Logo Design Tools

By James Hackworth

The primary tool for logo design is the pencil and/or pen. Whichever drawing tool you are most comfortable with. Alot of people want to jump in and start right away using the computer. I can't stress enough that following the process of logo design will yield the best results. The beginning of each logo design begins with thumbnail sketches. These are small sketches that roughly define the idea of the logo. The more you create initially the better your final logo will be. Pick the best 5 of your initial thumbails and refine those and create variations of them. Continue this process until you have exhausted all of your creative ideas on the logo. Even if you feel you have a great logo already, continue to develop new ideas. Sometimes one of the first ideas is the best and sometimes its one of the best. Only after developing a very refined logo using traditional drawing tools would I suggest you move on to using the computer. Hardware and software - The two industry standards for graphic design are Apple and Adobe.The two primary software tools for logo design are Adobe Illustrator and the lesser known Adobe Streamline. Illustrator allows you to create what are called vector graphics. Vector graphics are scalable without loss of resolution. This allows you to create and manipulate images with a very fine control that isn't possible in a paint program. A professional designer does not use a paint program to create logos or icons. Streamline allows you to convert line drawings, such as your refined logo drawings, into vector graphics. A quick way to convert the fluid, artistic lines of a drawing into a file that you can manipulate in Illustrator. One other aspect of using Adobe Illustrator is that it is easily used with the other design programs from Adobe such as Photoshop and InDesign. InDesign is slowly replacing Quark, a page layout program that was the only professional choice for a long time. Adobe has excellent customer support and is user friendly. Indesign isn't directly related to logo design, but it is an excellent page layout tool for such things as magazines or any design project that has multiple pages.