5 Tips for Designing Logos Faster




So apparently I am a logo designer now? Not by choice, I design sports apparel for my day job and recently I've been tasked with a slew of logo design challenges for some new brand ambassadors that our company is bringing on board to help promote our brand.

I've also had a couple of our clients request some logo designs for their teams. This has forced me into learning a little more of the ins and outs of sports logo design. 

Here are five tips I've picked up on my quest to become a faster logo designer. 


1 - Sketch ideas out FAST

Spend no more than one minute for each rough sketch and sketch for 10 minutes. Pick out a few of your favorite forms to develop. This also prevents you from getting too carried away and stuck on one design or putting in too much detail. If the logo reads well, after only a short amount of time then thats what you want.


2 - Give your logo's elements a house

Thick bold line work is the name of the game here. While there are tons of successful methods and styles to choose from. Using thick lines is a simple way to make everything easy for yourself and it's hard to not have a successful design using this method.


3 - Keep your line work on a top layer

This allows you to channel your inner child and color all sloppy like. This only holds true if you made your line work thick enough so any amount of scribbling will be contained. Gone are the days of trying to painfully match that bezier line that just wont arc right. 


4 - Minimize as much as you can

Ockhams razor that thang. If you're drawing a logo with an animal with fur or hair don't go ham on all the hair spikes. You want your logo to be succinct. We're not going for photorealism or trying impress everyone with our abilities to portray every follicle with painstakingly sick-nasty-pixel-bezier-scuffing-perfection. (Save that for intense illustrations) Try to keep hair spikes to no more than 3-4 more if your illustration kinda requires it, but the point is our brains are smart, they get what hair is supposed to look like. Don't go busying up your composition with unnecessary detail.


5 - Get color palette inspiration from the pros

Look up NBA, NFL, MLB etc team logos and designs. They've spent big money on market research to figure out what colors work well and there are tons of teams to reference. A tested treasure trove of inspiration for your color palettes.


Below are a couple of my recent comps:


I hope you find these tips helpful in your  workflow if you don't do these already. 

Until the next one!

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