Creating a logo scares the shit out of me.
Out of all the visual elements involved with a brand - profile pictures, those long horizontal bars on the top of social media profiles, font/color choices, whatever - the logo is the most intense. It’s a tiny, simple thing. It has to be easily seen and understood at a small size - and you really, really don’t want to change it.
Think about the Nike swoop logo. They’ve never changed that shit. It is a fucking LINE. How does one find such an elegant logo?
I’m embarrassed to admit that I’ve never made a logo before. I let it slide and forgot about it with previous branding efforts.
As an artist, talking about “branding” and "logos" is the least cool thing, but if you look around - all the big acts have logos. It’s not uncool, it’s totally standard. People just want to pretend they’re “pure artists”, “we’d never think about the business” - bullshit!
Even these artsy fucks have a logo!
I have no secrets. So I’ll give you the scoop. Here is the brainstorming process I used to get past the initial uncertainty/fear of logos and get into some interesting ideas:
The Logo Brainstorming Process
Brainstorming is about allowing yourself to be dumb. You come up with 100 ideas so you can find the 5 decent ones scattered throughout.
Self-consciousness and doubt are truly the enemy in this phase. There’s no clean, easy way to do it. You can’t skip the bad ideas. I find it best to go into the opposite direction: Just think up a ton of ridiculous ideas, let myself be stupid, and sort it out later.
My goal was to fill up one full notebook page with logo concepts. Here’s what I ended up with:
I’ll type it out as well:
(1) Me w/ Megaphone
(2) Hourglass w/ flower blooming out
(3) some kind of brain/mind
(4) me going “sh!!”
(5) an open book with my face on the page
(6) fire
(7) naked
(8) headless w/ arm extended forward holding detached head
(9) a UFO
(10) me writing in a notebook
(11) me at the front door
(12) beckoning viewer to come in
(13) megaphone by itself
(14) my head w/ a broadcast antenna coming out
(15) me selfie-ing
(16) a microscope
(17) a magnifying glass
(18) a mouth running
(19) a guitar that is also a video game controller
(20) me at a chessboard
(21) …or a checkers board
(22) 2+2=5
(23) me sitting in a pile of books
(24) me sitting surrounded by music gear
(25) tye-dye spiral backdrop
(26) me showing empty wallet
(27) one of those walls covered in notes/pins/etc like in a movie
(28) just my face
(29) dog wearing headphones
(30) lightbulb
(31) my face w/ lightbulb on top
(32) a drum machine.
That’s some unbridled, un-diluted creativity right there. After thinking all of that into existence, I put a star next to the ideas that seemed like they have the most potential. Those were: (1), (2), (14), (18), (23), and (24).
This process is great. It’s important to break through the wall of self-consciousness to get to the childlike state of playing with art, where all real progress seems to happen.
Tomorrow: Drafting
The next step is to actually try out the best of these ideas. In my post tomorrow, I will show you how I turn these concepts from ideas into rough drafts, using my sketchbook to quickly get an idea of what logo ideas are the coolest in practice.
In the meantime, let me know: What is your brainstorming process? Do you do any “stream of consciousness” or similar exercises to shake loose new ideas?
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