Designing a Logo for a Band

Course details

A great band deserves a great logo. Think about The Grateful Deads dancing bears or The Rolling Stones hot lips. Or even The Beatles: their famous logo is just a simple text-based design with a drop T. As a designer, your responsibility is to come up with a variety of logo ideas for your clients and hone in on and finesse the best one. In this course, Nigel French uses a client brief from Brooklyn-based band Shy Hunters, and shows how to evolve rough sketches into great logo designs, anchored by typography and highlighted with imagery. He also shows how to prepare variations on the design and format the logo for different uses, such as print, websites, and social media.

Learning objectives
Exploring type casing, weight, and alignment
Evaluating typefaces
Adding an enclosing shape or lines
Presenting different ideas to clients
Choosing colors
Fine-tuning the design
Saving separate versions of the logo

Concepts

0. Introduction

01 - Welcome
02 - What you should know before watching this course
03 - Using the exercise files

1. The Design Brief

04 - Kicking off the project with the client's brief
05 - Defining the logo-design process

2. Exploring Ideas

06 - Establishing a workflow
07 - Exploring type casing and weight
08 - Exploring letterspacing and alignment
09 - Evaluating typefaces
10 - Combining the words
11 - Adding an enclosing shape
12 - Adding lines
13 - Combining type and symbols

3. Presenting Ideas

14 - Forming logo idea 1 - Mysterious Figure
15 - Forming logo idea 2 - Lost Highway
16 - Adding perspective and texture to logo idea 2
17 - Forming logo idea 3 - NxNW
18 - Presenting the logo ideas

4. Finessing Ideas

19 - Choosing colors for the logo
20 - Evolving the logo idea
21 - Fine-tuning the logo design
22 - Preparing variations of the logo design
23 - Formatting the logo for different uses
24 - Saving separate versions of the logo
25 - Creating a web-optimized logo

Conclusion

26 - Next steps

Designing a Logo for a Band

Authors

Nigel French