How to Create an Animated Logo?

First impression is the last impression, when it comes to Digital businesses or businesses with a digital presence, Animated logos are a great way to create that first impression in the mind of the users, it is also a great way to communicate your message to the customer, and to build a brand identity. Animated logos are a combination of typographic, visual elements, and effects that together represent an organization, a single person, or a group of people.

In this article, we will discuss what Animated Logos are. And what is the step-by-step process to design a logo? We will also discuss the best practices for designing animated logos.

What are Animated Logos?

Animated Logos are simply logos that have a creative movement of text or visuals attached to them. They are a combination of typographic and visual elements that together represent an organization, a single person, or a group of people. The purpose of a logo is to give a unique identity to your brand and to make a visual representative of your brand. Animated Logos are a great way of creating a first impression in the minds of the users, it is also a great way to communicate your message to the customer and to build a brand identity.

How to Design an Animated Logo?

The process of designing a logo can be subdivided into these steps:

Step 1. Project Discussion: Designing an Animated Logo must start with discussing the project with the client. It is essential to know everything about the business and their target market in order to design a logo for them.

Let’s paralleling create an animated Logo for a company called “Cool Drink”. We will assume to perform Project Discussion and have come up with green, white and yellow to be base colors and the Logo should be cool and appealing to young audience.

Step 2. Research: Once we know about the business we are designing for and their target market, we will have to research about what are the company values, about demographics of the target audience, about the space the business operates in and anything else that we may require in the process of logo designing.

After performing research, we have decided to go with a circular logo. Since “Cool Drink” is a soft drink brand, we will use fonts that would make it look fun and interesting.

Step 3. Choosing Typeface: Typefaces simply are the way of designing typography. Typefaces are distinct styles of writing for any font. It includes design for everything every set of characters – from letters, numbers, and punctuation marks, to symbols. The next step is to choose a typeface out of the two:

• Serifs: Serifs are the oldest font styles whose characteristics are the small feet at the end of a stroke on the letter. Serifs help the reader follow the letter easily making them highly clear and readable.
• Sans-Serifs: “Sans” in the word Sans-Serif in French basically means “without,” therefore, sans-serif typefaces are those that lack serifs.

The type face we will be using for our animated logo is “Norwester” as heading and “Jetbrains Mono” for tags.

Step 4. Coming up with visuals and animations: The next step is to come up with some visuals and animation effects. these need not to be your final visuals and animations but just a start point. Think of visuals that come to your mind when you think of some keywords that we may have obtained about the business in the previous steps and then come up with some effects that would make the animations look natural.

Lets create a basic visual element for our animated logo, we will also create some animated effects that we will add after the final iteration of our design.

Step 5. Refining those visuals using design thinking: Design thinking is basically a creative way to solve problems. It is the sum of all the processes that results in designing of a prototype, The most important skills for design thinking are – having empathy for the users and prototyping. In this step we will refine the visuals we had from previous step to come up with a final prototype. Our aim in this step is to use design thinking principles to get a prototype that is presentable enough for the stakeholders.

Lets add some more Visual elements to the logo to make it look cool and appealing.

Step 6. Review and iterate: The final step of the process of Logo designing is to present the final prototype to the stakeholders and get a review from them, as well as we need to test the logo by a group of people. The feedback you receive after this must to taken into account and the design should be iterated accordingly until a final working prototype is obtained that satisfies the stakeholders.

After multiple iterations, this is the final design we settled upon. After that we will add the effects to the design and this is what we get as our final design:

Best Practices

• Simplicity: Contrary to popular belief, simpler logos perform better in capturing the user’s attention and are much well taken by the customers, most of the popular brands you see like Apple, Nike, Adidas, HP, etc. all have a simple logo. This retains the logo in the mind of the customers.
• Originality: One of the most important aspects of designing an animated logo is to have originality in your logo, originality makes your logo unique from others and makes it stand out in the sea of logos. Avoid the generic visuals everybody else is using and come up with an original design.
• Brand Perception: While designing your animated logo, you must research about the target audience you are designing for and make sure that the brand logo resonates with the work they are doing. Before start designing the Logo, research about the target audience’s demographics and you will get design insights from there.
• Versatile: Your animated logo design must be versatile, by this we mean that it should be able to work with different backgrounds. This helps when you may be changing themes of your application or your website. For creating a versatile logo, you can simply design your logo and test with in different backgrounds and iterate of the basis of the results,
• User feedback and iterating: The first iteration of your animated logo may not be perfect but taking feedback from the users can provide valuable insights about the logo design and what things should be improved. In order to continuously improve the Logo we have to that user feedback and iterate our design.

Conclusion

Animated Logos are combination of typographic, visual elements along with some animated effects that together represent a business organization, a single person or a group of people. Having is logo has now become an industry standard not just for digital businesses but for any business with an online presence. But logos are a double edged swords, while a good logo creates a lasting impression in the mind of the customer and can help you build a brand, and poorly designed logo can also harm your brand. Follow the points we discussed in the article in order to design a professional animated logo.