Making Logos for Startups

Well, there is always the need for a nice looking logo, so if you are starting a company how do you get one quickly that looks decent. There are a couple of choices that I’ve used over the years in order of simplicity:

  1. Use a logotype with a cool font. My favorite was actually ignition which they still use 20 years later. I remember sitting there on a PowerPoint in 2000 (what a crazy time that was) wondering how to express the idea of ignition and being influenced by simple fonts that weren’t fancy and making it read seemed logical given the name. The great thing about it is that is so easy to express and create. You don’t need anything but generic HTML with <span style="color:red">i</span> works just about everywhere and then all you need is to know the font. I actually have forgotten the original font but wanted one that was san serif and bold. I still use this technique today. The main thing is picking the right font for the job, Google Fonts has just about every font needed, so study that and for WordPress users, there’s a great plugin called Easy Google Fonts to set your website to the right font. As well as being integrated into Google Slides for your presentations.
  2. Use an emoji plus logotype. Yes this trick actually works pretty well because there are literally an infinite number of unicode emojis now, so if you want ironsnow❄︎ it looks pretty nice and reflects the snow. Here the superscript really helps and for font nerds here is the unicode for this and is easy to reproduce but this is Unicode &#2744. One thing to play with is whether you are Initial case, Camel Case or no case at all. You can see what I like 🙂 Some of the other choices are to stick the Unicode in front when can look nice too.
  3. Use an icon plus logotype with things like The Noun Project, just do a search for an idea and then you have your logo. So for instance if your company is called say wave, then it’s easy to get a logo and just spat the name right after it. Now the only problem with a logo is that you have to decide what resolution you want the icon because the web likes PNG and fixed formats and not vector formats that expand dynamically so you get. I find that if you use 512×512, then this doesn’t really affect the size it much and it scales down nicely to website or for slides so you get something that is more custom than a emoji
  4. Go all in and make an SVG. OK if you really want something fancy, then you are in the world of combining two SVGs and then creating PNGs from it. This is easier than you think. For instance, there are plenty of SVG editors that are free and then you have an infinitely changeable font. I almost never go there, but it is available. But I personally find the quickest thing to do is to fire up Google Slides and create a template for presentations at the same time you make your logo. Then you just Screenshot the logo and you are done 😀😁

What if you need a little bit more.

  1. Well one easy choice is to use fiverr to spend a little like $5 or more to get a font treatment. You will and probably should spend more for this as you are funding web designers all over the world 🙂
  2. Or hire someone real for $500 which makes sense if it is doing to be long running. In any case, just changing a logo is pretty easy, so work until it is right.

I’m Rich & Co.

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