How to Develop a Logo in Two Days
Grant and I had only two weeks to get the Danneman’s Coffee shop styled before they were planning to be opened and we had a very limited budget. No time or money to hire a graphic designer so I had to work up a logo for Danneman’s so we could get a sign painted on the building and order stick on letters to put across the store windows.
In order to make the logo I had to do a little research. I was lucky to have seen the letters from the old sign that Joe saved from the original building. We used those old metal sign panels with the great green letters to cover the Javaology laminate front counters and it looks great. Those panels gave me an idea for what I was looking for in a Danneman’s typeface. I wanted to find one that had that old super market look and feel to evoke the nostalgia and I also wanted it to look a little beat up around the edges without being too edgy grunge.
To find fonts I go to a site called My Fonts. This website has thousands of fonts and they makes it easy to search through them using key words. When you find a font that is close to what you are looking for, the website will give you a list of others that are similar to it so that you can narrow down to choose just what you are looking for. Not only that, it allows you to type in a specific phrase and choose a background color and type color so when you look at each font you can see how your phrase looks in that font. When you find fonts you are interested in you can tag them to go in a personal font “album” which lets you see a list of your phrase in all of the fonts you tagged displayed in one place to compare between them to help make a final choice.
It will also give you the price of each font or font family. For the most part they are very reasonable, from about 10.50 to a couple of hundred dollars. I have never bought spent more than 45.00 for any of the fonts I have bought there. For those of us that are clueless, it also offers an automatic install process that is presto magic and all of a sudden your new font shows up in your lists of fonts in all of your programs. I LOVE that. I chose a chunky raggedy font called Ultrazoid for the Heading font and I really liked Office Memorandum, which looks like type from an old typewriter, for the body.
After finding the font it was off to a site called Dreamstime which has thousands of photos, and illustrations. For most uses you can purchase a license to use a certain image for less than 10.00 and the artists gets a portion of that money. It is a terrific site since it allows you to run searches and quickly scan through their database for just the type and format of image that you are looking for. For Danneman’s I was looking to find a graphic of a retro coffee cup. I found one that was just right and it cost me about 2.00 for a license to use it since I didn’t need it too big and I wasn’t using it on items to resell.
Once I got the fonts and the coffee cup I played around with them in Adobe Photoshop but you could use Microsoft Publisher or other design program. I made a lot of different configurations and showed them to my “clients”, my friend Joe and Kate and of course Grant, and we all agreed on the design of Danneman’s spelled out in Ultrazoid font with Coffee in the Old 4th Ward smaller and directly under it also in Ultrazoid font but small enough to fit in the same width as the word Danneman’s. We tried the coffee cup with the word coffee in a retro font in red and actually did the business cards like that but I like the simplicity of how I did it on the website better the way I described first but with the coffee cup to the right of the word block.
I would have like the business cards to be printed on brown kraft paper card stock, but doing that would have cost about 600.00 or more for business cards. So instead I found a graphic of what looks like brown paper and used that as the background of the for the cards. I sent them off to Overnight Prints which will give us 1000 full color business cards that are printed on both sides for only 49.00 and with express printing the whole bill only came to a total of 67.00 which included shipping. Don’t get your hopes up because you do not get them overnight but it only takes about ten days to get your cards. I expect ours any day now.
