A lot of my clients come to me bearing MANY questions about the logo design process. I have clients that don’t know what they want at all, and some that come to me with very clear ideas of what they want their identity to look like. Most are somewhere in between.  But regardless of where you fit into this spectrum, we can help guide you through the process and make it easier for you to decide.

Keybridge Accounting is a new client that we have, and Lyz knows exactly what she wants. Clients like Lyz are really fun to work with, and from conception to completion she played a very large role in the project. I truly believe the evolution of her logo pushed me to think outside the box and find ways to combine her ideas with my design style. The overall result is a mesh between both of our personalities.

This is the final design

When Keybridge first came to me, Lyz sent me some sketches of what she thought the logo could potentially look like. These are so fun!

Original client sketches

There are 3 types of logos I will design: text-based, iconic, and illustrated.  After talking to her for awhile and seeing these, I decided that an “iconic” logo is what we were going for. You can read more about the types of logos on the services page. Once the process for designing a logo begins, typically I will give a client 3-4 different options to choose from. Unless you have a full color scheme picked out, I will typically design the logos in 1 single color. From these choices, the goal is to narrow it down to the one the client MOST likes, and then we work with that (to make revisions, tweak colors, etc.).

Each round after the initial presentation may result in 1-4 more concepts which you will again choose from. It really depends on what the revisions are for. For example, if you aren’t sure about the color scheme it doesn’t make sense to only provide one option, so I may present 3 or 4 color options at once. But, if you are just concerned about the thickness of a font or a line, it may be possible for me to tweak this with only one option to present.

This seems to work for most of my clients, but if it doesn’t I don’t really cap the amount of logos I will mock up (as some designers will). As a general rule of thumb, no matter what company you are working with, it’s important to find out exactly what their design process is so that you can actively participate and give input at the right times.

In the case of Keybridge Accounting, it took about 4 rounds of revisions after the original presentation of logos (marked as Round 1).

1. In Round 1, she chose the logo to the far left to work from, but thought it might be too whimsical for an accounting firm, and that it may be too difficult to tell that the letter “K” was also the top of the key.
2. In Round 2, I gave a few options that made the logo look a little more professional, and tried a different “K” design for the key head.
3. After these options, Lyz decided that it may be better to not incorporate the K with the key so much, and also went exploring online for some fonts that she liked and some color samples she liked. This is typically more information than my average client will provide me, but I went with it and sampled all of the fonts and colors, trying to make it work with some new key options.
4. These were much more to her liking, and we decided on the purple and orange combo, but pumped up the intensity of the purple. I also matched the weight of the rest of the font with the K  in two different options.
5. After seeing the 2nd option in the 4th round, she was pretty much set with this as the logo. We just tweaked the curve of the K ever so slightly so it wasn’t so vertical.

As you can see, there was a lot of tweaking to be done throughout this process. It really helped to morph a simple sketch on notebook paper into a BEAUTIFUL, unique logo for Keybridge. I’m very happy with the result and hope to work with them again in the future.