This question comes up at least once a week with my clients. I know you’ve been wondering about it to.

Where do I start when developing a logo for my creative business?

Let’s get something out of the way right out of the gate. In today’s landscape, a logo is quite simply a recognizable graphic design element that illustrates your business name. It may, or may not, have an icon associated with it (these days, the big brands rarely do).

Here’s the bottom line: a logo is a tool to help communicate and represent the brand behind it.

When you’re first starting out whether you have a service based business like coaching or a product based business like jewellery making, you need your business name written in type so that when it’s displayed, it represents the essence of who you are and what you do.

A logo is just one small piece of a brand identity.

Still not convinced you don’t need a butterfly or geometric shape that goes behind or beside the name of your business?

Have a look at these brands (as logos):

Unless you’ve never been in a mall or watched ads on TV in the past few years, you’ll recognize many of these.

Do any of them need an icon to differentiate them? Looking at each one, if you know it, you get a sense for their brand and your experience of it.

Do you still think you need that icon in your own logo?

You need to build a brand, beautiful. A logo is only one small part of it. And locking yourself in now to an illustration that will mean nothing to your audience (or likely you in three years), does not often serve your brand.

What DO you need?

A type (or font or hand drawn calligraphy) that spells out your business name. (My favorite places to source custom fonts include Creative Market and My Fonts.) If you want a hand letterer – there are many you can hire right off Instagram [that’s where I found the gal who did mine!]

A word of warning — choosing any old font that you like and going the DIY route has the chance of setting your brand off to a rocky start. (You’ve got to trust me here: please don’t use Comic Sans. EVER. Or Angelina or Papyrus. There are many typefaces that have similar characteristics to those fonts that will likely be a better fit for your brand personality. Talk to or hire someone with design experience. Let their trained eye help you.)

You need a tagline. Something that sums up what you do in a clear, easy-to-understand sentence.

Many of the reasons that clients hire collaborative partners to help them define and develop their brand identity is that understanding the nuances of type and color psychology can be daunting. You need to partner with someone who has experience to help develop guidelines for you to follow.

In the meantime though, what you really need to do is get out there and get clients. You need to test out business models and find your footing. There is no reason to let not having a “logo” stop you.

You’ve got this.

And when you’re ready, I’ll be here. Ready to help you develop your own brand essence.