- Hey folks!
Today's video is going to be about
how to find inspiration when
it comes to logo design.
Now it isn't aimed
specifically at logo designers.
It's aimed at everyone.
It may be that your a business owner
and you're looking to have a logo designed
for your product or
service, and you want to get
a better idea of what
it is you're looking for
so you can communicate
that to your designer.
So the process and
techniques that I'm looking
at today are useful to everyone.
So the first thing we want
to do is some research.
Research into the product or service area
of the client's brand.
Now you can do this in all
sorts of different ways,
but today what I thought
I'd do is I would pick
a specific subject.
I have a friend who wants to start
a sci-fi YouTube channel.
So let's take a look at the process
I would go through to try
and get some inspiration
when it comes to creating a
logo for that YouTube channel.
I'm kind of lucky on this point
because I'm a big sci-fi geek anyway
so I know a lot about that area.
But one of the first things that
you can do is create a mind map.
So at the centre of that mind map,
I would have sci-fi or science fiction
and from that I would have different words
which I associate with sci-fi.
So spaceship, spaceman, laser guns, UFOs,
stars, planets, time
travel, all of the that,
all the words that you can
associate with science fiction.
When you have that mind
map, you'll be able to start
to pull words out and
connect them together.
And you'll already start to have ideas
on how the logo could potentially look
by pulling in some things
like planets and stars
and spaceships going around
them or anything like that.
So we're not drawing anything yet.
All the imagination is being sparked
just from these words on the mind map.
Next thing to do is to start looking
at some design books.
What logos are already out there?
What ones look futuristic?
Now I'm quite lucky because I do have
quite a lot of logo design books.
Books like Logo Lounge.
These are great for reference.
They are full of existing logos
by many many talented designers,
but these can give you
very quick inspiration
in terms of how your
final logo may well look.
After I've had a look through my books,
I'll head on to my computer,
fire up my web browser
and get right into Google.
So we open our web browser at Google,
and we want to do a
search for sci-fi logos.
And we hit Google Search.
And what we want to do is we want to click
on the Images tab.
And there we go, we're
presented with hundreds
if not thousands of sci-fi based logos.
All different styles.
All different types of designs.
Really great for inspiration
for your own logo design
or in our case, a sci-fi logo design.
Some are bad, some are
great, but you can pick up
little things from each of them.
Now let's say if you want to just widen
that a little bit, we
could say sci-fi movie logs
because maybe that's the type
of look you want to go for.
And it will be even more specific.
It will narrow it down to only showing
movie type sci-fi logos.
And again, we can scroll through these
and just be inspired, take inspiration
from what's presented to us.
So another site that I really
like to use is Pinterest.
A bit like Google, it does
show you lots of images.
I've done a search here as
you can see for sci-fi logos.
The different being that Pinterest can be
a lot more focused because people
generally are creating
boards and collecting images
based around specific topics.
So you will find that
someone probably has done
a lot of the legwork for you in collecting
lots of sci-fi images.
So if we click on this
image here for example,
we can see below it's going to bring up
a lot of related type
images, and in this case,
sort of icons and things
related to sci-fi.
So these are really really useful.
Now if you find images on Google
or on Pinterest, I highly
recommend you save them
to a folder on your desktop
because the next stage is
to create a mood board.
With a mood board, you lay out the images
you really like and you can also list
all of the words from your mind map
that we did earlier.
You can then start to link
those words to the images
and it's starts to open up
different pathways for you.
It's around about this point where
I've looked on the internet,
I've looked through my books,
I've done my mind map,
that I start the sketching.
Now even when we start
the sketching process,
there's nothing firmly there yet.
The sketching process allows your mind
to just be as scribbled
as possible on the page.
But because you've done that research,
in your subconscious you've got all these
different elements swirling around
so they can come out onto the page
when you're doodling with your pencil.
I recommend you sketch
for at least an hour.
For the first half an hour,
you'll be trying too hard
and you'll be trying to come
up with finished designs.
It's guaranteed, everyone does it.
By the time you get to that hour,
you'll be more relaxed
and the ideas will start
to flow more naturally.
They'll be less forced.
The inspiration from all the things
you've looked at before
will start to channel
themselves through the end of your pencil
and onto your page.
And you'll start to see that's when
the real concepts for your logo
design will start to appear.
So let's quickly recap
my research processes
for when I'm trying to inspire myself.
You research the subject area.
You create a mind map.
You look through some logo design books
if you have some available.
We go online.
We look through Google and Pinterest.
We then create a mood board of the images
that we found along with
the words from our mind map.
We use those as inspiration
for starting our sketching,
and from our sketches we produce concepts
that come from the
inspiration of all the stuff
that we did during our research process.
Sounds like a lot of hard work,
but inspiration generally
does not come out of thin air.
Sometimes it will.
Sometimes you're lucky.
But really, it's a lot of hard work.
If you want to create
an original logo design,
you really do need to work for it.
And the more inspiration you
can give yourself for that,
the better.
So there you are folks.
That's a process that
I use to get inspired
when it comes to creating
logo designs for my clients.
I'm pretty sure though that a lot of you
out there will have different processes.
I'd love to hear what they are
'cause I'm always looking
to change up my own
to add some freshness to it.
So please if you do
have a different process
or you have one nugget of information
which you think will be useful,
pop it in the comments section
so that everyone can see and
try it out for themselves.
I hope you find this video useful.
If you have, please give it a thumbs up.
Leave me a comment as well.
I love speaking to all of the people
who watch these videos.
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And until I see you next time,
stay creative folks.
