The Secret To Designing PERFECT LOGO SHAPES (6 Things You Need)

Summary

This video provides tips on enhancing logo design quality, increasing client approvals, and creating memorable designs for portfolios. It emphasizes the importance of shape psychology in evoking emotions, using grids for precision, and considering real-world applications of logo designs. Additionally, it stresses the value of understanding client needs and market research to inform design choices. The video also announces a logo design competition and introduces Framer, a tool for interactive design, highlighting its user-friendly interface for creating realistic designs quickly.

Takeaways

• 🎨 Boosting the quality of logo designs helps get more client approvals and enhances portfolios.
• 🌐 Interactive designs are becoming essential in the design industry, making it crucial to learn tools like Framer.
• 🔵 Shape psychology is important in logo design: squares represent strength, circles imply community, and angled lines evoke motion.
• 🏗️ Example: The CAT logo uses triangles to signify strength and stability in construction machinery.
• 🖼️ Designers should place logo shapes in real-life mockups to see how they perform beyond digital screens.
• 📊 Knowing the client and their target audience is critical for creating logos that align with corporate values and business goals.
• 🔗 Combining word pairs or concepts (e.g., Adidas' 'motion' and 'progress') can inspire strong logo shapes.
• 💡 Focus on memorability for successful logo design, with simplicity being a key factor.
• 📐 Using grids ensures precision in logo design, helping create well-crafted and balanced shapes.
• 🏆 Logo design competitions can help improve skills, and feedback can provide insight into trends and areas for improvement.

Q & A

What is the main benefit of watching this video?

The video aims to boost the quality of your logo designs, helping you get more client approvals and adding stunning designs to your portfolio.

Why is learning to create interactive designs important in the design industry today?

With the direction the design industry is going, learning interactive design is essential because it enhances how designs are presented to clients, making them feel more realistic and impressive.

What is 'shape psychology' and why is it important for logo design?

Shape psychology refers to how different shapes evoke different emotions in the subconscious mind. Skilled logo designers use shapes strategically to evoke specific feelings or thoughts from the target market.

Can you briefly describe what different shapes represent in logo design?

Squares and rectangles represent strength and reliability, circles and ovals convey community and love, while angled straight lines suggest motion and speed.

Why is the CAT (Caterpillar) logo a good example of shape psychology in design?

The CAT logo uses triangles, which represent strength and stability. This aligns with the company’s association with heavy construction machinery.

What is a useful strategy to test your logo shapes before finalizing them?

A good strategy is to place the logo design in real-life situations like business cards, banners, or letterheads. This helps you evaluate how the design looks and functions in practical use.

What is the significance of knowing your client and target market for logo design?

Understanding your client’s corporate values and goals, along with their target market, helps you create a logo that aligns with their brand identity and appeals to their customers.

How can combining word pairs help in logo design?

Combining word pairs related to the brand can lead to creative logo shapes. For example, Adidas used 'motion' and 'progress,' which influenced the creation of angled lines in their logo, symbolizing forward movement and growth.

Why is memorability important in logo design?

Memorability is key because a simple, recognizable logo is more likely to stick in people’s minds, which contributes to the logo's success. Brands like Nike, Apple, and McDonald's have logos that are simple and highly memorable.

How can grids help improve logo design?

Using grids ensures that your logo shapes are precise and well-crafted. While starting with a sketch is fine, refining the design with a grid helps maintain balance and accuracy.

Outlines

00:00

💡 Boost Your Logo Design with Shape Psychology

This paragraph emphasizes the importance of using shape psychology in logo design to enhance the emotional impact and effectiveness of logos. The speaker explains that shapes like squares, circles, and triangles evoke different emotions and ideas—reliability, community, and strength, respectively. Designers can use these principles to influence the target market's perception. A real-world example is the CAT logo, which uses triangles to symbolize strength and stability in the heavy machinery industry.

05:05

🔍 Test Your Logos in Real-Life Contexts

Here, the speaker stresses the importance of testing logo designs in real-world situations, such as on business cards or banners, before finalizing them. The paragraph warns against getting tunnel vision when working in design software and reminds designers to ensure that the logo is functional in practical applications. This tip encourages designers to mock up logos to avoid discrepancies between digital and real-life presentations.

🎯 Know Your Client and Their Target Market

The third tip reinforces the importance of understanding the client and their audience when designing logos. Designers should research corporate values and business goals, which will help them create logos that align with the company’s identity and resonate with its customers. The paragraph serves as a reminder to gather insights into the client’s vision and customers before crafting logo concepts.

💡 Use Word Associations to Inspire Logo Shapes

This paragraph introduces the concept of using word pairs to generate creative logo shapes. By associating words with concepts like motion and progress, designers can develop meaningful shapes that embody the company’s values. Examples like Adidas, which uses angled lines to represent motion, and Truth Arts, where initials were turned into an easel, show how word associations can fuel logo creation.

🧠 Focus on Memorability in Logo Design

Memorability is key to successful logo design, as explained in this tip. The speaker advises keeping logos simple to make them more memorable, drawing examples from iconic brands like Nike, Apple, and McDonald’s, which have simple yet recognizable logos. A focus on simplicity can help ensure that the logo sticks in people’s minds, contributing to long-term success.

📏 Use Grids to Perfect Your Logo Designs

In this tip, the speaker advocates for using grids when refining logo designs. Starting with sketches is fine, but grids ensure precision and consistency. Grids help designers perfect the shapes of their logos, creating well-crafted and polished final designs. The speaker recommends a related video on grids for those who want to further explore the topic.

🏆 Logo Design Competition Results and Next Contest Announcement

This paragraph covers the results of a banner design competition, highlighting the top three winners and their prizes. The speaker critiques each design, explaining the strengths and weaknesses of the entries. The first-place design stood out for aligning with current design trends and requiring no changes. The speaker also teases a logo design competition for the following month and encourages viewers to like and share the video.

🚀 Framer Sponsorship and Learning Interactive Design

In this final paragraph, the speaker introduces Framer, a no-code tool for creating interactive designs. They describe Framer’s features, including smart components, clean layouts, and realistic flows, making it a valuable tool for anyone looking to stand out in the design industry. The speaker encourages viewers to sign up for free and learn how Framer can enhance their skills in just a few hours.

Keywords

💡Logo Design

Logo design refers to the process of creating a symbol or mark that identifies a brand or company. In the video, the speaker emphasizes how understanding shape psychology, memorability, and practical application can boost the quality of logo designs, leading to more client approvals and an enhanced portfolio.

💡Shape Psychology

Shape psychology involves understanding how different shapes evoke specific emotions and meanings in the human subconscious. The video explains that certain shapes, like triangles, circles, and squares, can communicate strength, community, or motion, which are crucial elements for a successful logo design.

💡Interactive Design

Interactive design refers to creating designs that engage users in a dynamic way, often through digital interfaces. The video suggests that as the design industry evolves, learning how to create interactive designs is essential, as they can make presentations more engaging and realistic, rather than static.

💡Real-Life Application

Real-life application means testing a logo in various real-world contexts, such as on business cards or banners, to see how it functions. The video advises designers to mock up their logos in these settings to avoid tunnel vision and ensure the design works effectively outside of the screen.

💡Client Research

Client research involves gathering information about the client's business, goals, and values to guide the design process. The speaker stresses the importance of knowing the client and their target market, which helps in creating logo shapes that align with the brand's message and identity.

💡Memorability

Memorability in logo design refers to how easily a logo can be remembered by viewers. The video emphasizes that simple, iconic shapes like those in the logos of Nike, Apple, and McDonald’s are memorable, which is key to their long-lasting success.

💡Grids

Grids are design tools that help organize elements in a structured and precise manner. The speaker mentions that using grids when crafting logos ensures that shapes are well-proportioned and visually balanced, improving the overall quality and professionalism of the design.

💡Word Pairing

Word pairing is a method where designers combine two key words that represent a brand’s values or goals to inspire a logo shape. An example from the video is Adidas, where the words 'motion' and 'progress' led to the use of angled, straight lines to symbolize forward motion and growth.

💡Minimalism

Minimalism in logo design refers to keeping the design simple and uncluttered. The video suggests that focusing on simplicity often leads to more memorable logos, citing famous brands like Nike and Apple as examples of successful minimalist designs.

💡Framer

Framer is a no-code tool for creating interactive designs. The video promotes Framer as a platform that helps designers create realistic prototypes and interactive layouts quickly, enabling them to stand out in the competitive design industry.

Highlights

Boost the quality of your logo designs to get more client approvals and add stunning designs to your portfolio.

Shape psychology is crucial for logo design, with shapes like squares, circles, and angles evoking different emotions and meanings.

Understanding how to use different shapes can help logo designers evoke specific emotions in a target market.

Experiment with placing logo designs in real-life situations to see how they look in practical use.

It's essential to know your client and target market, including their corporate values and goals, to create meaningful logos.

Pairing words like 'motion' and 'progress' can help form effective logo designs that evoke the right message.

Memorability is key in logo design; simplicity often leads to the most memorable logos.

Use design grids to ensure precision and craftsmanship in your logo shapes.

Shape psychology example: The CAT logo uses triangles to evoke strength and stability, fitting for a construction machinery company.

Mock-ups on items like business cards or banners help assess how logos will perform in real-life applications.

Nike, Apple, and McDonald’s logos stand out due to their simplicity and memorability.

Using grids for logo design helps ensure consistent and professional results.

Adidas used angled lines to symbolize motion and progress in their logo design.

Simplicity in logo design often leads to more success and easier brand recognition.

Framer offers an easy-to-use, no-code tool for creating interactive design components and layouts quickly.

Transcripts

by watching today's video you will be able to  boost the quality of your logo designs allowing  

you to get more client approvals and of course  add some stunning logo designs to your portfolio  

with the way the design industry is going learning  how to create interactive designs is a no-brainer  

instead of putting flat files in front of your  team manager or client imagine being able to hand  

them a design that looks so good it feels like a  real website learn about framer later in today's  

video now my career and my logo designs really  grew to greater things when i started to implement  

shape psychology into my projects and that's  why it's the first tip in today's video  

now i'm not going to go into huge detail about  the psychological meaning for each kind of shape  

because i have done that multiple times on  this channel and there are loads of websites  

out there that talk about it but briefly squares  and rectangles are strong and reliable circular  

or oval shapes represent community friendship  and love angled straight lines are linked back  

to motion and a dynamic sense of speed and the  list just goes on but the important thing is to  

understand that our subconscious mind responds in  different ways to different lego shapes straight  

lines circles curves jagged edges they all imply  a different meaning and so a skilled logo designer  

can use shapes to evoke a specific emotion to the  target market or to make the target market think a  

certain way and remember graphic design is just  a visual communication so shape psychology is a  

huge part of logo designing or it should be a very  good example of shape psychology is the cat logo  

now cat is short for caterpillar and they're a  business that leads the way in heavy construction  

machinery production and sales triangles from a  shape psychology point of view show strength and  

stability which obviously is something you  want to evoke when talking about machinery  

used in construction now we would look into why  yellow or orange is used for this logo but that's  

another story for a different video but if you do  think you know comment below the second tip is to  

experiment with placing your logo design shapes  in real life situations to see how they look  

sometimes we can kind of get tunnel vision when  crafting our logo shapes on paper or design  

software and that can lead us to where we forget  about the actual practical use of the logo design  

so before you send designs to a client or settle  on a specific lego shape try mocking it up on a  

business card a letterhead or banner or wherever  the logo might end up in real life and see how  

it functions in that situation you might find that  your logo on screen looks very very different when  

it's used in a real life application and that  might change the whole course of your project  

tip number three is to know your client and the  target market yeah i've said this many many times  

but you should be doing things like compiling  a list of the corporate values of your clients  

or take a close look at the goals the business  wants to achieve if you conduct the research  

needed you can then start to formulate concepts  that turn into logo design shapes so basically  

here tip number three is a quick reminder to  know your clients and also their customers  

the fourth tip helps with getting  the ideas for your lego shapes  

from your research you can marry together word  pairs in couples so an example could be that  

adidas had two words such as motion and progress  which would lead to the logo shape being born  

as angle straight lines do evoke a sense of  forward motion and the steps up could be seen  

as progress or you can take my truth out to logo  project where i use the initials for tna for truth  

arts and then i also turned that into an easel  which of course relates back to art combining  

word pairs or words can lead to the best logo  shapes when carefully thought out of course  

the fifth tip for excellent logo design  shapes is to really focus on memorability  

that's one of the core concepts of a great lego  design and if you do focus on the logo being  

memorable throughout a project you will likely  end up with something halfway to being acceptable  

and often an easy way to make a logo  design memorable is to keep it simple  

think of the most popular logo designs out  there we're talking about nike apple mcdonald's  

microsoft all of these logos have shapes that  are very very simple and they stick in your mind  

and that's the main key to their success really  of course alongside branding techniques and such  

tip number six is to use our grids there are  many grids at your disposal as a logo designer  

using a grid will ensure that your shapes are  precise and crafted with care sure you can start  

off with a sketch or an idea but when it comes to  finishing that shape using a grid is almost always  

going to be a great idea now i'm going to leave  a video at the end of this one that talks about  

logos and grids so i suggest you do check out  that video to further your learning on the subject  

so last week i launched a competition where you  guys had to design me a banner now if you want to  

have another cash prize competition next month do  make sure to like and share this video on social  

media and also it should be known that it was very  difficult to choose the three top designs for this  

competition i ended up finding things i wanted  to change in every single design pretty much  

but the work was good overall but in third place  for twenty dollars is this design right here  

now i liked my channel colors being used i like  the minimal design and i also liked how clean it  

looked however the satori section in the white box  on the left has a weird kind of leading and micro  

space layout and i think the layout in general  is just a bit random with not that much thought  

taken into consideration but yeah it's a fairly  good design and that's why it's in a number three  

next up we have this design here for second place  and for fifty dollars for me this could have been  

the first place but the outline typography on the  left on the right is almost illegible because it  

has that kind of glowing effect it just doesn't  work everything else is really awesome though the  

lighting the style and it does look pretty epic so  yeah congratulations to second prize on this one  

and the first place for 200 is this design here  which is really really interesting it falls in  

line with this year's and probably next year's  design trends and it's just a design that is very  

different from the rest there were around eight  designs in total that i had to really consider  

for the top three spots so it wasn't easy for me  to do that and this design right here doesn't need  

any changes made to it pretty much which is one of  the main reasons why it won i'm going to contact  

the three winners via email today and we're going  to get things processed and don't worry if you  

didn't see your design because next month i will  launch a logo design competition so remember to  

like and share today's video if you want that  to happen so the sponsor of today's video is  

framer it's a no code free to use tool making it  easy for anyone to get into interactive design  

their mission is to help you get closer to real  you can create your own smart components complete  

with multiple states design clean layouts with  easy to use layout tools and of course build  

flows so realistic that your project feels like an  actual website in just a couple of hours you can  

have a new skill that helps you stand out from the  crowd now sign up to framer for free at framer.com  

that link is in the description box below be until  next time guys design your future today peace

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