How lucky can a blogging girl get? Kate from Floret Cadet has agreed to join us again today and share her advice on designing a logo. So much valuable information…thanks, Kate!
Logo
After you name your baby, you will need a logo! Obviously, you can hire a well established, corporate graphic design or branding firm to design a logo for you, but for someone just starting out on their own, that might not make financial sense. I think it’s important to have a unique logo that you love and will want to use for the foreseeable future, and again, I learned this the hard way- my year 1 Floret Cadet logo was a word document that I created with a free font and then took a screenshot of to make into a JPEG! There are some great options out there that are a huge step up from the DIY-without-the-proper-software route I initially took, even if you are on a very tight start up budget.
Chic Custom Logos For A Reasonable Rate
I later found a whole community of graphic designers who can custom design logos, blog graphics, and marketing collateral in packages for very reasonable rates. Many of them have a presence on Etsy.
Sage Wedding Pros is a great branding and business resource, and many of their advertisers and editorial contributors are boutique design and branding firms aimed at small business start ups.
I used Prophoto for by blog design / template, and I found that a lot of the designers doing prophoto template design also offer branding packages and one of a kind logo designs. Some of them were: Swoone, Seaside Creative, and Mindy Young Design. (A general note: a lot of marketing/ branding services and products tailored towards photographers are very transferrable to floral designers, which makes sense - a major purpose of your website and blog is to showcase professional quality photos of your work (even if you didn’t take them), and like photographers, lots of floral designers are sole proprietorships and involved in the wedding sector.)
And of course, getting a recommendation from someone whose logo you love is always another great way to find the right designer for your brand!
Working With A Custom Logo Designer
You will want to approach a prospective designer with at least some idea of a style you are going for, and whether you want a type based or image based logo. Some examples / inspiration for type based logos are here, and there are also lots of general logo design inspiration galleries online, many of whom have ads by logo designers who charge reasonable rates.
If you don’t know exactly what you want, I think that the best starting point for a conversation with a designer would be a few example pictures of logos that you like (or don’t like), a few fonts that you like (or don’t like), and a few kinds of shapes or images that you like (or don’t like). It’s very fun to browse fonts at Veer, and Shutterstock has a huge gallery of vector drawings that can be inspirational.
Pre-made Logos
If you don’t have the budget for a custom route with one of these types of designers who caters to small businesses, another discovery of mine was that many of the same designers offer pre-made logos that are *very* inexpensive. You will definitely want a logo that is unique to you, but most of the pre-mades are sold as exclusives, meaning that they are sold once with your business name added, and then not offered again. Designers sometimes use “OOAK” as shorthand for these offerings, meaning “one of a kind.”
Here are some of the pre-made logos that I happened to come across in a search today, and like for a floral design business– most of them are one of a kind, so would never be reused, and designers will let you change colors or fonts. I’d be proud to sport any one of these! Images are linked to their sources…
That’s it! Hope this post was helpful. I pinned lots of logos, blog graphics, designers, blog templates, and other marketing stuff on this board while I was shopping around for a logo and blog design, so please feel free to peruse for more ideas!
So many links that are brand new to me! I find it refreshing that Kate is so generous with the information she obviously spent countless hours researching. She is one of the designers I am beginning to refer to as the “caring bunch”…those are the designers who care deeply about their profession as an art form and want to share their experiences with other designers without worrying about competition…simply because they care…about flowers and about people.
Be sure to join us again next Wednesday. Kate will give you some pointers on finding your niche as a floral designer. Happy Wednesday!
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