Challenge Coins: 8 Tips for Creating the Perfect Logo for Your Custom Coins
Posted on April 01, 2018 by Logo Design Tips and Tricks
Making a beautiful logo is a fundamental part of running any business.
Whether you operate in the financial sector, run a travel company, manage a local restaurant, or do home renovations, the right logo can help you stand out. This is something that goes on everything from your company’s branded apparel to business cards and unique promotional items.
Promotional items include classic tools like pens and stress balls, but also distinct pieces that you can give out, like custom coins or special pins. If you’re exploring the option of making custom challenge coins, you can’t pursue this idea without the proper logo.
That’s where we come in. Our design system is here to help you turn your current logo into something that is coin-ready, considering challenge coins are pretty small!
First, though, you need to know a thing or two about logo design.
Below are all the tips you need.
1. Try to Be Timeless
No matter if you’re building a logo from scratch or manipulating your current logo to something that is suitable for custom coins, focus on one thing: being timeless.
This is the only way your logo will be remembered. Many people collect custom challenge coins because they are fun, unique items that are hard to come across. But, they don’t always remember the company that provided a certain coin in the first place.
That’s why your logo design matters so much. The more memorable your logo is, the more likely someone is to remember the actual products and services offered by the company a logo represents.
2. Brainstorm, Brainstorm, Brainstorm
How do you come up with a timeless logo?
By taking the brainstorming stage of the design process seriously. Take a moment to sketch out a few logo ideas before you start the digital version. This helps you get out of your head and visualize which ideas work and which don’t.
To make the brainstorming process even more effective, draw a circle around each logo. This allows you to conceptualize how it will look on the custom coins you want to create.
3. Manipulate Colors and Shapes
Once you have a few quality design ideas, develop them even further.
Take your sketches from pen and paper to a digital screen. Use the online tools provided to play with different colors and shapes. The shapes you use don’t have to be exact representations of a square, triangle, or so on.
But, using shapes as a basic outline for the design of your logo makes a big difference. This puts the concept of shape psychology to work. In logo design, certain shapes can exude a sense of trust, balance, or community – depending on what you want your company’s custom coins to stand for.
Similarly, there’s also a different set of color psychology for logo design. Educate yourself on these matters in order to send a message that is loud and clear (and effective!) to your audience.
4. Make Something Eye-Catching
While you’re figuring out how to relay your company values or purpose through shapes and colors, make sure the logo as a whole can turn heads.
If you aren’t creating a design that is eye-catching, you won’t get the results you’re looking for. Think about how your logo will stand out among many others. This goes for when it’s used on challenge coins, lanyards, and all other kinds of promotions.
Wherever you put your logo, it has to be easy to notice.
5. Brand Your Heart Out
It’s one thing for someone to notice your logo and another for them to recognize it as part of your brand. This is especially true if you have one variation of a logo for regular business purposes and another for your custom coins and other promotional items.
To build brand recognition, you have to make a logo that is a clear representation of your brand. A brand is a complex thing to identify. It’s both the signature colors of your company, as well as the products you offer and the quality of service you provide.
All of these details have to be summed up in your logo.
It can sound like a hard thing to do. But the longer you work at it, the more your brand will become front and center of your logo design.
6. Add a Special Touch
To further encourage brand recognition, think outside the box.
There is bound to be an element of your company that is entirely unique, no matter how many competitors or the amount of exposure you have. Think about things like office traditions and phrases that guide your culture.
Does your company have some sort of mascot or another internal symbol that isn’t necessarily a part of your logo yet? Add it to the design you’ve created and see how much more unique the overall look of the logo becomes.
7. Consider Use and Placement
At the end of the day, regardless of what your logo looks like, it’s going to have a limited amount of space when placed on custom coins. Keep this in mind throughout your design process.
The final version of your logo should be something that is scalable down to the smallest coin, and up to a big poster or even a billboard, too. The best way to achieve this is to keep it from being too busy.
A simple design turns heads when displayed on small pieces and is easy to understand. More so, it’s a classic look that can be used on bigger canvases, too.
8. Don’t Be Afraid to Edit
Throughout the logo-making process, you’re going to make plenty of edits.
This may have you thinking that once all the pieces come together, you’re done. In reality, the “final version” of your logo will go through many edits before it is actually complete.
It’s true that edits can be time-consuming. But, the more attention you pay to the small details and the effort you put into tweaking them, the better the true final edit will be.
Design Your New Logo for Your Custom Coins
Whether you’re building a logo for custom coins or figuring out how to display your logo for bigger uses, you need the right system to do so. Having access to a logo maker turns edits from a big hassle into a simple design process.
To discover just how easy logo making can be, click here.
Our Favorite Logo Ideas for Funny T Shirts
Posted on March 28, 2018 by Logo Design Tips and Tricks
With the online original design t-shirt industry making over $441 million of revenue in 2017 – a 9.5% annual growth since 2012 – it’s a great idea to get your cut of the cloth.
A booming business enterprise, t-shirt printing can be incredibly lucrative if you stand out and do it right. You can have a brand everybody knows, choose a niche that has mass appeal, or you can be funny.
That last one is what the majority of companies should focus on; if they want to be successful, they need to market funny t-shirts.
The best way to do this is through funny logos. For certain brands, this will be their bread and butter. Here are some of our favorite logo ideas for funny t-shirts.
How Can a Logo Be Funny?
There are two ways:
- Funny ha-ha, where the logo is a joke or riff off another famous logo;
- Funny clever, in which the logo doesn’t really convey a brand but instead plays with the idea of what a t-shirt is.
Oftentimes, these two can merge into one awesome logo. Below, we’ll show you both versions of funny t-shirts as well as combinations.
Basically, in order to be chuckle-inducing as a t-shirt brand, you have to have a pulse on your audience and the big issues of the day. Whether you’re catering to Millennials, hitting home the sports niche with current winners and losers, or using the Backpack Kid Meme to your advantage, you want to be relevant and tasteful.
If you get both things on your side, you’ll be profitable with your t-shirt business.
Our Favorite Funny T-Shirts with Logos
Classic Logo T-Shirts
Sometimes it’s best to stick with the famous brands.
If you can safely use the original brand logos of high-end companies like Coca-Cola or Guinness, it’s sometimes subtle humor that wins out. For example, this site gives you access to old-school logos. This “blast from the past” vibe provides a different breed of humor. Those who remember the good old days will get a kick out of these kinds of logo shirts.
Pun T-Shirts
A step past the classic logo, punny t-shirts can either take a well-known brand logo and alter it to the original brand’s benefit, or the logo can be a simple quote with a complementary image.
This is where being relevant is really important. Using a famous quote or image that is neither retro or fresh is funny t-shirt sabotage. Go for timeless phrases or fun photos and throw them onto muted color shirts. You’ll thank us later.
Clever T-Shirts
Lastly, if you don’t want to assimilate with another brand, quote, logo, or image, then go all-out and design your own clever t-shirt.
What does this look like?
Well, you could create your own pattern for an ugly Christmas sweater. Or, print a tie on a t-shirt. Or, have a t-shirt where if someone is wearing it and they put it over their head, viewers see another image on the inside of the shirt.
Printed gun side holsters, a “Baby Loading Please Wait” sign with a loading bar, and the body of a baby for an adult t-shirt create illusions often deemed as clever. These shirts are not just funny – they’re fun. Seriously consider these types of funny t-shirts for your print design.
Ready to Create Your Own Funny Logo?
Hopefully, these ideas for funny t-shirts give you enough creative inspiration to make your own hilarious logo. If you’re ready to get started on your logo, check out our unbelievable online logo maker tool.
7 Great Supplement Branding And Logo Tips
Posted on March 27, 2018 by Logo Design Tips and Tricks
You’ve decided to join the $37 billion-per-year industry that is dietary supplements. Do you know how to brand your product successfully?
Take advantage of great supplement branding to ensure you find quick profits in an industry that isn’t well-known for its advertising efforts.
Here are 7 tips to upgrade your supplement branding and logos.
1. Be Different
In an overly-saturated market like supplementation, your brand needs to stand out.
Make sure your mission resonates differently than the other brands, especially those that don’t take time with their own branding. You want to be known for how professional and knowledgeable you are in the supplement industry.
Create a unique brand mission statement and logo – you’ll never be forgotten.
2. Create for Community
The best thing about a brand is the fans. But how do you get raving, loyal fans?
Develop your brand and logo that exemplifies your ideal customer. You want them to be powerful, healthy, full of life. Your brand should mirror this.
If you make your brand with the community in mind, then it will translate into a powerful influence over those ideal customers and fans.
3. Use Logo Software
If you want to be seen as professional, you’ll want a professional logo.
This doesn’t mean you can’t make it yourself. Logo and branding software can be easily found online, some of them cheap or even free. Use the tools the internet provides and turn your concept art into a real logo.
If you put time and effort into your logo you can exude the message you want to convey, like how America Vitaminas exudes a feeling of restful, flowing sleep with their melatonin suplemento.
Your logo is the first thing people will recognize – it needs to be perfect.
4. Target Your Audience
Research your target clientele, then brand around them. Similar to creating a community, the only way you can begin is by finding where your customers live, what they look like, what their goals are, who they care about, where they work, and more.
Having a clear image of who will be purchasing your products is supplement branding 101.
5. Don’t be Afraid to Upgrade
Let’s be honest: We rarely get it right on the first try.
Thankfully, people will understand. We’re all human. Brands and logos are simply manifestations of human goals. So, if your logo or brand message doesn’t work as well as you originally thought, don’t fear to change them again and again until it’s perfect.
If Coca-Cola and Nike can alter their logos and brands, why can’t you?
6. The Characteristics: Name and Color
Just like the logo, how you name your supplement company will decide who notices you and who disregards you.
Same goes for color. The name, the colors, and the logo all need to invoke trust with the customer.
Optimum Nutrition works because it covers the “nutrition” aspect, their logo is clean and sleek, and their color scheme suggests professional, high-quality whey protein and other products.
7. What’s Your Voice?
How do you communicate your message? This is what your brand is all about.
Having a one-sentence brand mission helps with determining your brand’s voice, logo, name, colors, and everything else. If you are the company’s voice, depict that as best you can. If a family member or your ideal customer is the brand voice, run with it.
Once you establish brand voice, you’ll hopefully pigeonhole your brand to the customers you truly wanted.
Supplement Branding is Key
Give one or more of these tips a try to bump your supplement branding up a notch.
If you want help with crushing your fitness brand’s logo, one that invokes real motivation (and therefore more clientele), check out our guide to design elements.
How to Design an Attractive Clinic Logo
Posted on March 27, 2018 by Logo Design Tips and Tricks
Do you need a new clinic logo?
Whether you’re giving your current logo a refreshed look or creating a logo for a new clinic, there is a lot to consider.
You’ll want to get your logo design right because your logo can have a tremendous amount of impact on your clinic.
Researchers at MIT found that a good logo design can have a positive impact on your customer’s commitment to your brand, but also on your bottom line.
If you’re not sure how to design a logo for your clinic, you’ve come to the right place.
Here are the top tips to create an attractive clinic logo.
Start with the Brand
When designing a logo, you want to have a deep understanding of what the brand is. After all, a logo is a visual representation of a brand.
In order to understand your clinic’s brand, you’ll want to ask yourself questions to help guide you.
An easy way to go about it is to think about your brand personality. Creating your brand personality is a matter of thinking of your company as a person or character. You’ll then ask yourself a series of questions to uncover the traits of the brand.
- If my brand was a car, what would it drive?
- How would my brand dress?
- Where does my brand live?
- How does the brand speak and behave?
- What are the top adjectives to define my brand?
The last question is important because you’ll need to be able to define the main characteristics of your brand. Here are a few to think about to get yourself started:
Smart, sassy, strong, calm, relaxed, masculine, feminine, approachable, elegant, caring, quirky, energetic, serious.
You’ll then want to match these adjectives up with brand archetypes to discover what your brand’s personality is.
Not only will this exercise help you in designing a clinic logo, but you can use these traits in hiring staff. You can match the qualities of candidates with the qualities of the brand. That will help you determine if they’re a good fit for your organization.
Be Original
You do want to do some research on logos. It will start to get your creativity going as you discover what you like and dislike about logos you come across.
Looking at your competitors’ logos will also help you discover how they’re positioning their brand in the marketplace.
While doing research to get ideas is a good thing, you don’t want to copy elements of other logos. That can backfire on you and damage your brand. It can also raise some serious questions about your ethics.
For example, this clinic for STD & HIV testing took elements of Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign logo and tagline, right down to “Feel the Bern.”
While that seems creative and humorous at first, it isn’t a good long-term solution for a logo. Most people are only going to remember the campaign logo and slogan for a short period of time.
Not only that, but you can confuse your potential customers. They may think that your brand is somehow related to the campaign.
Use of Color and Fonts
It’s widely known that colors and fonts have an impact on your brand’s perception.
This is where you want to revisit your brand’s personality traits and create a logo that’s congruent with those characteristics.
For example, if you discovered that your brand is conservative, quiet, and strong, you can consider a dark blue color in your clinic logo. Dark blue tends to represent these characteristics, and it’s a more masculine color.
The font should reflect a similar tone. If you were to have a typeface that was a retro style, it won’t convey a conservative, quiet and strong brand.
The Shape of a Logo Impacts Your Brand
If you’re planning to incorporate shapes or symbols in your clinic logo, know that they have a psychological impact, too.
For example, the logo for this drug detox program incorporates triangles.
Studies have shown that hard angles such as these can create the perception of hardness and durability.
A rounded logo can be perceived as soft, warm, and attentive.
Either one can work well for a clinic logo, it comes down to what matches your brand’s personality better and what you want to convey to the public.
Put Your Ideas Down on Paper
As you’re going through this process, it’s important to keep detailed notes of what you want your brand to stand for and how that should be communicated visually.
These notes about your clinic’s brand personality, as well as what you liked and didn’t like about other logos.
Now, you can start sketching logo ideas. This is where you can let your creativity shine.
Don’t get to hung up on having to be perfect. These are just draft concepts, so feel free to play with colors, typefaces, and symbols.
Once you have your concepts down, go back and see which ones are most aligned with your brand personality.
You’ll want to have three solid logo concepts that you can start testing for feedback and review.
Test Your Ideas
Designing a great clinic logo is a collaborative process. Now that you have ideas down on paper, you can start getting feedback to see what works and what doesn’t.
Take your sketches and start showing them to trusted members of your staff and clients. If there’s one logo that they like more than others, ask them why.
You’ll also want to explain the brand personality to staff and clients. They may offer valuable insight and show you things that you may have missed in the process.
Start Designing Your Clinic Logo
Are you ready to start designing your logo?
As long as you’re true to the spirit of the brand and do your research, you’ll be able to design a logo that makes a great first impression.
You can get started right now with Online Logo Maker. There are images, templates, and fonts to help you draft something in a quickly as 10 minutes.
Check it out here.