A Process For Designing Your Company Logo
In 2019, I co-founded a startup focused on mindfulness and wellness. We weren’t super clear on how the product would work, but we had a few ideas, and we needed a name and brand to get rolling.
Branding exercise
In this article, Gibson Biddle walks through a few exercises used to develop Netflix’s brand. I don’t want to butcher the details, so please read the article yourself; it’s worth your time. As a team, we took a couple of days to work through each of the exercises. Our time together helped us understand who we are, what we are pursuing, what our product might be, and what we will never be.
Deciding on our name
Next, we needed a name. An initial favorite was Fleck, like a shortened version of the word reflection. Pretty good, but we couldn’t get behind it. It didn’t feel right for some reason. So we started throwing spaghetti on the wall: WellUp, BetterNorth, JustReply, JoyList, Fullest, Quirk…lots of noodles. Unexpectedly, on a Monday in May, we were on the phone and Cactus was born.
Why call our product Cactus? When a cactus is thriving, it can spawn other cactuses and turn into a garden, much like our individual lives intertwined with other people and relationships. As our positivity grows, so does our garden.
The designer side of my brain was excited after hearing Cactus, because the cactus is so recognizable. It’s like the jackpot of all simple shapes. 🌵
Cactuses or cacti?
When it comes to creating a logo for something you’re not fluent in (cactuses), it’s important to read up. I was familiar with cactuses from children’s books, but not much beyond that. Do all cactuses have flowers? I know the basic shape of a saguaro cactus (it’s the iconic shape that’s used in the cactus emoji, among other things), but what other shapes are there? Also, what is the plural form of cactus so I don’t sound like an idiot?
I learned there are around 1,750 species of cactuses. The saguaro can bear flowers and fruit, but not all cactuses do. And the plural of cactus is cacti, cactuses, or cactus. I’m not an idiot.
Initial sketches
Before looking online and influencing my design, I wanted to do a brain dump. I grabbed a pencil and paper and started sketching.
First, I drew the cactus in a couple different ways and tried to think of all the different types of cacti that are so obviously a cactus. How do they look from the top or the side? How does it look as a solid form versus an outline?
After I had some shapes drawn out, I wrote “cactus” in uppercase, lowercase, titlecase, and in different weights. I wanted to see what felt the easiest to read and look at. For each letter, I tried different letter-forms to see what would help shape the whole word better and feel more balanced.
Color research
I googled “cactus” and pulled up Picular to look at what colors often come up with any particular search. After that, I checked out Unsplash, because their photo quality is incredible and is a great place for inspiration. I started copying and pasting pictures and screenshots to my Sketch doc to build a moodboard, pulling the most dominant colors from the images to help form a starting palette. Using familiar and natural colors would help the logo be more recognizable.
Early round
Now that my Sketch doc was full of inspiring photos and colors, and my paper was full of shapes, I was ready to hop into Sketch. I don’t have an iPad Pro or a Wacom tablet from this decade, but my finger on the trackpad has never failed me. I used the Pencil tool to draw a cactus (lol) and quickly switched to the Rectangle tool to make myself feel better. Like a child playing with wooden blocks, I used rectangles to start to build my cactus. For this round, fidelity doesn’t really matter as these early designs will likely be thrown out.
When designing a logo, choosing to start simple may help your logo remain simple even through iteration.
After adding rounded corners, a cactus started to take shape. Early in a process like this, I duplicate everything, because I often take breaks from the screen. When I return, I usually notice something in a previous iteration that I hadn’t seen before.
I’m careful to position the parts of the cactus along an 8pt grid. (The same grid we’re using to build the rest of the interface.) A grid helps the shapes in the design feel balanced, so I rarely design without one. I played with a few fonts, and landed on Brandon Text Medium. The first Cactus logo is complete.
One done, but more to do, even if it feels solid. I started looking at different logos for inspiration and found some hand-drawn logos that I liked. So I set out to create a cactus version of that style. I used the Sketch Pencil tool (again) to draw an abstract cactus. It took me a few attempts to make it not awful. Then I played with blobs to add more weight to the mark — one for the blossom and maybe one for the trunk. I used a pretty serif font for this one to match the style. It’s not perfect, but it shouldn’t be.
For my third logo, I wanted to try a lined style, thinking it could play nicely with the ribbed texture of a saguaro. Staying on grid, I used the vector tool in Sketch to draw the interior lines of the shape I already had in the first mark. Initially, I used a narrow line, but when I zoomed out, it became really busy. I deleted some lines and thickened the remaining lines until it felt like the right balance. The blossom was tricky in this one. It needed to match the rest of the mark, but I also didn’t want it to look like a trident. After iterating a bit, it looked like a trident anyway; I decided to fix it up later if this logo was well-received. For the font, something more narrow than the first logo made sense and no serifs as the lines of the mark are uniform.
Feedback
Getting early feedback on logo designs is critical. The more you work on something, the more attached you will become. And, others have ideas that you would have never thought of.
One of the first things to come out of our review session was a brighter green. (It’s now been months since we created this logo and I still love this suggestion. It’s a huge part of our brand today.) We talked about the blossom looking like an apostrophe. I wouldn’t have thought of an apostrophe.
But, when it comes to logos, I don’t want people to think at all, I just want people to remember it in a good way.
The team liked the second, abstract logo, but it looked like it could be for a boutique retail store or spa. So we scrapped it.
For the lined mark, there was feedback on the line spacing and thickness. To my surprise, some folks liked this one the best.
Iteration
I played with the logos a bit, iterating on the blossoms, the lines, as well as the cactus itself. Then took a look at a few more fonts to be sure the ones selected were the right call.
We got together again, and agreed as a team to go with the first logo, and to play with some textures.
I had some patterns I was already playing with. Sometimes I get inspired when I’m designing, but never make time to work on smaller, side-project stuff. I decided to put these together while they were on my mind. We use them today.
It’s nice not to force creative, and instead take a little time, at the right time, and let it spill over.
So I used those as inspiration to add texture to the cactus.
One last vote and our logo was complete:
Conclusion
I’m not sure I’d change anything about this process, but I will certainly carry forward a few things:
The branding exercises in the beginning were helpful to get the team’s feedback on the personality. I’m not sure I’d want to design another logo without having gone through those exercises with the team.
Use a pencil and paper to collect initial ideas. It’s the fastest way to iterate.
Do side-project work when it strikes you. If anything, it will give you practice, and you may use it later.
Cactus guides you through mindful self-reflection and gives you a private place for your thoughts. If you aspire to improve your mindset, it’s a free way to build up a daily practice with positive effects.
