Dining outside of the home has become one of America’s favorite commodities. In fact, the average household spends over $3000 a year at restaurants, which is a huge chunk of salary.

The market is hot and ready for restaurants to succeed. But, you do have to be aware of how steep your competition is. The restaurant industry is actually quite over-saturated, making it hard to captivate new diners.

You have to deliver more than just quality food. Everything from your aesthetic to your brand needs to be on point at all times. Let’s focus on the latter, as branding is imperative to the success of all businesses.

When building a brand, a logo is a great place to start. It gives customers an eye into your company while telling a unique story. These 7 restaurant logo designs will give you inspiration for your own product.

1. Olive Garden

Everyone’s favorite chain Italian restaurant can teach us a bit about color appropriation. When designing a logo, you need to keep in mind how well your color scheme works together.

Olive Garden makes use of an olive green, which is often associated with Italian culture. Many Italian restaurants use this dark green or even a red to emphasize their flair. We indirectly ascribe meanings to colors, which is why greens and blues send different messages than pinks and purples.

What colors can help an audience resonate with your brand? If you’re a fast food restaurant, you may consider red or orange, as they allude to joy and speediness. A more high-end restaurant should consider a purple, black, or white.

2. Cracker Barrel

Cracker Barrel is a perfect example of how to use imagery to tell a story. You see an elder man leaning against a barrel, with the words “Old Country Story” in the center. This is because Cracker Barrel started as a small country store long ago.

So, how can you capture your own story? A good place to start is to consider why your audience chooses you over other restaurants. Are you freaky fast? Family-friendly? Fresh? Finger licking good?

Use an anecdotic to drive home what your brand sells. Finding a unique selling proposition is essential to finding brand identity.

3. Denny’s

What makes America’s favorite diner so ubiquitous in mainstream culture? No, it’s not that you can find one at nearly any exit off the freeway.

It’s how Denny’s props itself as an iconic brand that withstands through time. Part of its timeless appeal comes from its typeface logo, that only states the company’s name.

It’s not fancy or gaudy. It’s not overly decorative or complex. It doesn’t get crazy with colors or symbols. It simply states ‘Denny’s’ in a bold, red font with a yellow background.

This is one of the best examples on how to keep a logo simple, yet expressive. Sometimes the most creative logos aren’t the ones that are so in-your-face.

4. Oodles Noodle Bar

You’re probably not familiar with this Thai-influenced cafe unless you live in Seattle. But, Oodles can teach us all about getting creative with a logo through balanced shapes.

It’s advised to not use unfamiliar shapes when designing a logo, as it’ll confuse your audience. Instead, go with a symbol that is recognizable, and that ties your brand neatly together.

As a noodle bar, it makes sense why Oodles chose two chopsticks and a bowl in its logo. They took their creativity one step further by situating their main offering in the middle of the image. It’s familiar, yet innovative, and leaves no confusion amongst consumers.

5. Bottle + Kitchen

Another restaurant that’s probably unbeknownst to you is Bottle + Kitchen, an American gastropub based out of Portland. What makes this logo so special? Despite having a mix of different shapes, Bottle + Kitchen keeps a clean, symmetrical look.

Having a symmetrical logo doesn’t always mean you’re going to have a balance of shapes on each side. What’s important is optimizing the space, so one side isn’t filled while the other is completely blank.

You can measure this by imagining a rectangle or circle surrounding your logo. Would the edges of your logo meet the outer part of the encompassing shape? This can also help if you need better alignment.

6. Wendy’s

Since Dave Thomas opened this iconic burger chain in 1969, his redheaded daughter has been apart of the logo. Not only was the founder a family oriented man, but he also prided himself in old-fashioned values.

This logo exemplifies all of those qualities. Despite being one of the largest burger chains in America, we still get that homegrown feel from the Wendy’s logo. The inclusion of Thomas’ daughter has resonated so well because it sends that unique message.

We feel confident in the product we’re getting because of that family tie. This is the type of differentiator brands should look for to set themselves apart.

7. Roka Akor

You can find Roka Akor throughout Scottsdale, Chicago, and San Francisco. It’s a luxurious, award-winning sushi and seafood brand whose logo says just that.

Their logo is neatly tied together with a discernible black font and modern Japanese typeface. There isn’t a ton of words, symbols, or other shapes, which keeps it from looking cluttered. Still, when you see this logo, you can tell the message it’s trying to convey.

Sometimes familiarity isn’t such a bad thing, and Roka Akor uses this to their advantage. We get the feel that it’s an elegant restaurant, and it’s uniqueness still shows through expressive font.

In Need of a Restaurant Logo?

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If you need to design a clothing company logo, where do you begin?

A lot of different things go into creating a new logo or redesigning an old one. The clothing business is competitive, and a logo matters. Eight years ago, Gap attempted to redesign its classic logo with disastrous results.

It cost the company millions in design costs, focus groups, and bad press. The company underestimated the attachment people had to its logo, and the reaction was so strong, the company reverted to its old logo just a few days later.

That’s the potential impact your clothing logo has on your customers. How do you design a logo that stands out from the crowd? Read on to find out.

The Most Important Step Isn’t The Design

You’ll be surprised to learn that the most important step in designing a logo isn’t designing the logo itself, but rather the planning and research that happens beforehand.

What you learn in the research and planning phase will inform your designs, and actually, make it easier to apply design principles because you know exactly the look and feel you want to create.

Before you start designing, you have to have in-depth knowledge of two things: your company and your customers.

Knowing Your Company

We’re not looking at sales figures or anything like that. Rather, we’re going to look at your company’s vision and mission. You want to make sure that the reason why your company exists aligns with your company’s brand and your customers.

If your company’s mission is to create upscale business clothing for older women, you want to be sure that your logo and brand reflect that.

One easy way to go about this is to describe your clothing company as a person. Is it a man or a woman? What do they wear? What do they drive? What is a typical day like? Treating your company as a person will help you describe what your company is about.

Once you know why your company exists, you want to be able to describe the brand’s promise in a few words. For example, Nike’s mission and brand promise are to “bring innovation and inspiration to every athlete.”

Volvo’s is to make driving safer. What does your company promise its customers?

Who Are Your Customers?

When you have your company’s mission and brand promise down, you want to make sure that you understand your customers as well.

When they’re looking at different clothing companies, what do they want? Are they shopping for value or status?

You need to be sure that your customers’ expectations line up with your brand promise. That’s how you’ll create loyal customers who are attached to your brand.

Know What Makes Good (and Bad) Design

When you’re designing your clothing company logo, you have to know what goes into a good and bad design. When people look at a logo, they subconsciously process the colors, fonts, shapes, and symbols to create meaning.

Those meanings may vary across cultures, which is why it’s so important to know your audience. If your customers are largely based in the U.S. and Canada, they’ll perceive colors and symbols the same way.

Color

Color is one of the bigger impacts on design. Different colors are processed in the brain and they have psychological associations with different emotions.

Blue is used throughout many classic brands. Blue is associated with safety, reliability, and security. That’s why so many companies from IBM to Gap use it.

Black is a color of power, mystery, and strength. It’s used a lot in retail for this reason. Black can also be associated with sadness and death, so you have to be careful about how you use it and the color combinations you use.

Font

The fonts that you use also have an impact. Block fonts tend to convey something that’s bold or strong. Retro fonts can take people back to another time, as their childhood.

Some fonts are playful, and others are more conservative. You want to choose a font that matches your clothing brand’s promise.

A good example is a logo for this company. They sell modern clothing, and the fonts chosen reflect that.

Symbols

Even the symbols and lines that you use in your logo have an effect on people. A round logo can be seen as warm or soft. A logo with direct lines has the perception of durability and reliability.

The question for you is how approachable is your brand? Do you want to be seen as reliable or flexible?

You can do additional research to scope out what your competition has for a logo. Note what fonts they use and what they’re trying to communicate with their logos. You can use this as an opportunity to position your clothing company in a way that the competition doesn’t.

Doing competitive research gives you additional inspiration before you design your logo.

Designing Your Logo

You’re finally ready to start designing your logo. You want to start by brainstorming ideas and designing different versions of your clothing company logo. This is actually the easy part when you take the time to do research into your company, your competition, and your target audience.

You can describe exactly what you want your logo to accomplish, and you can test your logo to make sure it does that.

Print out several versions of your logo and ask potential customers and current customers what they think. You can also check with your employees.

Once you test out your logo, you should have one that stands out more than the others. That’s the final version you should go with.

A Clothing Company Logo That Stands Out

When you’re designing a clothing company logo, you have to take the time to research and plan before you start to design. Those are the most important steps you can take because those steps will inform the rest of your design.

You can then apply the principles of design to connect with your customers and create an unforgettable logo and brand that people can relate to.

Once you do those things, the rest is easy, just brainstorm your ideas, test them, choose the one that works best.

Are you ready to get started? You can start designing your logo using our online tool today.

Creating a memorable logo is one of the most important aspects for any new company trying to stand out in a competitive marketplace.

This is especially true in newly developing industries because no brand stands out in the minds of customers.

In the cannabis industry, the worst companies will make an obvious and boring cannabis logo that just uses an overused image, such as the marijuana leaf.

If you want a great logo that stands out, follow the steps below.

1. Simplify Your Brand

We get it. You love your company and believe in the product or service. But potential customers don’t know anything about it and will compare you to your competitors during their searches.

If your company just comes across as a company that does/sells “cannabis stuff”, it won’t be nearly as effective as a competitor with a direct message.

For example, imagine two companies make edibles. Company A’s logo is a graphic illustration of the cannabis leaf while company B’s logo is a chef holding a cookie with a cannabis leaf on his apron.

Neither logo is particularly original, but at least with company B, it’s obvious they sell edibles. Potential customers will instantly understand what they offer and will see company B as a specialist rather than a general cannabis store. The more info you can communicate in the logo the better.

But before even sketching your logo, make sure you can condense what your company offers to its customers down to just one or two words.

Even if it’s abstract like “relaxation” or “comfort”, these will help inform the look and feel of your design.

2. Understand Your Customers

Another mistake new companies make is to generalize their customers. E.g. “our customers like to get high for both medical and recreational purposes.”

This statement is too obvious and applies to almost every cannabis company. What is it specifically that customers will get from your company that they can’t get better anywhere else?

Is it the variety of choice? The quality of ingredients? The safety of your products? Once you narrow this down, you can then start thinking of your customers in a more specific and personal way.

For example, if your company is focused on the safety of your products, you will describe your customers as “people new to cannabis who are both curious and anxious about trying it. They are tired of pills and medicine and want to try something new but they are afraid of ‘bad trips’.”

This is a far more in-depth belief about who your customers are that will not only shape your logo but the entire way your company communicates and talks about itself to others.

In this example, a logo that looks more medical and professional may be better suited than one that looks casual and fun.

3. Search the Internet

Once you have a good idea about what you want to communicate, start searching the internet for existing logos and images for inspiration.

This is essential to make sure you don’t copy another company and also to ensure your logo will be truly different and stand out.

A good method is to save images and logos you like while making a note about what it is you like about it. From the color scheme and simplicity to the art style or the font, whatever stands out to you probably stands out to their customers too.

It’s important to know that it is perfectly normal for professional designers to draw inspiration and use elements from different logos to make their own.

The end result just needs to be unique and communicate what your company offers.

4. Create a Table

A good technique to help you think outside the box and create something visually different is to create a table that lists all the most important elements of your company.

For example, the edibles company could make individual columns with the headers: Cannabis, Food, Healthy, Safe, Delicious, Relief.

You then try and find (or draw) as many different images and words to represent that element. At this stage, there are no ‘wrong’ or ‘stupid’ ideas because you never know when a dumb thought could inspire something interesting. Just do as many variations as you can.

The point is to help you see that there are many different ways to represent the same thing and the more time you put into this step, the more options you will end up with.

5. Start With Pencil and Paper

Most of the world’s top designers will still start all their preliminary ideas as rough sketches because it is easy and fast.

You can start something, hate it, and start drawing something else. You can sketch minor improvements and variations quickly without worrying about quality.

You may even come back to the design you hated later and think of an interesting way to improve it.

When you make something on a computer, it’s too tempting to see it as the final design and minor changes can sometimes take much longer than you expect, which wastes time. You’re also tempted to delete designs you don’t like to keep the page clear, meaning you may miss out on a cool idea later on.

Once you have some sketches you want to try out, you can follow our tutorial to learn how to make your own logo.

6. Play With the Components

When designing a logo, it’s normal to get stuck on a few concepts or ideas and struggle to come up with something else.

When this happens, it helps to try changing how you approach the design as a whole by breaking it into components to change or combine.

For example, some logos are a design with a relevant font spelling out the company name. Other logos bring the company name into the design itself. Some even combine this by involving the design into a letter (often the first) within the name. Others are purely a unique font style that speaks to the overall tone of the company.

Try different combinations or leaving everything the same and changing just one thing. This will help you create more designs and options to work with.

7. Make it Scale

In our digital world, there are endless screen sizes people will view your content from. Because of this, website designers have created responsive sites that can shrink to mobile or enlarge to a PC without the design and spacing of the content being cut off.

From this movement, companies have begun creating logos which can be both long and short.

The easiest example of this is McDonald’s. When they have space they can show the entire McDonald’s name spelled out. If they want to save space, however, the logo can get smaller until it changes to just the recognizable yellow ‘M’.

This is effective because it prevents you from making a logo that is too complicated. The more simple it is, the easier it is for people to remember.

8. Show Your Cannabis Logo to Others

It’s perfectly normal to spend so long thinking about something that you end up with designs which make perfect sense to you but are completely lost on others seeing it for the first time.

That’s why you should make three to five options and show them to as many friends and family members as you can.

Don’t explain the logo at first, so you can get their genuine initial reaction and thoughts.

It will likely reveal problems you never thought of or even new ideas to improve what you have. Just make sure to only make changes that came up multiple times. If only one person didn’t like the color then you don’t have to change it if you don’t agree with them.

Ideally, you will be able to show your logo to a stranger and they will be able to tell you a roughly accurate depiction of what your company does or offers.

Have Fun With It

The creative process is both fun and frustrating. When coming up with your cannabis logo, just remember that there’s nothing wrong with being stuck or feeling like your ideas are terrible.

Often, those moments are the best time to try something stupid and silly to help remind you to have fun. And you never know, that cannabis leaf punching a bear in the face may spur an awesome logo idea.

However, if you’re concerned about your design skills, read our blog about paying for a designer.

There are over 41,000 optometrists in the United States. A number that goes up every year as more students find access to affordable higher education.

As optometry continues to become a more studied field, competition for patients will become more difficult and that reality will make branding integral to the success of those looking to open their eye care practice.

One of the most important components of your optometry office’s overall branding is its logo.

Logos are the first thing your customers will see when engaging your services and will either facilitate them having positive feelings towards you have to offer or alienate them which will make it difficult to convert them into lifelong patrons.

To help your optometry office’s logo get off on the right foot, here are some tips on how to create effective and unique logos.

1. Keep Simplicity at Your Logo’s Core

The unique logos you consider leveraging for your optometry practice should be able to communicate information at a glance.

It should answer people’s topical questions like, “What do you do?” “What’s your area of expertise?”, etc.

To that end, you’ll find that many optometrists find unique ways to play with the image of an eye or glasses which leads to their successful creation of simple, yet effective logos.

2. Don’t Get Too Busy in Your Execution

Many people perceive simplicity with logos as using simple shapes like circles and squares. That can be true, however, slapping tons of different geometric shapes into your logo, no matter how simple each one is, can create a logo that becomes too much.

Take the London Olympics logo for example. This logo’s pieces are simple enough but their synergy is jarring.

For that reason, be sure that your optometry logo only incorporates one or two elements into its design.

3. Keep Your Logo as Original as Possible

We get it, as an optometrist, your go-to elements are going to be eye shapes, glasses, contact lenses (which you can read more here about), etc. That reality can make it difficult to create logos that really stand out.

That’s not to say that you shouldn’t try to be unique though.

Remember, if your logo feels like a copy, you may end up inheriting some of the bad will a similar looking brand carries. To make sure your organization stands on its own, take the time to analyze the logos of other optometry practices in your area and try to make sure your unique logos don’t bear any resemblance.

4. Design Your Logo as a Vector Graphic

There are a lot of logo creation tools out there, many of which will output your logo into different formats. As a rule of thumb, you’ll want to have a vector graphic of your logo to use as the master copy.

Vector graphics are infinitely scaleable which means your logo can go anywhere. That means it will look right at home on a pamphlet and can also be blown up to a billboard-size model without getting pixelated.

5. Start With Black and White

Color is an incredible tool that can be leveraged in design. It can make onlookers feel emotions and will help them draw conclusions about a brand.

With that said, color can also distract during your logo’s creation.

Many first time designers trying to work on unique logos fall into the trap of getting carried away with color and don’t focus on the much more important shape of their logo.

To avoid that with your optometry logo, first design it in black and white. Once finished, see if people get what you’re communicating and make sure the shape of your design is carrying your desired impact.

Once you’re confident in your logo’s foundation, you can then add color to give it that extra oomph!

6. Consider Typeface Logos

Most logos rely heavily on images. After all, images are worth a thousand words.

Still, some of the most effective logos on earth leverage nothing but original typefaces to get their brand’s story across.

Think Disney or Google. Both don’t use images in their logos yet they’ve created branding that’s recognized across the world.

Bottom line, be open to experimenting not only with the stereotypical eye or glasses-based optometry logo but also with the creative use of text.

7. Get Inspired by Other Successful Logos Both Within and Outside of Your Niche

At the end of the day, there’s no better way to draw inspiration for unique logos more so than by taking the time to admire the work of others.

As an optometrist, look at the most successful optometry companies in the country. Inspect their logos.

What do the logos have in common? What do you like about them? What do you dislike?

Going beyond optometry logos, what can you learn from the Nike logo? What about McDonald’s golden arches?

Becoming a student of logo design will skyrocket your foray into creating breathtaking logos more so than anything else. So get out there and start studying!

Wrapping Up How to Create Unique Logos for Your Optometry Practice

How you brand your business will have a profound effect on its success. It doesn’t matter if you’re in the fast-food niche or in the business of helping people see better.

That reality was the basis of our article above and we hope that, through our unique logos tips above, you’ll find the inspiration you need to create stunning logos that will help skyrocket your business beyond your competition!

If you’re not a professional designer, we appreciate that creating an incredible logo can be incredibly tough. The good news is though that there are tools out there that can turn anybody into a world-class designer in minutes!

Our personal favorite of those logo creating tools… Online Logo Maker.

Over 2 million brands rely on online logo maker to create engaging branding elements for their business. Let our tools provide you with the same incredible value!

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