Spandrel

Designing a logo

Describe the business and get real logos drawn for you, keep the one you like, adjust it by hand, and download a file you can put on a sign, a shirt or an invoice.

The short version

  • Say what your business is. You get three directions to react to.
  • Point at one by its label and ask for changes.
  • Nothing is thrown away. Every round stays on the canvas.
  • Click any part to move, resize or restyle it yourself.
  • Hand edits do not save until you click Save changes.
  • Download SVG for anyone printing it. PNG for everywhere else.

Getting the first ideas

Say what you do and how you want to come across. "A fern plant logo for a small garden design studio, calm and a bit old-fashioned" is plenty. The first round draws three genuinely different directions rather than three versions of one idea: usually a letter mark, a simple picture and an abstract shape.

Three is on purpose. Reacting to something is much easier than describing something, and the direction you reject tells you as much as the one you keep.

You do not have to pick a font. One is chosen to suit the design, and you can name a different one at any point.

Working towards the one you want

Each design carries a small label, like 2a. Use it. "2a but the leaf is rounder and the name sits underneath" changes that design and draws one result, rather than starting again with three new ideas. Ask for options whenever you want several to choose between again.

Plain descriptions work better than design vocabulary. Say it feels too corporate, too busy, too sharp. Say what it should remind somebody of.

Nothing is thrown away

Every round stays on the canvas with the newest at the top, so a change you regret costs you nothing. If round two was better than round six, use Bring to top on it and carry on from there.

This is the part people get wrong. There is no need to save a design you like before trying something else, because trying something else does not replace it.

Changing it yourself

Asking is good for direction and bad for millimeters. Click any part of a design to select it and you can move it, resize it from a corner handle, rotate it, or restyle it directly.

Clicking again selects what that part sits inside: a single leaf, then the whole picture, then the picture and the words together. That is how you grab the thing you actually mean when it is made of smaller pieces.

A selected shape offers fill color, outline color, outline thickness and opacity. Selected words offer font, size, color, weight, italic, underline, strikethrough, alignment, letter spacing and capitals, and you can double-click them to retype the name. Hold Ctrl (Cmd on a Mac) to select the picture and the words together and line them up with each other.

Saving, undoing and starting over

Changes you make by hand are not saved until you click Save changes on that design. Until then they live only in the page you are looking at, so refreshing puts everything back the way it was. That is deliberate: it means you can experiment freely and get out of a mess without asking for anything.

Undo steps back one hand edit at a time, and Ctrl+Z does the same. Revert to drawn throws away your edits to one design and puts back exactly what was drawn, which is always kept underneath. Clear all deletes every round and starts the whole thing over, and it is the one action here that a refresh will not undo.

Downloading it

Select any part of a design and choose Export. You get the whole design that part belongs to, and you choose whether to take the picture on its own, the words on their own, or all of it. Files are trimmed to the artwork, with no empty space around it.

Take the SVG to anyone who is printing it. A sign maker, a vehicle wrapper, an embroiderer or a printer will ask for a vector file, and that is what an SVG is: it stays perfectly sharp at any size, from a business card to the side of a building, and it carries its font inside it so it looks right on a machine that does not have that font installed.

A PNG is a picture made of dots. It is right for anywhere that will not take an SVG, and it is what social media profiles and most other tools expect. What it cannot do is get bigger: enlarge one and it goes soft. If you are only going to keep one file, keep the SVG.

Using it on your site

From the same place you can add the logo straight to this site's images, ready to place on a page, or set it as your site icon, the small picture that shows in a browser tab.

A logo with fine detail turns to mush at icon size. If yours is detailed, export just a simple part of it for the icon and keep the full version for the page.

Check it on dark

The Light and Dark buttons show your logo on both backgrounds. A logo that only works on white is a problem you will meet later, on a dark footer or somebody else's page, and it is much cheaper to notice now.

What it costs

Each round of drawing uses build credits, the same pot as everything else the assistant does for you. Editing a design by hand, exporting it and downloading files cost nothing at all, so there is no reason to be sparing with the fine tuning.