How I made the Kuma Learn logo

As an independent maker, I often like to make things in DIY fashion. That includes making a website, publishing eBooks… but also making a logo! In this post, I’ll show you how I made Kuma Learn’s logo (your friendly guide to learning Japanese!).

Note, this post was originally published on Kuma Learn’s blog.

Figure out your brand

First things first: branding. It’s important to consider what your brand should represent before you go knees deep into designing your logo. Kuma Learn is on a mission to offer a visual approach to learning Japanese. Keeping this in mind, I wanted a logo that captured fun, friendly, approachable and simple.

Kuma means bear in Japanese, so it was a fairly obvious choice to include a bear in the logo.

Sketch it on paper

Once I settle on the logo’s themes, I usually sketch it on paper. It’s a very rough sketch. I try to make multiple versions in order to explore the different possibilities before settling on the final draft. This is important in design: explore and expand your possibilities before reducing your choices. Let your creative brainwaves and imagination take flight!

Once you’ve done a bunch of sketches, you might start to see a winning sketch. In my case, it was this one:

Take a picture of it and send it to your computer.

Use your favourite illustrator tool

Next, you’ll want to import your sketch into your favourite illustrator tool to digitise your logo. You can use vector illustration tools like Adobe Illustrator or use web design software such as Figma or Sketch. In my case, I used Sketch.

Copy your image into your Artboard/canvas and reduce its opacity, so that you can draw things on top but still be able to see the image.

Create outlines

Next, using the pen tool (called “Vector” in Sketch), start drawing the outlines and tweak the edges’ curvature as you go. Note, you’ll notice that I’m only creating outlines for one half of my sketch. This is because I know my final logo will be symmetrical, so I’m only going to work on half and mirror that half at the end to get my final logo!

Once you’ve created your outlines, you’ll have something like this:

Add colour, create versions

Ok, that looks more like it! Now you can remove the underlying image (of your sketch) and start colouring in your logo. Create different versions of your logo.

Iterate

Finesse, finesse and finesse. Try different colours, tweak the curvature and remove things (e.g. I removed a part of the bear’s mouth).

Ask your friends and family what they think. Initially, I was told my bear had too narrow a face, so I made my bear face a bit wider.

This is looking great! But we need to do the “zoom out” check: does our logo still look ok when it’s tiny?

The eyes are too small, in my opinion. So I want to make the eyes stand out a little more. The mouth is also barely visible. Let’s iterate:

The eyes and mouth are a bit bolder. Let’s do the “zoom out” check again:

This looks much better in my opinion! This will be the final version of my bear.

Final touches

For the web, I thought the bold, black outline was a bit much, so I removed it. Finally, I wanted to determine a typeface that fit well with my logo. So, again, I created multiple versions of my logo with different typefaces.

I asked friends and family for feedback again. I also revisited my notes on branding to make my final choice of typeface (I chose the bottom-most one above).

Thank you

I hope you enjoyed this post. 😊

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Please feel free to reach out to me at mario@kumalearn.com if you have any comments or feedback. You can follow Kuma Learn on Twitter, Instagram.