extreme webmaster evernerve

You will like this small guide if you are:

• Launching a new website, product or company…
• …and you need a cool, sleek logo for it, but…
• …you don’t want to spend a lot of money on some designer?

Well, you will now see how really easy it is to create a modern & cool logo by following just a few simple rules. What you’ll learn is a logo design style that has recently been used massively.

Learn by example

Why reinvent the wheel? Take a look at the following logos:

Now, what do these logos have in common?

Answer: They all use two different font weights of the same font family.

The two first logos have their first word bolded, while their second word is very thin. The TechCrunch logo has the inverse situation. The Mental Floss logo has basically the same thing as the two first logos, only with a drop shadow effect applied.

This always works and looks very professional: A bolded and a thin word written together (or vice-versa).

Now, there is a second thing that you might have noticed: All the logos use black or white for their text (sometimes the second word is colored). This works very well with different kinds of backgrounds.

Simplicity always works

As you can see below, the barcamp logo is composed of a bolded and a thin word. The bolded word is white, and this allows for easy application on light backgrounds. Check out the modified green logo below, set on a white background.

The Superfluous Banter’s logo seen below can be applied to any non-white background and is also used by the author of its blog as header for different blog sections.

Variations on the same technique

Here are a few logos which again have their text written in the same font, but with different thicknesses for the separate words. The main difference compared to the previous examples is that these ones are written in all caps. But the bold/thin thin/bold effect still works flawlessly.

…and here is a monocolor, all-lowercase thin and bold logo used on a series of products:

Summary

So, to create a really cool logo the easy way you need:

1. A cool font. You can search for professional free fonts or you can buy one. If you decide to buy a font, it is still cheaper than buying a font and hiring a designer. Remember that you must find or buy a font with various degrees of weight (light, semi, demi, bold, heavy, etc).

2. Experiment with the two words of your logo. Make the first one thin and the second one thick, then try it vice-versa. Try using black on white background and the other way around. Try coloring one of the words. Just keep it simple!

3. An additional icon or shape. Although the logo made in this way functions all by itself, you may still want to try adding some graphics to it, especially if you already have some kind of sign/symbol/mascot for your website or company. See the examples above — nearly all of them have placed the graphics on the left side, before any text (Problogger, barcamp, Internet Dreams, etc).

Seeing is believing, right? Well, here are a few logos that I made with this technique — my own website’s name and the names of two persons that left comments on my blog, Kara Sheridan and Pinny Cohen.

If you make a logo using this style and method, please leave a comment and a link to your newly made logotype!

Logos of the following websites were used in this tutorial: Internet Dreams, Bartelme Design, TechCrunch, mental_floss magazine, barcamp, SuperfluousBanter, Smashing Magazine, ProBlogger, Design Disease and Garnier UK.

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