How to Create Web Page Logos

If you are creating a new blog, commerce site or any kind of website, having an eye-catching logo is essential for branding and can help increase traffic and create buzz for your site. Even if you are not a design or coding expert, creating a logo and implementing it is not difficult if you follow simple guidelines.

Things You'll Need

• Design or illustration program
• Fonts

Instructions

Logo Design

1. Find a good design program. If you do not have Photoshop or Illustrator, there are plenty of free design programs available that work just as well, such as the Gimp.

2. A logo typically has two components: an illustration or graphic, and the name of your site or company. A catchy slogan is often a good addition as well.

3. You can start with either the site name or the graphic, but make sure that the two complement each other. If you do not have natural artistic talent for drawing a cartoon or graphic, you can use the design elements of Photoshop or another program to create a graphic using line, color and shape. Often a simple gradient or creatively made shape works just as well as an illustration.

4. Choose a font. Photoshop comes with a lot of good fonts, but if you can't find the right one, there are programs like Linotype Explorer and websites like DaFont.com, which have countless options for finding a unique font.

5. Make sure the font, title, slogan and other graphics complement each other and create a seamless image. A good logo should not look thrown together. It shouldn't call attention to itself over the content of your site, but should be aesthetically pleasing.

6. Don't go overboard with colors or crazy fonts. When you start designing it can be fun to go over the top, but make sure your final product is simple and straightforward. A good logo typically has only one or two colors and only one font, though experimenting with shading and font sizes can be fruitful.

Implementation

1. Once you have created a satisfying logo, it is important to make it work for the web. Create a .jpg or .png file that is the exact size that it should appear on your website. You don't want viewers' browsers to be resizing your images, because this will compromise the integrity of your image.

2. Another good trick is to create a .ico version of your logo, a smaller logo that will appear in the URL window on your browser, like the little "g" in Google. This will help identify your site in browsers and brand your site for viewers.

3. Once you have finalized your images, make sure the page design and color scheme of your site matches that of your logos.

References

• Web Design in a Nutshell