Transcription
How do you know if a logo that you've got or that you've designed actually works in the real world? We've all been in the situation whether you've been handed one from a designer or you've designed a logo and you've put it into real use. You put it on a brochure, you've put it on your website and it just doesn't look how you expected it. How do we test a logo? I'm going to show you five ways of testing a logo design to make sure that it works in all cases, that there's no issues with copyright, and that there's no issues with legibility. Let's go.
The first test I always use when I'm designing a logo, it's foolproof. It's the blur test. I don't just use this with logos. I use it with when I'm designing font or if I'm designing an icon or anything lettering wise. So, blurring the logo. What we do is use any design app. I'm using Affinity at the minute. I'm going to highlight it and I'm going to go find a blur tool. So, I'm going to choose a gorgian blur. Just want to increase the radius slightly as we go. And I'm going to press enter and say okay. I'm going to zoom in and out. Now, what I'm looking for in the design is to see any problems with it. So, for instance, if you look at like down here with the C, we might have an issue there that we can balance even more later. And I'm just going to mark it with a red circle. You can see that this part of it here of the A that looks thicker than the rest. And that means there's a bit of a balancing issue. That may or may not be an issue there that we can play around with. So, I just put another circle on there that I can see it. And the G and the I look kind of like the molding together, which could be an issue when it's scaled. The ultimate goal is to make this work as blurry as it can. If you take the Apple logo, for instance, and you blur that, even if you blur it quite a bit, you can still see parts of that Apple logo throughout. And what we want to do is with our designs, make it so that when it's blurred, it can be seen sort of. If you blur it a little bit and it doesn't work, then there's a big problem.
The second test is flipping the logo. Again, this works really well with a logo type or word mark, but even an icon works good for this, too. So, for the logo type, all I do is in any software, I go up to the right here and I press flip horizontal. And that mirrors it. Notice now you can't actually read the text. That's because our brains in our western culture read from top down, left to right. flipping it breaks your brain and it stops you from reading it and starts to let you see it. So here I can see if there's any inconsistencies. I've already done this so I don't actually see any in there. But you can repeat the same process of going in here adding a circle of a certain color as you go into any spots that you might think are a bit off. And you can even write a note next to it. And we do the same for Krey. In fact, I'm going to just do it for the icon here. If I can just ungroup this guy. take these and we can flip horizontal. And again, we're not reading it as a K. We're now reading it as a different kind of letter form probably. But we can see the shapes in between. And if we don't spot any problems, all good. But sometimes you really can spot some issues from doing that. Changing the perspective as well can help too, depending on where it's going to be seen to see if it's going to have a big issue. For instance, if your logo type is going to be seen on a billboard and people are going to be walking at a certain angle to it, you can get very nerdy and check the perspective and make sure it looks good at that weird perspective that people will be perceiving the design at. So, flip the logo so that it's not legible, so you can't read it, but you can see shapes and you'll be amazed at the mistakes that you can see.
The third test, it's an obvious one, but something that we all must do, scale. The goal of a good logo is that it's recognizable instantly. People can remember it at all different sizes. Now, I'm going to use the M for this because I'm going to say this here at this size is 100% scaled. What I'm going to do is I'm going to press enter and I'm going to make sure we move this horizontally. We're going to add some duplicates and we're going to bring the scale down like this. Press okay. And then now what we have if I just make them all neat and tidy, we have different scales of the same logo. And if I zoom in and out, you can see where it starts to become really hard and difficult to see where it is or what it is. Luckily, I've already done this. So this M here looks readable and looks identifiable as the magic logo from that size. However, if your logo doesn't, that shows that there's an issue with scalability within your design, and you'll have to go back and fix that afterwards. If the logo starts blurring itself, and you can't tell the specific elements within the design, for instance, this K on Crazy, if I scale it down, theoretically, you should still be able to see the individual parts of the K even at its smallest setting. That means it's working well. But if those arrows or the part of the K are starting to merge and you can't tell what it is, that means there's a consistency issue within the logo. Therefore, we need to go in and make some edits to that to make sure it works at that size.
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Okay, the next test is inverting. If your logo is black on white, which is how I normally design or start my design of every logo, then it's really important to invert that. So, the logo should become white and the background should become black. And the reason why is because logos actually change in size and in proportions depending on whether it's a light source or it's reflecting off something. So, with a white logo on a black background, it will look a little bit larger because of the glow effect happening than a black logo on a white background. Which logo looks bigger for you? It might be hard to see, but generally speaking, this magic logo here, the white one, will look slightly bigger than this one or slightly thicker. And that's because of that glow effect that I was talking about. with anything that's white on a black or dark background, it will naturally glow and that increases the mass of the object in our perspective. So, in order to fix this, what you want to do is change it slightly. So, you add an inner stroke to it and then you cut that inner stroke out, which I've got a video, which I'll link down below, showing you how to do that.
The last test that we all should do as designers, but many don't. And this is where it can get messy legally is to check the copyright and trademark of a logo as much as you can. So, if you're worried that a designer has given you a logo and you don't know whether it's been done before, maybe someone's ripped it off or maybe they've accidentally taken too much inspiration. It happens to us all by the way, logo designers, it always happens. What we can do is check in a couple of different ways. Firstly, let's just screenshot this logo that's going to appear down here. I'm going to go to Google images, images.g Google. And I'm going to drag my screenshot in, but it's going to do some image matching. And it's going to see if a logo looks similar to mine. And as you can see here, it's not found it. And any that it does find is mine from like an actual project that I've put on my portfolio. So from there we know that we're absolutely fine with the magic logo. The second thing we need to check with this is trademark. Companies can trademark and protect their intellectual properties and they can do that with logos as well. And there's a really cool website that you can use for completely free called world brand database. You can go on there and upload the logo similarly that you can do on Google and it will check whether that logo is essentially copyright or trademark. That way you can tell whether that logo is unique or unique enough in that sector. So that's five different ways of testing your logo designs. If you enjoyed the video, consider subscribing, leave me a comment, share the video, and I'll catch you in the next.