lp, here are a few things you'll want to think about when working on a logo.
- A good logo (And there are a lot of *bad* logos out there) should be kind of a shorthand statement about the business it represents. It should give some sense of how the business wants to represent itself to its customers. Do they want to be seen as fun? Energetic? Healthy? Or maybe they want to be seen as serious or highly professional. You're trying to give as much of a sense of this as you can in the logo, while making it distinctive, so it won't get confused with logos from similar companies.
- Logos should be (relatively) simple. You're doing pretty good on this point. For all the work a good logo needs to do, it still needs to be simple enough to be "consumed" quickly visually, and be easy to remember.
- Think about how your logo is going to be used by your customer. A well designed logo should work well on a six foot high banner, on a letterhead, and as small as on a business card. It should work well both in color and in black and white and greyscale.
- Think about how cost efficiently your logo is going to be to reproduce; again you're doing well so far. It's tempting to throw a ton of colors or gradients or other special effects at a logo. But if you're designing a logo for a small company or budget conscious company, you won't be doing them any favors by designing a logo that's going to cost them a ton of money every time they go to have it printed. If you're not sure how to judge this, just take a sample of your logo to a local printer, and ask them what would be involved in getting your logo printed.
- Logos are best designed in a vector design program, like Illustrator, using what are called "spot colors".
Vector artwork is made up of lines and shapes that the program sends to an output device as mathematical equations. The big advantage to this is that it allows your artwork to be scaled as big or small as you like with almost no loss of quality (Assuming you're printing to a good, high resolution printer). This versatility can be really valuable for something that can be used in as many ways as a logo can. Vector artwork also tends to give you more flexibility in editing and reworking your logo if you need to do so later on.
These things can be achieved using a "bitmap" artwork program (bitmap oriented programs define your artwork on a pixel by pixel basis), like Photoshop, to a certain degree, but you have to be much more careful and think further ahead in how your artwork is going to be used. You also need to give more thought into how you are using color as Photoshop is not primarily focused around using "spot colors", though it can be done.
- Spot color vs. process color. Spot colors are inks that are premixed using a standard formula so that the color is very, very consistent from one print run to the next. This is very important in creating a corporate identity, which is what a logo is part of, because, ideally, you want your customers to be able to instantly recognize you logo. Having it always print in the exact same color is a big help in this.
There are a number of different "systems" that define spot colors, but in the U.S. the most popular by far is called the Pantone Matching System, though sometimes they're just called "PMS colors". You can buy books with small samples of all the Pantone colors or you can also just buy individual little "chips" that will have a sample of a given color on it.
The alternative to using spot color is using "process colors". These are colors that are defined using the four basic colors used in printing, cyan, magenta, yellow and black. This is sometimes referred to as CMYK; "K" being used to represent black, so that there is no confusion that you may be referring to the color blue.
Printing using process colors is done all the time, but for projects like logos, it's not the most cost efficient way to go, because when you are printing, a printing plate must be created for the printing press for every color being used; the more plates, the greater the cost. So if you are creating a logo with only two colors, you can save a good chunk of change if you use two spot colors, using only two plates.
Creating logos and corporate identities can be a speciality unto itself and there's lots of information out there on the subject. Here's a good place to see some logos with brief explanations of the thinking behind them;
Will-Harris House. Another good source on topics like logo design and just design in general is
Before & After magazine; in fact their current front page is touches on logo design.
You've made a good start. Keep at it.
Snark
