Creative Drawing Exercise: Logos

Published by

M Coston

on

April 17, 2024

The type of art that everybody today is most familiar with is advertisements. That makes it a great practice arena for developing your creativity skills.

Typically, the goals with logos are to keep them simple and memorable.

For this exercise, I’ve composed a short list of Fictitious busineses below. To the best of my knowledge these companies do not exist, I just made them up.

You will just need to choose one company from the list and design a logo (or t-shirt design or advertisement) for it.

You can do this exercise with just pencil and paper if you’d like. It’s really all about practicing generating and exploring simple ideas.

For my examples below I made them in the vector art program Inkscape because I was curious what they would look like all polished. I created two for each one. I was thinking signs and logos for polo shirts.

Since I don’t have formal training or experience designing logos I spent some time researching then came up with my own process to create these.

You don’t have to do it the way I did. I just include the details here to give you an idea of how I created them. You can design your own method if you want to.

I first chose what the logo “footprint” (overall shape) would be. Then I chose the dominant and accent colors I would use. Next I brainstormed possible visuals and decided what would look best. Eventually, I got around to actually drawing them.

Common ‘Footprints‘
Crests – think coat of arms
Shields – usually found in the center of crests
Emblems – flattened oval appearance
Wax seals – circular
Gumdrop – square shape wider at the base with round corners

Art Deco Footprint Design
Abstract Footprint Design

With all that said, go ahead and pick a company name below and try your hand at designing something different.