Getting a Professional Logo for Your Business

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Organizing Your Vision

A logo tells a story about your brand, but how do you put it together? The first step is to organize your vision with a mood board to get some examples of existing logos you like. Then, you’ll need to further organize all of your thoughts – your fonts, your colors, and your example logos – and send them off to a designer for implementation.

To give you an idea of what you could expect from this process, we put together a mood board, found a designer, and sent them a design request with all of the necessary details – all leading to a professional, finished logo for our imaginary barbershop.

Getting a Professional Logo for Your Business – Transcript

If you're forming your own small business, your company logo should be a decision that you handle quickly but professionally. And this video will be showing you how to organize all of the information that would be needed to source a logo from a professional.

Hey everybody, Will Scheren here from Small Business Startup Guide by TRUiC. This video is part of a larger course dedicated to helping small business owners cut through the noise and get to the essentials of starting and operating their business. If that sounds like it would be really useful to you, be sure to like and subscribe.

All right, in the last video, we learned some vocabulary surrounding logo creation, and we learned how to source a great logo for any company that you're branding. In this video, we're going to create a logo mood board and make requests on Fiverr.com to see if we can get a logo for the imaginary barbershop that we've been building throughout the course.

We'll start by going to Google.com and searching “barbershop logos,” then click on images to see what pops up. As I scroll through here, I'll grab any images that I like and drop them on my desktop. 

Next, I'll try some different searches using some of the vocabulary that we learned in the last video. So here's what comes out for negative-space barbershop logos. I’ll grab a couple of these, and now I’ll search for minimal barbershop logos and grab a few of those.

Now, I’ll quickly go through the images that I pulled and narrow it down to the five best images that I want to include in my mood board. Next, I'll head over to GoMoodboard.com, and I'll upload all of the images here. After uploading each of the images, I'll give all of them a number so that I can reference them easily when messaging with logo designers. After I create a mood board, I'll copy the link to that mood board and save it somewhere safe until I'm ready to start messaging designers.

Now I'll head over to Fiverr.com and create an account. If you're creating a Fiverr.com account, you'll need to receive and click on a verification email. After verifying, I'll head back over to Fiverr and search for logo design, and as you can see, I have tons of design options here to choose from. You can sort through these options by logo option type, budget, or delivery time. I'll try a few different ways of searching for designers with cover logos that I like, and I'll pick out a few and send the following message. You can download a template of the message that I send below this video to save yourself some time and to easily communicate with the designer in a way to get yourself a great logo.

Hello, my name is Will Scheren, and I'm in need of a logo for my business. My business name is North End Barbershop of Bloomington. Keywords that describe our brand identity are modern, familiar, warm, polished, and formal. Our complete list of products and services are: men's haircuts, scalp massages, beard trims, straight razor shaves, kid's haircuts, pomade, hair texture pastes, shampoo, conditioner, styling paste, and beard oil. Our mission statement is, “West End Barbershop of Bloomington exists to provide Bloomington, Illinois, with an elevated barbershop experience.” Our company fonts are Libre Baskerville and Montserrat, and I provided a link for you to download these fonts here. Our company colors are… (and I list out the company colors). 

I've created a mood board to show you the logos that I like. You can view this mood board here… (and then I include a link where someone could download our company fonts). I provided a brief description of why included each of the images in the mood board below. 

I included Logo One because I liked how they use the emblem-style logo, and I thought that the blade design was clean. I included Logo Two because I liked how the minimal blade logo ran through the wordmark and did not simply sit on top of it. I also liked that the fonts were weighted and well-spaced. I included Logo Three because I like the sheer simplicity of the design. However, I would definitely want to include a wordmark using the aforementioned fonts in my logo. I included Logo Four and Logo Five because I love negative-space logos. If you're able to use the negative space in the design to create a second image, I will be very thrilled with your work.

I have a budget of $100 to spend on logo creation. The terms by which I would like to do business with you would be that you use the information I have provided to provide me with two color logo options. If I like either of these options, I will work with you through two rounds of edits on one of the logos you provided and will be delivered a full vector file of that logo, as well as a version of the final logo in all white and a version of the final logo in all black.

If you agree to these terms, please provide me with the logo options. Otherwise, please let me know how you would prefer to amend the terms and work together.

I look forward to your response. Thanks.

As we were going over this message, I'm sure that you had the thought of how helpful it will be that we already have so much organized about our branding and that it will significantly cut down on the time needed to communicate with anyone who's not associated with our brand. 

So now I'll contact four or five designers with this message and see what I get back. After messaging back and forth with a few designers and negotiating the rates for the work, I'll purchase a logo and use most of the information that I sent in my initial message to fill out any mandatory questions they have for me at checkout. 

For this imaginary barbershop, I stayed at the low end of Fiverr. I paid about $100 to two different designers, and here's what I got back. After landing on this logo, I went back and forth with the designer to get a few revisions, changed up the color, deleted the stars, and here's our final business logo. I'll be sure to save this logo wherever I'm saving all of my other marketing assets, along with an all-black version using our darkest hex code color and an all-white version using our lightest hex code color.

So there we go, the imaginary barbershop that we've been planning in this course has a logo. In the next video, we'll briefly discuss firming up the photography and videography considerations surrounding your brand.

This video is part of a step-by-step course that gives business owners the essential information to start and operate their business. We've provided a link where you can get access to all of the free and discounted business tools that we mentioned in this course below this video.

Be sure to like and subscribe to get more of this content. We'll see you in the next video, and if you have any questions, let us know.