Only Logo Design

Logo Design Templates

Templates for logos. What a fabulously bizarre idea. A logo is supposed to be original. Capital ‘C’ custom. A brand that has been created with your company, service or product in mind. It is supposed to appeal to your customers. Reflect your business philosophies. A logo is usually born out of a sometimes-difficult process that takes place between you and your designer. The give and take between design integrity and market practicalities. Or you can pick a so-called pre-made logo, a template, where you select an existing icon, add your company name and you’re all set. All for pennies on the dollar. Of course, the very logo template that you’re using will also be picked by other companies who will use it as their logo. Seems like the antithesis of what any designer worth his/her salt is about. It’s also the polar opposite of what you should do, if you care one iota about your business image.

How can slapping your company name on a generic logo template replace an effective logo design created specifically for you? We don't think it can.

From a design perspective, pre-made (or template) logos are a disaster. The idea that you can simply swap out some text (invariably presented on these template logo web sites as ‘Your Company Name’) with your actual company name presupposes a few things that are fundamentally incorrect. A font treatment is part of any effective logo. It is part of the design. The process. Not just something that is added in as an afterthought – the basic premise of the logo template model. Not every company name fits into the visual area created by the words ‘Your Company Name’. Red’s Pet Shop requires a different textual approach that The American Society of Red’s Pet Shops. No good can come from any design solution that involves simply slapping text on the bottom, or side of an existing generic icon. And let’s talk about the text itself. In order to keep these template logos as cost effective and therefore profitable (i.e.: fast) to edit as possible, the font styles are usually ‘off the shelf’ fonts in their native form (just like the ones in your font folder). This allows ‘Your Company Name’ text to be swapped out by simply cutting and pasting in the new company name. No design. No thought. Design integrity be damned. A vast majority of effective logos feature custom tailored fonts – text treatments that are kerned, re-rendered, warped, distorted, outlined, beveled, etc. Take a look at our logo design galleries – how many of these text treatments are ‘off the shelf’? Very few. It would be next to impossible to simply drop in new names into most of our presented logos because each text treatment was designed with the company name, business philosophy and market depicted in mind. Not so with template logos. But, oh, it only gets worse. Let’s look at the icons offered on most template logo sites.