Step 9: Branding – start with a logo

This is part of the series ‘Step-by-step guide to getting started as a food blogger’.

Step 9: Branding – start with a logo

In order to create a strong, instantly recognisable brand, you need a good logo.

The logo should come before the site design, because the colours, theme, font and ‘feel’ of the site design should be derived (or at least associated) with the logo.

To get a logo, you can use a ‘design agency’, or a ‘design marketplace’.

A design agency is a single company with one or more designers.

• Sortfolio is a good starting point to find design agencies (you can sort by location and budget)

A design marketplace is somewhere where you can describe your requirements to a large number of designers. The designers (often individuals) then offer proposals that you can choose from.

• 99designs is a popular design marketplace

Design Agency

Depending on your budget and requirements, a design agency may be your first reference point when it comes to getting a logo. However, note that prices can vary enormously so it is a good idea to get quotes from lots of companies before you choose one.

The design agency will ask you a number of questions, to help ascertain your requirement, then likely only offer you 3 draft designs. You will then pick which of the 3 designs you prefer, then they will enhance it.

When working with a design agency, you can do it remotely (they will be used to this); meaning that you won’t have to visit them in person – all communication can be done over e-mail and phone/skype.

Design Marketplace

We used 99designs to get a logo at a very reasonable cost. After setting a good design brief (this is important), we received over 711 design concepts from 264 designers. The main incentive to try them was that they offer a full money-back guarantee if you don’t like any of the designs. If you do use 99designs , consider paying $5 above the recommended price (as we did) to ‘game the system’ – this resulted us in getting far more views and entries from developers compared to people who paid the standard price.

Some design considerations that you need to think about when having a logo designed

Ask the designers about each of these points:

• It needs to convey the message of what your brand is about
• It should set the tone of your brand
• It needs to work on your blog (usually in the header)
• It may need to work on a light and/or dark background
• It must be clear and easy to read when printed in colour, greyscale and black and white
• It must work in different sizes
• It must work on other sites such as Facebook and Twitter – some of which require a landscape format and some require a square format
• You should have guidelines on where and how the logo will be used, the about of white space surrounding it, etc.
• You might want to think about spot colour and process colour printing considerations
• For brand familiarity, your blog’s favicon should be representative of the logo (the favicon is the image that appears in the tab and bookmark of the web browser). It does not have to be the logo itself, for example Facebook use an ‘f’ and Twitter uses an image of a bird

You can see our logo (and variations of it) on our promote page.

Step 10: Site design (content is king, design is queen)