Hello Logo!
The logo on this here website had been with me pretty much since day 1 – so coming on for a year and a half! At the time I just wanted some nice pictures of me and the little one, with my blog name – I didn’t really have a theme or ‘concept’ in mind as I never really had any plans for anyone to actually read my blog. To be honest I assumed I’d probably keep blogging for a few weeks, get bored of it and give it all up again!
Fast forward 18 months, and not only am I still (just about) writing this one, I also have a joint one with my blogging BFF, Fran, and actually spend a fair bit of time writing. So when the lovely folks at Logojoy offered me the chance to try out their Premium logo creation tool and give my blog a new look it seemed like an opportune moment to give it a whirl.
So How Does It Work?
It’s actually pretty simple as to start things off you just need to give an indication of the kind of logo you like by selecting a few generic designs from their collection, so that the software knows roughly what type of image you like. You then pop in a few details about your company / brand / website and a tagline. The final step in the set-up stage is to pick a few different icons that you feel would best represent your brand. In my case, I typed in a few search terms, such as ‘parenting’, ‘dad’ and ‘family’ and picked a few icons that I liked the look of.
Based on your brand name, tagline, design preferences and icon choices the system then generates literally hundreds of options for your logo for you to select your favourite, although at this stage you’re not tied down to anything – all the refining and tweaking comes next!
Refining & Tweaking
This is where it gets fun! You can literally spend hours playing with every tiny detail of your preferred design from the colours, fonts, sizing, positioning and wording. You can either spend five minutes and get something you’re pretty happy with, or disappear down the wormhole and spend the best part of an evening making everything perfect.
For me, I really liked the icon of the dad holding the child’s hand, as it was simple, striking and pretty much summed up the whole point of my blog. I was also rather taken with the colour purple, as I had already been using that shade for my featured images for the past few months – and it’s the colour of our bedroom. And the logo of my last two jobs!
One of the things I liked most about the Logojoy software is that you can scroll through all of your design choices in a quick and easy motion. It’s not like some packages where you pick an option to change and then wait for it to preview and then decide you don’t like it and go through the process again. With Logojoy lots of different fonts and colours are already lined up waiting for you to scroll through and pick from, so you can quickly get a feel for what you like.
I liked the idea of having the holdy handy icon in gold foil and the text in two different striking colours, a.k.a. black and white! The other feature I really liked was the ability to preview your design in a variety of real world scenarios. Admittedly, not MY real world, but for big companies out there I’m sure it’s pretty useful seeing how your logo would look on a billboard or in gold leaf on a filofax. I think mine looked pretty cool…
Pretty cool, eh?! I thought so anyway!
Money, Money, Money
Up until this point, you’ve been able to play with all the options to your heart’s content, pick your perfect logo and see how it would look on a business card and on a massive sign next to a random escalator! But how does your pride and joy actually become yours to keep!? Well of course you have to pay for it, and there are a few options to choose from:
The premium package seems to have everything that I would ever need and that was the one I was using to create my new logo. When it arrives you get a load of different flles, including full colour with background, full colour with transparent background and black and white, so you get everything you need to use your design in pretty much whatever format you could ever want to.
I was really happy with mine, and actually really enjoyed fiddling around with the package to make it perfect. As you can see at the top of my website I’ve coupled the new logo with a strip of photos of me and Joshua so as to mix the clean, professional logo with a bit of my own character – and I think it looks pretty cool!
If you fancy creating something new for your website or company why not give it a try?