7 Ways to Make Your DIY Logo Look Pro

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When you’re starting a new business or blog, it’s usually a good idea to DIY things in the beginning because most likely your vision and ideas for the blog will change over time and you could even change directions completely. Once you’re well-established it’s great to pay for custom web design and branding, but in the mean time, here are 7 ways to make your DIY logo look pro.

7 Ways to Make Your DIY Logo Look Pro

Here are some general design rules I’ve come up with that help make your DIY logo look more legit. These will help your budding new blog look great while you still refine the direction and idea for your business.

The main benefit of DIYing your logo and branding at this stage is that 1. you’re probably on a budget and 2. you can make changes to it if you pivot or change your idea completely without dropping hundreds or possibly thousands of dollars on a rebrand.

Here we go!

1. Equal spacing around elements
One very subtle but effective way to make your logo – or designs in general – look more pro is to create equal spacing between elements such as letters and any images in your logo. Imagine that there’s a consistent white border around every piece of your logo and keep that white space distance the same.

2. Choose a pro color palette
If you don’t know what colors you want to use in your logo, take a look at these branding inspiration pictures from Colour Lovers here for some great ideas for how to pair different colors.

3. Use legible fonts
Sometimes it’s fun to use creative and wild fonts in design projects, t-shirts, or advertisements, but in your logo, simple is better. You’ll generally want to stay away from anything too flourish-y, intricate, or hard to read at a distance (because of course your logo is going to be on a billboard one day, right?)

4. Don’t mix too-similar fonts
An example of this is that you probably wouldn’t want to use two similar cursive fonts in the same logo because it looks kind of weird. However, two plain fonts would probably be ok, or two very different fonts.

5. Have contrast in your fonts
Similar to the rule above, if you have multiple words in your blog or business’s name, you might want to have significant contrast in the different fonts. Here is an example of a photography logo that has a strong cursive font for the main name and a smaller sans-serif font for the word “photography”:

Lauren Em Photography sample logo

6. Make it readable at small sizes and in black and white
Even though we live in a digital age, you never know when someone is going to look at your website on a tiny device or end up with a poor black and white photocopy of your logo on a handout somewhere. That means that using pale yellow for your entire logo is probably not a great idea because it would be almost invisible as a super light grey color if it ended up in black and white.

7. Don’t put elements inside other elements
This is a rule that you can sometimes break (and many companies often do), but for similar reasons to the last rule, if you put a bunch of text inside a circle or something for a logo, it can make it illegible at certain sizes. It’s pretty common to put logos inside of circles, but just make sure you can still read the text.  Many hipster logos gladly break this rule. 😉

If you need help creating the actual design elements of your logo, check out these logo templates for bloggers from Creative Market.

Lady Boss Premade Branding Logo Pack
Humongous Girlpreneurs Logo and Texture Pack
Essential Branding and Identity Kit
Feminine Logo Creator volume 1

Good luck!

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