Looking to create your own logo?
In this Canva tutorial, you’ll learn how to make a logo for free without illustrator or photoshop all by yourself. It’s easy graphic design for beginners without the fancy programs.
If you’re ready to design your own logo online (did I mention for free?) be sure to grab my guide *Free Professional Logo Templates For Your Business*: https://learn.aligncreativeminds.com/free-logo-template-brand-business
Lesley Nimmo (00:00):
Need a logo for your business without breaking the bank? I do not blame you. I have definitely been there before. By the end of this video, I'll show you how to build your own logo in Canva for free, and I'll share some awesome templates to help you get started. For the best design hacks for non-designers, subscribe to the Brand Therapy Sessions channel, and don't forget to hit the bell so that you'll be notified when we post a video every Wednesday.
Lesley (00:23):
As you probably know, logo design can be a huge investment. I've helped dozens of people with the exact same method that I'm about to show you today. They've created beautiful logos and gone on to have great success in their business. What you can do right now is access the link below this video, and you'll be able to get to the templates that we've created in Canva for you so that you can use this as a starting point to do the same. Let's get started.
Lesley (00:50):
Be sure to click on the link in the comments below so that you can access the free resource that I've created for you. Once you've clicked through, you'll see a window like this, and all you'll have to do is click the option to use template. And in the case that you don't already have a Canva account, you can either sign up really simply with Google or Facebook, or you can manually set up with your own email.
Lesley (01:19):
All right. And once you've done that, you'll see right away that the template that we've created is loaded and ready for you to dive in. First, we're going to start by choosing a font. And the reason we choose a font first is because it really does set the stage for the rest of the logo. Really quickly, you can see how your brand name feels as you click through different fonts and you can actually gauge if it would resonate well with your ideal client. Then once you've selected your font, it can influence and inform the type of symbol or the illustration you might want to incorporate into your logo, as they should look like a set. An example could be a modern or a thicker font, and that would call for a solid icon, whereas logos with thinner lettering might call for an outline symbol or a linear illustration.
Lesley (02:09):
Another reason for working font first is because sometimes business owners only want a word mark for their brand, meaning text only. And that can be a really clean and lasting option. There will also be incidents where the icon for your logo is shrunken down too small and it won't be legible or recognizable anymore, so you always want to make sure that your business name can be well-read.
Lesley (02:31):
On the second page, you'll see the table of contents. And what we've done is we've selected our 10 favorite Canva fonts for each category of font. Generally, there are serifs, sans serifs, and scripts when it comes to types of fonts. And usually what you want to try to do is think of the kind of business you have and how that would be best represented based on the font style. And we won't get too far into that right now, but for the sake of this tutorial, let's assume that this is a yoga studio that we're branding and because we want it to have that personal touch and that feeling of entrepreneurship and owned by a small company, we're going to go with scripts. And this is great because we'll scroll through the serifs and sans serifs along the way so you can see what else you can find in the template.
Lesley (03:24):
As I come down, you'll see this is the serif section and serifs work really well if you want to have sort of an academic feeling or a little bit more mature. It definitely speaks to the concept that you're a trustworthy company and you do things in maybe a more traditional way. These are our favorite of the serif category in the free fonts that Canva has to offer.
Lesley (03:53):
And then following this, this is the sans serifs section. Serifs are the feet that are on the edge of the letter as you saw in the previous examples and sans serifs, just like this one, don't have any of those details. They're a little bit more modern, pretty contemporary and androgynous as well. You can see, we have a range from much thinner letters to things that are a bit more thick and bold. This one's a little groovy.
Lesley (04:21):
Okay, so now we're in the script category. I'm going to look through here and choose which one I think I want to use as my base. One of the things you really want to watch out for with script fonts is making sure that the word you're typing into it is legible to everyone. And that's why we wanted to give you quite a few options because some letters shine better in different fonts.
Lesley (05:04):
After taking a look, I think I'm going to go back up to one of the first ones, because I really like how it looks almost like genuine handwriting. Here we go. And we'll just type in the name and you can play with this here. If you want to do two lines of copy or just one, it's up to you and you can play up here with the space in between the letters. Usually with script, we recommend zero just because you want it to feel as true to handwriting as possible. But if you were to break it down to two lines, you could play with the spacing between the lines of texts. It could be tighter, or you can make it a little bit more like this. You could even move it over so it's a little bit asymmetrical. Actually, let's try this. Cool. All right. And keep in mind, you don't have to use just this one singular font. Sometimes we recommend you can pair a script font with a serif or a sans serif, but never use more than two fonts just to keep things simple and clean.
Lesley (06:29):
Now that you have your brand name set in the font that you like, I'm actually going to show you this other great feature that Canva has to offer. And I will caveat, this is not at all an ad for Canva. We just love to use it because it's all about the value and Canva is a free and really easily accessible program for people who are not designers, who don't spend hours and thousands of dollars on these really expensive programs. What I'm going to show you is all of the awesome icons and illustrations that Canva has to offer that can help make your logo actually completely unique to yourself. Comment below and let me know what type of business are you going to be building this logo for?
Lesley (07:11):
If you just go over here to the elements panel, what you can do is search a keyword that works well with the name of your company. In this case, we have Lotus Yoga, so we could search flowers or we could go right to the yoga section. Let's take a look here.
Lesley (07:34):
You'll want to watch out for these icons that have the symbol with the crown that say pro. Everything else is free and the actual pro icons come with a subscription. We definitely have a pro account because we get a lot out of what Canva offers in their premium elements, but again, you can totally be crafty and sift through yourself and find stuff in just the free section if you want to stay budget-friendly.
Lesley (08:10):
All right. I think I'm actually going to use this one. The thing that I like about it is that it's actually a flower and you can see it's sort of the silhouette of someone doing yoga. What I'm going to do is I'll actually shrink this down so that the line is the same width as the width of the text so that it kind of matches a little better. That's a little trick that we do when we're designing logos. And because it's not centered, I can actually place it off-center or play with it down here.
Lesley (08:43):
This, now that I know which icon I want to use, I may decide that, "You know what? Actually, this would look much better if it was all on the same line," so maybe I'm going to just try that out and yep. That was definitely the case for this one. In the case where you want to use an icon, you might find that a single line of text or something that's a little bit more centered works better, but if you just want to do a word mark, that's when you're not really using an icon at all, it's a great option to try and align the text in a more interesting and asymmetrical way. Now we have the actual logo design, so I'm just going to put this in the center of the page.
Lesley (09:27):
And the last thing you have left to do is save it so that you can apply it to your website, your social media, and any of your other marketing materials. You're going to want to get it onto your desktop. What you'll do is you'll just go up to this button on the top right corner and this is how you can get the file and download it in different format types. With the free model that Canva has to offer, your options are a little bit limited, so you can do a PDF, a JPEG or a PNG. Typically, you're going to want to also have a vector graphic so that it can be scaled to any size or a PNG image that has a transparent background.
Lesley (10:03):
A little hack, and a tip for you guys is you can actually just try and sign up for the 30 day trial with Canva, download all of your assets that you need and cancel before you start getting charged. It's definitely worth trying and exploring all of the premium features as this is something you'll save tons of money working on versus any of the Adobe Creative Cloud programs. If you do decide to go forward with the free 30 day trial, all you would do is select which page in this file you would want to download from. In this case, it's page 28. And then just make sure that you click on the transparent background option after you've signed up and then you'll hit download. And as you can see, Canva is very quickly processing this file for you and now you'll have it on your desktop.
Lesley (10:54):
All right. Now you know how to build a logo in Canva on your own and save yourself a couple of dollars along the way. If you haven't already, don't forget to download the template. If you like this video, please tap that like button, subscribe to our channel, and don't forget to share it with your friends. See you soon.
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