Bolidea – Giving Rise to Stellar Companies

by Magali Janvier

The logo is often the main visual element of the business, and it’s the first item people spot when they land on your website. For these reasons, your company’s logo is one of the fundamentals you can’t disregard when building a startup.

The logo itself can fall into a much greater scheme of brand and marketing, but often in a startup, there’s no time to think of the entire business marketing plan before having your logo designed. But what is the right time to spend on this? When does it become too much? How can you make sure you do the right steps and end up with a logo you find great? These are some of the questions I will cover in this post.

At Bolidea, we follow a specific process when we need a logo for a new startup. As startups usually do not have an in-house designer, we obviously need to outsource the making of the logo. When we outsource, we want to spend the necessary time to end up with the best result, but not too much time that it becomes the main activity and delays other priorities. Here are the 3 main steps we suggest you follow to end up with the best possible logo:

1. Prepare a creative brief:

The creative brief covers what you need and what you want; it holds the information the designer will need to be aware of in order to make you the best logo. Writing a Creative Brief will reduce the time spent giving feedback, and all the back and forth that this can lead to. This is what we include in our creative brief:

• Product Details: Mention your company name and your tagline and specify if you wish the latter to be included in your logo. Also, explain the product by writing your pitch(es), describing your industry and indicating how you are different from your competitors.
• Audience Information: Describe the different audiences you serve, particularly your target audience. Explain what it does on a daily basis and why it needs your product.
• Concept Guidelines: Mention if you want a symbol (like Apple), a logotype (like Facebook), or a mix (like MySpace). Point out the colors and shapes you want or don’t want to include in your logo as well as characteristics you want it to portray, such as: serious, young, innovative…
• Logo Preferences: Spend time finding logos you are fond of and describe what you like and dislike about them.
• Competitor Logos: Look over your competitor’s logos to see how yours will eventually fit in and include those logos in the brief.

2. Seek out your designer or design firm:

Since working toward having a logo designed requires a lot of time and effort on your part, you want the first logo selection you make to be the right one. Changing designers once the process has started, or even worse, changing the logo once it’s been finished will leave you spending more time on something that had been already checked off your task list. Here are the steps we suggest you follow to pick who will be doing your logo:

• Investigate the source of your preferences: Go through the list of logos you have identified as your preferred ones and look into who did them. This exercise can help you decide which designer you may want to select. Logopond is a good site to look at freelance designers and their logos. What’s great about freelance designers is that, compared to logo companies, it’s easier to size the designers’ style and decide whether you like it or not. Odds are that if you like the style figuring in their portfolio, you’ll like the logo they give you!
• Go over different online logo companies: If you do not find any freelance designer or want to look further, you may want to consider logo companies such as Logoworks or Infinity Logo Design. They tend to be a little less expensive than solo designers, but since many designers can contribute to the logo design, it’s harder to predict what style will emerge.
• Review your choices: After looking at your options, take an in-depth look at their prices, timeline and reputation. How many concepts and revisions do you have, how long does the process take, what is the final price? You can dig deeper and search online to see what previous clients think of the service and even how the designer is perceived within the logo designers’community.

3. Collaborate with your designer:

Once you’ve picked your designer or logo company, provide them with your creative brief – but don’t stop there. You should actively participate in the logo creation process if you want things to go faster and if you want to end up with the best possible result.

• Get people’s 2 cents: Throughout the entire process – of drafts and revisions – ask for people’s opinions and feedback. Don’t only ask your friends and family; try to ask your future customers since they are the ones this is being designed for.
• Avoid copyright infringements: Before choosing a concept as your favorite one, look at other logos to verify if yours resembles anything that already exists. To do so, we recommend you go to logo sites such as Logopond , Best Brands of the World, Logosauce, or Google images and do searches using keywords related your product. If you notice your eventual logo is very similar to an existent one – especially in the same industry – you may wish to make sure there is no copyright infringement. If there is an occurence of copyright infringement , or even if there are chances there is, you may have to reconsider your decision and pick a different concept.
• Send clear feedback: Once you have selected your favorite logo concept and are in the revision stage, it isn’t enough to say “nice” or “not nice”. You need to specifically express what you like and don’t like; make sure to communicate clearly what you expect in the next revision. It helps to play around with the image and visually clarify what you mean – MS Paint is a practical, simple, and quick tool for doing that.

The time you choose to spend on the logo creation process can also depend on how things evolve during the development. For example, we recently added a step to our process: Avoid copyright infringements. We added this because one of the companies we work with, ArtFox, recently had to take down its logo as it resembled an already existing fox logo.

You can obviously decide to do more or less than what we propose, but we strongly believe that these steps will put you on the right track to obtaining a great logo. If you think we are missing a crucial step or have any resources to share, we encourage you to leave us your suggestions in the comments section below.