Tips for Your Design Process

Before beginning any design work, you must look at the logo or visual identity the client's company or organization already has in place. Your first design jobs may be for pro bono clients or small businesses that are starting from scratch. However, very few professional projects are undertaken for clients with no prior visual identity. Evaluate the client's brand as if you were not the designer hired to revamp it.

Audit the Existing Identity

One key question is how much brand equity the company's current name and visual identity has established over the years. Visual identities always have a track record with companies and customers. Strengths and weaknesses will emerge from your initial interviews. More than likely, you will want to retain the favorable aspects of a current design.

Your consultation might conclude that the current brand identity doesn't really need to be changed at all, or that a few slight modifications will do the trick. Such honesty may not make you rich, but it will lend you credibility as a professional and establish you as a serious design consultant.

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Many logo design projects require you to refresh an existing design rather than overhaul it. Find out early on which aspects of an existing identity are judged successful by clients and customers.

Alternatively, perhaps nothing less than a radical redesign may be required. If so, be honest about that too. Clients need to be told when their identities are ill-conceived, inappropriate, or just plain stuck-in-the-mud ugly! You're there to clarify the issues and save the day.

Research the Company

To create a logo and identity system that will grow with the client's needs, it's important that you get as much background on where your client's company is headedwhat it is trying to achieve not just this year but also five years down the road.

Figure 7.18. Menu Pages, a New York area online restaurant guide, was a new client with a very specific brief: to evoke the excitement of eating out. The approach was a stylized logo treatment redolent of 1950s diner signs.

If your client has been around for a long time, it will behoove you to examine past marketing efforts to discover some previously used visual resources. You may discover some earlier visual message in an old advertisement, some well-defined mission statement that will set off a visual cue, or even a previous logo buried long ago that could be refined and incorporated into your client's current visual direction.

Never forget that the inspiration for a logo design can come from current or past sources. Keep your mind and eyes open from the outset of a branding project. Recognize the value in any work that was done prior to your involvementtreat it with the respect that you would hope later designers will accord to your work.

Start with a Sketch

The most polished design can start with a sketch. I am not a skilled illustrator by any means, but I find that sketching helps my ability to explore as many design directions as possible.

Many of today's designers immediately start work in their favorite graphics software programs, such as Illustrator, Photoshop, or Freehand. That's not wrong, but it can be limiting. Putting pencil to paper will often give you the freedom to explore initial ideas unencumbered by email distractions, technical glitches, or computer design techniques that (trust me) can look like worn-out design elements.

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Sketching helps you formulate visual ideas that are beyond your technical abilities and your stylistic comfort zone.

How many visual ideas can you sketch in a minute? How many can you draw in Illustrator? Now you see why sketching is a great way of opening yourself up to creative possibilities.

Don't be a "safe" designer who concocts ideas only through a computer mouse. You may think you're saving time, since you'll eventually work on most of the design on your computer, but you're really restricting yourself by not at least exploring what you can draw out on paper. (Of course, this is a technique issue, and different designers work differently. But do make sure you explore various options when coming up with your initial creative ideas.)

Think in Black and White

Always take the initial steps of designing in pure black and white. The shape of your design should be refined and established before you even think about adding color. Applying color to an evolving design too early will only mask any flaws in the form of the design.

And since most logos will eventually appear in black and white in some form during their use, it's better to discover any design flaws during the creative process rather than after the logo has been implemented.

Figure 7.19. Print your logo in black and white and at different sizes to make sure it is legible.

Pricing and Scheduling

Fact: Multinational companies pay tens of thousands of dollars for their logo designs. That's a measure of the importance of logo design to a large corporation.

If you're starting out as a logo designer, you may not be pitching your work to Apple or Microsoft. But you still need to charge an amount that reflects your expertise, your time, and the value of a successful logo design (the end result). Quality design takes time, professional skill, the latest software and hardware, and knowledge of current graphics industry standards. These all cost money.

My approach is to charge a realistic professional rate, and back it up with hourly work estimates if necessary. Prices for developing a logo range from a few hundred dollars to thousands. Butof coursethe price you charge should not be the only factor when a client is looking for a designer or design firm to develop a brand identity.

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Never underestimate the value of well-designed visual identity to a client, who may use it in literally millions of communications.

If a client balks at your professional quote, you have several options. Explain the process in depth. Show the client your previous excellent work. Emphasize the power of branding (positive or negative), perhaps by referring to real-life examples that the client will recognize. If your client is looking for a bargain price rather than skill, service, and technical knowledge, warning lights should go off. Logo design is like any other commodityyou get what you pay for.

Faster Is Not (Necessarily) Better

Thinking takes time. Takes me time, anyway! Logo designers who crank out a logo in a day or two as a standard service are doing just thatcranking 'em out. Quality design takes time. It's as simple as that.

Consider all the steps in the process. Designers must research a company, a market, and a client's needs. They then must create original work that can be trademarked and/or copyrighted. Otherwise the client may run with the logo, printing it on everything in sight, only to find out that the icon that took two days to create came from an obscure clip art CD, and is in fact being used by dozens of other companiesooof!

Reputable design firms usually charge high premiums for rushed design work, and that's because a team of designers must drop all other projects and concentrate all their energy, time, and equipment on a project that requires overtime salaries to be paid. Time and energy is required for innovative design. Keep in mind that the less distinctive your logo, the more difficult it is to trademark. Three multicolored brushstrokes may be wonderful and all, but the trademark office won't think so.

Meetings and Presentations

The contraction phase is the part of your project in which 20 great ideas get whittled down to 1 or 2. It's time to execute something specific. During this part of the process, it is essential that you as a designer hit your creative brakes and switch gears from being an idea generator to becoming a client advocate. It's a whole new ballgame.

When you meet with clients about identity projects, the process inevitably becomes personal. What a client is really asking you to do is to put a new face on the work he does or the product he creates. It's important to establish trust between yourself and the client, who's counting on you to give his product or service a makeover.

Figure 7.20. The Menu Pages logo ultimately required some additional elements that could be applied in different areas at the company Web site. Typographic, descriptive, and symbolic, all in one logo!

Presenting a logo to a client can be a daunting task, since you're trying to distill a company's attributes and brand objectives into a unique and memorable mark that will capture the essence of what the company represents. Even though a logo is a single mark, it will always need to be integrated into whatever branding system is already developed. So be sure to define at the outset how and where the new identity system will be applied within the company's existing branding strategy.

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The ability to explain your artistic direction is essential for a logo designer, as the important aspects of a work (and thereby its value) may not be immediately apparent to a client.