Joe Troyer 0:30
I want to talk about how to create a logo on an hour look, let's be realistic. Most logos suck out there. Right, a friend of mine recently spent $20,000 on a branding exercise for his name, right company name and logo. And to be fair, they already had a company name. So it was just really like the the color scheme and the logo. And the other day on a call with with a partner of mine, he was like, Yeah, I really liked your guys's logo better. Where did you get that done. And I had to laugh, right? Because it was literally done like the name we came up with in less than an hour, just tossing ideas back and forth. And then we handed the spec, which I'll teach you guys how to write, and how to get this right and how to write a good spec so that it can be done correctly. The spec, the spec, we wrote in that hour, and then we handed it off to our Filipino designer who knocked it out. Okay, and he did his work in like an hour.
So it was an hour of my time, let's say an hour, maybe two hours max. And that's being so generous for our Filipino designers time. He's talented, but he knocked it out in no time. And you guys know that that wages in the Philippines are cheap, right? There's a whole currency conversion thing. So like, maybe it cost like 10 bucks, right? 15 bucks to get a logo done. Right. But there's a right way along the wrong way to do it. Because again, most logos suck. So the big thing is you got to copy something that's already been created. Right? You cannot reinvent the wheel. And there's really only three variables when you think about a logo. And so we want to figure out, how do we isolate those variables? How do we make sure that they can't be wrong? So the only three variables are icon, the text, right? And the color scheme? So like, what's the name of your company? Right? Is the text, there's an icon, there's a color scheme? And then there's like, is this going to be on one line? Two lines? Is this bolded? What font is this? Is it italicized? Was it underlined? Like, that's really it. Okay, so the way that I control this, is I give specific examples.
And the way that I do that is by is really defining a really good spec for my designer. And I do that by finding inspiration. Right? So I still, and I will still hold designs, right? But I still sections, parts of designs, and what do I mean parts of designs, I mean, the icon, the text and the color scheme, right? So I'm gonna go look for inspiration on sites like 99 designs, or free logo makers. If you Google that you'll find a bunch of different free, literally logo makers, but they have preset templates that you can look at. And you can model right, then I also like looking at a site called brand bucket.com. And on brand bucket, they sell you overpriced company names, and I bought one from here before for a couple of grand and predetermined logos. But the cool thing is, again, it's a great place to find inspiration. So if you want to look on 99 designs, for example, if you just do a Google search for site, colon 99 designs.com.
And then marketing agency logo, that you go over to images, guess what you're going to find a lot of marketing agency logos. If you like, Oh, those are all great, but like I want my icon to have something to do with like local marketing, like your local electrician, your local plumber. Okay, so then do a Google search site 99 designs.com marketing agency logo Plus Local, guess what happens? You find what you're looking for, right? So as you start to iterate, right, what I do is I like to just jot down the image URLs array of the ones that I like and make a note, right, and it's that simple. So I'll start at 99 designs. I'll spend five minutes looking through there. I'll go through some free logo makers. Again, do the same thing. Same thing with brand bucket, and I'll start to find trends of things that I like and I'll usually cycle through this whole process. I'm gonna design three logo makers brand bucket three to four times in order to create a spec to handoff From the designer, and the spec comes from my notes, I like this font. And again, what we ended up doing is I want this icon, I want it to be this color, I like this font, I want it to say this, instead, I want it to be styled like this example. And that's it. Right? But you really got constrained the elements. So literally, literally, what you're doing is, your designer isn't really designing, your designer can simply mean a graphic designer, or someone proficient in Photoshop. Right?
Did you catch that we're not actually asking them to really design. Or say, here's a spec, here's exactly what I want it to look like. They just need to be capable inside of Photoshop. Next up, you're going to need to pick a color scheme, right? And this goes with your logo. And, you know, definitely get inspiration from other sites. In my mind, I always have kind of a bank, so to speak, right? A mental bank of sites that I've visited recently, in the last 3060 days, probably 90 days is too long. I probably don't remember that far. But sites that I've looked at and been like, wow, I really liked this right? And so definitely, I'm going to use them. When I'm thinking about a color scheme. I'm gonna get inspiration from other sites, but I'm also just going to go to Google, right? If you're a marketing agency, and you're trying to figure out a color scheme, go find marketing agencies, how do you do that you go to Google, picking a random city and, you know, do a search for a marketing agency or pick a random niche, you know, you know, window cleaner plus marketing agency, and just do a bunch of iterations like that, and very quickly, right, you're gonna see a bunch of logos, or you're gonna see a bunch of color schemes, whatever it is that you're looking for inspiration on.
And you can also use a tool like colors.co, and it's spelled funky to help you come up with awesome color schemes, but they'll help you come up with not just like, oh, I want to use black and gray, they'll help you come up with a color palette. Right? And those palettes are like colors that work well together. And they'll not only show you like you know the top you know colors that belong together like your the four colors for your site, but they'll also show you a colors that work well. If you need other colors that right like I'll use this dark blue, I'd really like another shade of blue. They'll give you like the other complementary colors for each primary as well. Thanks for tuning in to show me the nuggets. If you've been enjoying the podcast and find our content. Also, please visit our apple podcast page, hit the subscribe button and leave us a review. Joe and the whole team have been working hard to bring more value to the show. Worth you back feedback will go a long way in helping us make better and reach a wider audience.
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