Logo Design Process

This week I've been trying to lets of things organised for the pop-up shop project that I'm heading. In the past few weeks we've had some exciting developments, lots more people have come on board. we also got confirmation on the space, it will be in the Sony Centre on O Connell St. I'm so delighted about this project, especially now that the ball has gotten rolling. 

We decided on the name 'Limerick Craft & Design', it's pretty simple and 'it does exactly what it says on the tin'. The City Council were keen for it to have a strong link with Limerick in the name, so we kept it basic and to the point.

I've been working on the logo design over the past few days. After a little brain storming I found that my ideas were split into two catagories, either a clean, modern, slick logo, or something more textured and crafty. Both looks have their pros and cons but at the moment I'm leaning more towards the pared down designer image, but I played with both design types to see what ideas popped up.

I did some sketching with pens and pencils one of the days that I was at the market, this helps to loosen out some cobwebs in the creative process. But I find things really start to develop when I start looking at fonts. Usually when doing a logo I head over to DaFont, and browse through a few hundred fonts, I download whatever ones feel right to me. I allow this stage to be really broad, I don't over think it, if it feels right for the mood of the business I save it. After that I write out the name in all the fonts in photoshop, after seeing a bunch of them together I can quickly eliminate ones that either look too similar of that I don't think are suitable.By this point I had narrowed it down to 10 fonts, 5 modern and 5 crafty.

Then I spent a few hours making quick sketches around these fonts, using different colours and formats. They were all done fairly fast, just laying down ideas really. We will be meeting as a group tomorrow evening, I'll show the committee members what I've done, and hopefully we'll narrow it down to two or three designs. I'll then go back and work on these a lot more, tweaking each design, trying out different font sizes, colours and layout to see what works best. Finally we'll have a vote on what logo looks best.

I only do a few logo designs per year, but they are fun. I'm pretty much self taught, so I'm not too sure what the normal process for designing a logo is, but this is what works for me.

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