files were large and clunky to send and download. Beginning with the SuperPaint System, which was introduced over the period from 1973 to 1979, graphics programs improved in sophistication and ease of use over time.

Adobe Flash, Microsoft Paint, and Adobe Illustrator made digital graphics more accessible. But for a long time, these programs had to be downloaded and installed manually on each computer.

Even with graphics programs, it was still expensive to hire a designer, and the whole process took a long time. Many small business owners couldn’t afford the time and money to hire a professional designer. However, these graphics programs also began to make the design process more accessible to those who didn’t have professional training in art and design

It became increasingly more possible to skip working with a designer altogether and to design your logo. As technology continued to progress, the process of logo design became easier. Gradually software designers began to come up with programs that let you make your logo.

Logo Contests Crowdsource Global Talent

One rule of technology nowadays seems to be that it is changing all the time and changing at a very rapid pace. It also varies in many different directions at once, as software designers and users explore the possibilities of each innovation. At the same time that software designers began creating apps to design your logo. A new trend appeared in the world of logo design.

It was the use of logo contests to crowdsource artistic talent. Logo contests invite professional designers from around the world to compete to design a logo according to your specifications. It gives you access to a global pool of talent to choose the best design for your business.

There are many advantages to running a logo contest. The costs are much lower than working with a single designer. The contests produce hundreds of entries from talented professional designers around the world. It’s also a quick process, and the whole contest can be completed in two days. You also have the choice to work one-on-one with a designer whose entry you like to achieve a design to your satisfaction.

But the world of logo design has moved on one more step. Letting you create your logo with easy-to-use online apps. For many business owners, this can be a better choice than a logo contest.

Online Software to Design Your Logo

The latest stage in the logo design evolution is currently happening, with online software that lets you make your own logo. There’s no need to download any software or apps, and the design process is quick and intuitive. Using the hundreds of logo templates available. You can make your own logo design, in some cases free, in just a matter of minutes.

Logo makers simplify and streamline the entire process. You can secure the copyright to your design, and download high-quality vector files. These files can be used right away to print your logo on various media to spread the message of your brand. The process is flexible enough that if you want to work with a professional designer to elaborate or refine your design. You can use the files for that purpose as well.

Why Design Your Own Logo?

Your logo represents your brand and expresses your vision and values to the world. It’s the first and lasting impression you make on your customers, old and new. It is why you may have a particular idea of what you want your logo to look like. Though it may be challenging to put it into words.

Designing your logo with a logo maker gives you the artistic and design tools to bring your vision to life. It puts you in control over the creative process of defining your brand. For many small business owners, that can be a valuable learning experience in itself.

The making of logos has changed a lot from the days of hand-painted signs. With online logo makers today that you can use to create designs in just minutes, you can choose how to represent your business best.

What hasn’t changed is the importance of logos in defining your business and pulling in new clients. Logos are still used to create recognition and trust, building confidence in your brand.

The post Logo Design Evolution – How the Making of Logos Has Evolved appeared first on WP Pluginsify.