How Long Does It Take to Design a Logo?
It’s that time. That time to finally design your logo. You’ve been dreading this moment because you don’t consider yourself to be super creative but you know that your logo design is important. So how long exactly does it take to design a logo?
When you close your eyes and think of McDonalds, what do you see? Golden arches right? For those companies and products that have a strong logo, it’s the logo that people often think of first rather than the product itself. Think of Apple or Ford or Target. Odds are high that you have a good image of those logos in your mind without even looking at them. Whether it’s fair or not, we often judge a book by its cover. And that’s why the perceived value of a product or service is usually greater than the actual value. The same logo and visual identity seen over and over again build’s trust. Logos in essence put a face on a company and help people remember their experiences with companies. In fact, logos are often the first impression your potential customers will likely have of your company. Getting the logo wrong can miscommunicate who your company is and cause your audience to lose trust. Obviously, they think, if you can’t get your logo right, why would they trust your company to do anything else, right?
Yeah, we hear you. Logos are hard. And they are critical for developing your company’s brand persona. And that’s why when clients ask me how long it will take to design a logo they’re usually shocked when I can’t give them a set time frame. Why? Because there is no one way to design a logo and the process can vary depending on the client and even your agency.
Don’t have time to create you’re own logo? VERGE is a full-service branding agency that can help you develop world-class logo. Learn more:
Depending on the client and the agency there are a number of logotypes and the time frames in which they are produced varies depending on the situation. Here we provide 5 major types of logos and then discuss a general process for how a great logo is developed.
#1: The 3-Minute Napkin Logo
This is the mythological logo you see being designed in movies about marketers and designers, where a brilliant creative type pulls out a napkin and a pen and in less than a few minutes sketches the perfect logo. This logo needs no changes or revisions. It’s “perfect, almost instantly.
But here’s the thing. In the real world, logos or at least the best logos aren’t sketched on a napkin in a few minutes. More often than not, the 3-minute logo ends in disaster because you haven’t taken the time to do the exploration and refinement to make it a great logo.
And by now you’ve probably realized the 3-minute logo doesn’t really exist, but if you own or run a business, you may have assumed that it did. If so, when designing your company logo, you need to rid yourself of any idea that a great logo will be knocked out in 3 minutes.
#2: The 3-hour Logo
Okay, if a great logo can’t be created in minutes, what about a few hours? Well, ask yourself if you think it’s really possible to think through a logo in all its permutations and touch points -- such as a website/content management system, stationary, or building sign? The best logos think through not only how a design looks in two-dimensional space and in a digital medium, but also how the logo would be rendered in real space and on real objects because the best logos will be used over and over again in both real and virtual spaces and on a wide variety of surfaces and textures.
So again, it’s unlikely that you could truly develop a logo that would best represent your brand and voice in a matter of hours.
#3 The 3-Day Logo
A few days? Possibly. If you’re in a time crunch because you need to have something branded for a business transaction in a short time frame, the 3-day logo may help you out of a jam. 3 days would be about enough time to weed out rash ideas or poorly conceived designs and to try out different fonts and color treatments. In other words, it might help you to think through how a design might age over time. But odds are even if you can develop a decent logo in 3 days, you’re going to have to revise it or fix it later. And honestly, updating or refreshing a logo at a later date is a lot more expensive--in terms of both time and money--than simply doing it right the first time.
#4 The 3-Week Logo
3 weeks? Yeah, we’re getting into a realistic time frame for most small and mid size businesses to create a logo that completely captures the essence of their brand, is “versioned” for use on different mediums and backgrounds, and is flexible enough to evolve over time as the business changes. The 3-week logo, however, may not work for well-established or large organizations. Larger organizations obviously have had a logo associated with their brand for some time and changing a logo can negatively impact customers’ and the public’s perception of a brand, so a company needs to be more careful and take more time. For a small business, start up or even mid-size business, 3 or 4 weeks is enough time to develop a truly great logo for your business.
#5 The 3-Month or 6-month Logo
What about months? Well, you might assume given that you want to be careful with your logo and your brand identity, that taking 3 or 6 months to design your logo would be better than 3 or 4 weeks. But that’s not necessarily the case. In fact, the truth is, sometimes extending the logo design across a period of months can be counter productive. Usually it’s the result of the company not clearly knowing what they want or truly understanding their brand persona. Because they are confused, it makes it very difficult for an agency to deliver concepts and designs that they can agree on. And in some cases, the lengthy design period is the result of paralysis because the company is too afraid to commit to a design or concept. This is never good and always results in a substandard logo that doesn’t convey the brand persona or voice. Often the end result is a logo the company ends up scrapping later on.
However, sometimes lengthy design cycles, as I mentioned earlier, are helpful for larger companies that are rebranding or developing new sub-brands and have many stakeholders who need to weigh in and agree on a final design.
So How Long Does it Take to Design a Great Logo?
VERGE has a well-defined, 10-step process to ensure every logo we create for our clients accurately represents their brand persona and brand voice.
10 Steps to a Great Logo:
Step 1: Meet Client: When possible, we do our best to meet with every client who is redesigning their logo. By meeting a client, I mean it's best to meet in person, but even a remote meeting would work. Why is it important to meet the client for logo projects? It’s really just important to have an in depth discussion on the client’s current branding and brand persona but also to truly understand what logos they admire from other companies in their industry or even outside their industry to help guide us in an art direction that will be on brand and the client will love. The more discussion and brainstorming we do with our clients during a logo design project, the better our final design will be. This translates into overall greater satisfaction from our clients.
Step 2: Project Proposal: After we meet the client and have at least one in depth discussion about their logo project, VERGE will put together a proposal for the client that includes a detailed description of the entire logo design process, an approximate timeline for the logo design project, including key deliverables, and a price schedule that provides an estimate for the work that needs to be completed. Key deliverables will include mood boards, sketches, mockups, final design files, logo presentation, and copyright transfer.
Step 3: Research: Once the project proposal has been approved, VERGE moves to the next step in the process, which is research. During this phase, we will research our clients competitors brands, taking into account their logo design and how it’s treated in multiple company touch-points. We’ll also review branding and logos of companies outside the client’s industry the client has admired. And finally, based upon discussions, we’ll also research designs that are well known for communicating the client’s desired brand personality, taking into account color and shape.
Step 4: Ideation & Sketching: When we’ve completed our research we’ll begin the process of “ideation” where we brainstorm potential ideas for the look and feel of our client’s new logo. Ideation is often the most important aspect of the whole process as it is the core creative process that enables us to think of new ways of envisioning a client’s unique company services and products. From there we begin sketching. All resulting sketches remain in black and white so that we can stay focused on the most critical components of the logo design which are the line, weight, and shape of the logomark.
Step 5: Design Import into Illustrator or Photoshop: Once we’ve completed our initial sketches, we typically take 3-6 designs into Illustrator or Photoshop. From there we work on refining 6 designs until we believe they really capture the essence of our client’s brand. Again although these sketches have been imported to Illustrator and are now digital, we continue to design in black and white so we can focus on the design itself without the “distraction” of color. As every logo will eventually be used in black and white by the client, black and white becomes the baseline design from which all other permutations are constructed.
Step 6: Client Meeting: With 6 initial designs, we’ll then schedule a meeting with the client and work with them to narrow down the focus to 1 design that comes closest to the client’s brand.
Step 7: Logo Refinements: Once we’ve narrowed down the design into one final concept, we’ll take that design back and work out approximately 3 different variations of the final concept.
Step 8: Add Color: The next step is to introduce color into the design. In many instances, color is what makes or breaks a good logo design. So this is the stage where we explore different color treatments and then identify the color which best brings out or highlights the major design elements of the logo.
Step 9: Logo Presentation & Style Guide: Once the logo design is finalized with color, the logo is optimized into all major image file types in color, black and white and transparent--svg, jpeg, png etc. The logo is then ported into a presentation which shows the logo mocked up on all major digital brand touch points, such as a website, app, social media accounts, and all physical print touchpoints, such as stationary, signage, and banners. For a final touch, we include brand identity guidelines, which provides prescriptions and proscriptions for how the logo should be used in the marketplace. This helps to ensure everyone in the company is using the logo correctly and thereby helps maintain brand consistency and equity.
To discover what should be covered in a comprehensive brand identity guidelines, download our free checklist:
Step 10: Copyright Transfer: For the last step, VERGE will provide the original raw logo files and the official copyright transfer to the client. And that’s it. When all 10 steps are complete, the logo design process is finally finished. As you can see from this list of steps, it would be very difficult to do all 10 steps in 3 minutes, 3 hours, or even 3 days.
So, I think we’re finally ready to answer the question we posed at the beginning of this post: how long does it take to design a great logo? Well, in the end it depends on many factors but generally it will take 3 to 4 weeks for small businesses and startups to develop a truly phenomenal logo.
If you’d like to discuss having VERGE design your logo, why not schedule a free consultation or give us a call at (415) 715-9669.
If you’re still at the stage where you’re trying to decide if you need help with your brand, feel free to review VERGE’s free guide on how to develop a brand personality.