Unless you're a professional designer, getting a logo for your business can be daunting. There are countless marketing consultants who will tell you that logos are super important, and they convey all kinds of hidden meaning to customers, blah blah blah. A company I used to work at hired some professionals to design a logo, and it involved maybe a half-dozen meetings and ended up costing something like $6,000!
It was a waste of money.
Here's the thing about logos: There's a ton of downside, but almost no upside. If you have a terrible logo, it might cause you to lose customers, but in the history of business, a great logo has never closed a sale. A logo just needs to be good enough that it doesn't embarrass you. It's all the other stuff about your business that will actually convince your customers to buy.
Here's the good news: It's easy to get a logo that's good enough. Instead of spending thousands of dollars and countless hours of your time, you can spend 15-30 minutes to get something that looks professional and inoffensive, and then you can move on to more important things. You can always invest more in your logo later.
As an experiment, I tried out a few different approaches to generate logos for this site, LessAnnoyingBusiness.com. As a rule, I didn't spend more than 15 minutes on any individual logos, and some of them took less than five minutes. Here are all the different logos I ended up with:
I'll admit, none of these are going to win any design awards, but they're definitely good enough.
If you want a good enough logo fast, here are the options I tried:
Use a paid logo generation tool (my favorite option)
- Pros: You get a high-quality logo instantly. They give you the logo in multiple formats (color, all-black, all-white, etc.) so the logo will be more versatile.
- Cons: For the full brand kit, it cost me $65 which is a bit more than the other options, but well worth it in my opinion.
There are a number of websites that will automatically generate a logo for you. You just tell them the name of your business and they'll show you a gazillion different options, and you can pick the one you like best. They also let you customize it with your brand's colors, fonts, etc.
I tested a few out, and my favorite was looka.com. It was a bit more pricey than some of the other options at $65 for a full brand kit, but it was very easy to use, the quality of the designs were good, and they give you the logo in a number of different formats which I think is important.
Here's how I did it:
- I went to looka.com and entered my company name into the form on their home page.
- They walked me through some questions to get a sense of my design preferences.
- They showed me a number of different logo options and I picked my favorite.
- They let me customize the logo a bit. I chose different colors to match my brand colors.
- Now the less fun part: It was time to pay. They tried to push a monthly plan on me, but there was an option to buy the logo via a one-time fee for $65. For an extra $15, I could have also gotten a social media kit and business card designs which would probably be worth it if you need business cards.
Hire a freelancer on Fiverr
- Pros: You don't need to have any design sense at all because a professional is doing all the hard work.
- Cons: It costs a bit of money (I spent $44 on this logo plus a tip for the designer), it isn't instant (I spent less than 15 minutes of my time, but I had to wait two days for the final logo) and you don't get many logo variations unless you spend more.
Fiverr is a site that lets you hire freelances to do projects for you. There are plenty of other sites like this, but Fiverr is the one I've heard the most about, and since the whole point is to get this done quickly, I figured I'd give them a shot.
Here's how I did it:
- I went to Fiverr searched for Logo Design.
- A million different freelancers popped up with varying price ranges. I picked the first person in the $40 range because I figured it might be slightly higher quality than the cheapest options, but still very affordable (my default assumption is that you never want the cheapest, but you hit diminishing returns quickly as the price increases).
- I completed the checkout on Fiverr and paid the money ($40 + a $4 fee). Note: There's an option to tip after the design is finalized, so if you're the tipping type, build that into your cost estimate.
- After paying, I had to fill out a short form asking what I wanted. I said I wanted something professional but informal, and I told them the specific shade of green I'm using for this website.
- Every designer has a different time frame, but the person I went with had a two-day turnaround time. Two days after placing the order, they sent me four sample designs and asked me to pick one and request any adjustments. I picked my favorite and asked for a few tweaks.
- One day later, they got back to me with the final designs in a handful of different formats.
Overall, the designer was fast, courteous, and I think they did a good job. However, because Fiverr is a marketplace, results might vary depending on who you actually hire to do the design.
Design your own logo with Canva
- Pros: Gives you the most control, and is either free or very cheap.
- Cons: Takes a bit of extra work, and if you don't have an eye for design, you might end up with an ugly logo.
Canva is an online design tool meant to be used by non-professionals. It's much simpler to use than something like Photoshop, and there's a free version which will probably be enough for you. They have a lot of templates to start with, but then it's up to you to make the necessary tweaks for get the logo looking the way you want. Of all the options in this article, this one definitely involves the most work, but I still managed to make this logo in about 15 minutes.
Here's how I did it:
- On the Canva home page, I just typed "logo" into the search bar and it immediately took me into the editor (I didn't even have to create an account).
- It shows a bunch of templates that you can use as a starting point. I scrolled through them until I found something I liked (note: I ended up replacing literally every single part of the template, but it was still helpful for giving me an idea of what to do).
- Once the template was applied, it was up to me to do the rest. I changed the colors to fit my brand, chose a new image, picked a font, and typed out my website name. None of it was very hard, but it did involve a lot of decision-making compared to the other options.
- I downloaded the image directly from there. Creating an account is optional, but I would recommend doing it so you can save your design in case you want to make adjustments later.
Use a free logo generation tool
- Pros: Free, easy, and instant.
- Cons: You just get a single image file, and a lot of the logo options are terrible, so you need to have enough design taste to pick one that's good enough.
There are multiple options for generating a free logo, but for this one, I used FreeLogoDesign. It's very similar to Looka (the first option on this list) but there is a free option. Honestly, you get what you pay for. The designs on FreeLogoDesign weren't nearly as good I didn't think, although some were good enough, which I guess is the whole point.
There are paid options if you want high-resolution images or different image formats, but you can download a simple image file with the free version which might be all you need.
Here's how I did it:
- I went to FreeLogoDesign.org, typed in my company name, and clicked "Get started".
- They show you a ton of different logos (15 per page, but they have over a hundred pages) for you to chose from. Many are terrible, but it's not hard to find ones that are good enough.
- After selecting one, you have the option of editing it. I found the editor to be pretty difficult to use, but you should be able to change the text and colors at least.
- When you're done, click "Save" at the top right of the editor and it will take you to a pricing page. I went with the free option which requires giving them your email address, and then they email you the logo.
I hope you found this helpful! Of course there a many other ways to get a logo for your business created. The key is just to get something you're happy with and keep moving, because there's a lot more to building a business than having a pretty logo.