What’s in a logo? In this introduction on logo design you will learn about the elements that go into designing a logo that is just right for your business. You will learn the basics of color palettes and how to choose complementary colors. Read through this guided tour as we show you how the Leone Image and Design logo was developed.

Logo Design Concepts

When designing a logo it is crucial to have a clearly defined image for your company. Leone Image & Design needed a logo that would portray an image of a high-class boutique and yet still have a classical, artisan feeling. Seeing as the word leone means lion in Italian, we chose to have a lion in the logo. To have a lion portray the image we wanted, we decided that it should be the face of a lion that resembled a stone carving or a wrought-iron door-knocker from ancient roman times that you might find all over Italy and in most of Europe. Once we decided on this it was time to do a preliminary sketch of our lion (fig. 1).

From Paper to Digital

Our logo is a little bit more intricate and complex than most; nonetheless the process is the same (albeit more tedious). We began by placing our pencil sketch in a tablet. A tablet, if you’re not familiar with them, is basically a digital pen-and-paper: it consists of a stylus and a block. Whatever is drawn on the block, or tablet, is translated into a drawing on the computer in real time (with the right software).

After we placed our hand-sketched logo on the tablet we chose a line tool in our drawing program and drew a few strategic points to make a crude shape (fig. 2). Knowing where to add points comes from experience, but you generally want to click where the line is most severe. In fig. 3 we have placed the crude shape from fig. 2 over top of a scan of our sketched drawing to give you an idea of what we are doing. Some of you will have noticed that the points match up almost perfectly on the right side of the shape and not on the left. This is because to make the shape symmetrical, we moved the points on the left side to match those on the right.

Our next step was to curve our straight lines to match our drawn image (fig. 4). Each drawing program differs, but generally you drag control points for each point around to control the shape and direction of each line. Once we had the shape we wanted for the face of the lion, we continued the process by adding points of other features of the lion-head and then curved the lines to match the sketch.

For those of you who are wondering why we didn’t just scan the logo, fix it up a bit and color it, here is the reason: A logo is a graphic element that may need to be printed (or published online, etc.) at a number of different sizes. Scanning an image creates what is called a bitmap file, essentially made up of many colored dots. If you enlarge a bitmap you start to see the dots (pixels), resulting in poor image quality. We instead created a vector file, made up of descriptions of lines. This may be a little bit over-simplified, but it helps in understanding that enlarging a vector doesn’t degrade its quality.

Color-ific

Once this pain-staking process was completed we added color and some effects to produce our final logo (fig. 5). But first we had to decide what colors we would use, not only for our logo but for every printed or online item about us (including this web site). Well, our logo being a lion, we wanted one of the colors to be the color of a lion’s mane. But what color is a lion’s mane? How do you reproduce it on a computer and then in print and on the web? If an exact color is known (in computer terms: you know the hex, RGB or CMYK values for the color) then a site such as easyrgb.com is very useful. Tools on this site and others like it take a color and return a list of complementary colors that you can use to put together a color palette for your business. Easyrgb.com in particular also lets you search for colors by name, in case you don’t have the hex, RGB or CMYK values for your color.

But what if you don’t know what color a lion’s mane is and you don’t know where to begin? You can do a search for "lion" or "mane" or both on images.google.com, browse through the pictures, looking for just the right color and then use a graphics application to get it’s hex value. However, there ’s also a little tool out there that will do all that for you — sort of. The free program, called Word Color, will take your search terms and get images.google.com’s top nine results. It will then “look” at every pixel of those pictures and get an average of the hue, resulting in a color. Please note that this doesn’t always work as expected: a search for “clouds” yields a light-blue.

Type and Placement

After designing the logo, the job is not finished. The name of the company needs to accompany the logo and, of course, it needs to be in the right font, at the right size, in the right place for the image you are trying to portray.

We started by displaying our company name – Leone – in thousands of different fonts and choosing 30+ that we liked and thought appropriate. Then we just narrowed the list down until we had picked our font. Now it was time to repeat the whole process for the last part of our company name – Image & Design.

That’s All Folks

We hope that this article helped you in understanding the process of creating a logo. We look forward to working together with you to design your logo.