If you have to ask how, then you have no business doing it!
Oh well, the world is full of cheap and crappy logos that reside on the sides of pickup trucks that promote hauling rubbish or mowing lawns. Your logo might as well join them even though it cheapens the profession.
Be sure to post what you wind up doing so that I can have a laugh or eat my words.
Seriously though... do you have ANY clue to the process that goes into designed a good logo? Do you even care?
My immediate jump was to Illustrator. If you are starting from the ground up designing a corporate identity I would defiantly start in illustrator. Build your logo in Illustrator. ....
WRONG!!!
Sigh... let me see if I can bring some reality to what it takes to do a GOOD logo mark.
1. Start by finding out what the use of the logo is going to be. Print? Web? Silkscreening? Billboards? 4 color? One color? Vector or bitmap? Etc...
2. Begin research. Find out everything there is to know about the business. Brainstorm concepts and ideas... but don't design anything other than to get an idea out of your head so that you can let it go. Take your research and begin to brainstorm keywords, metaphors, positive/negatives. Create a matrix and start to refine the words. Brainstorm images to find relationships. What are the key element of the business? Should the design be abstract or representational? Research type. Is the client willing to pay for a typeface? Custom typeface? Etc....
3. Once you have a distilled a couple dozen of ideas based on research, get out your pencil or pen and start sketching thumbnails. Initially you might want to use newsprint or cheap tracing paper because you need to do a couple hundred (minimum) thumbnails for EACH idea or concept. Make the thumbs big enough to see detail but not so large that they take too much time. You'll want to work fairly fast so that you don't intellectualize it too much. You should be able to knock out one thumbnail every minute or less. Once you get those hundreds of thumbnails done, go through them and pick a couple dozen to work on refinement. Get out better paper and start over by refining the concept. Do a couple hundred of those. This is when you start tying in the relationships of the graphic elements. Figure ground relationships? Isomorphic correspondence? Continuation? Proximity? Simplify, simplify, simplify....
Do a hundred or so of those until you feel you're getting a concept/direction you like. Get critiques from others. What does the client think? Is there a design direction that's working? Why? Why not?
Next, choose 3 of the strongest concepts and do revisions. Refine, refine, refine and simplify. How many should you do? Keep doing them until it works. If it's not working... then you skipped a step, so you need to go back. Make BIG changes in your edits or you'll find yourself spinning your wheels. Pretty soon, all of your revisions will look the same if you don't keep it fresh.
Now, take your "final" choices and render them out on marker paper. You should be using black ink only with clean lines! Do them around 3 or 4 inches so that you can see them from a distance of 5 feet. Take those to your client and have them choose the concept they like the most. GET FEEDBACK!
Do one more round of refinements based on the feedback you got. But don't let the feedback change your direction too much!! Your job is to add the feedback that makes sense and doesn't change the design. Remember, you went through the process... not your client.
4. Now it's time for Illustrator! Scan your "final" sketches and trace them in Illustrator. Plan to spend a lot of time cleaning up the edges and tweaking alignment. Test your mark by printing it 1 inch and also at 6+ inches. How well does it hold up? Does it need further refinements? Does it stand out well as a black on white logo? Is there trapped white space? Is there a positive association? Is there detail that gets lost or has no meaning? Etc....
5. Start working on a color palette. Get out your research and come up with a scheme. Or is there already one in use? Decide one a single color, 2 colors and a 4 color palette. Use Pantone and 4/C to create your palette to insure printing consistency. Go into illustrator and apply the colors to the logo. How well does it hold up?
6. Print out the logos on nice laser or quality inkjet. Does the colors shift from the Pantone swatches you chose? If so, you need to run some calibration checks and do it again. Perhaps you can print a swatch guide and "cheat" the color so that the colors print close to what you see in the swatch guide?
7. Once you print the "final" logos, mount them on nice black museum matte (not foam core) and take them to your client for final approval and selection. At this point, you should be close to finished so don't let the client take you back into doing more revisions unless they have paid for extra rounds of design. You should be able to apply any client tweaks without spending a lot of time if you did your job correctly.
Of course, this only applies to the logo part of the process. If you are doing other collateral such as a complete identity system, you'll have to show how the mark fits into the whole concept. But if it's just the logo, then go back into your illustrator files and setup the correct Pantones, clean up your files and then save a version for each color. Simple one color, black, 2 color and 4/C if required. Save them as EPS and deliver electronically, CD, or memory stick that works on Mac and PC.
Better yet, instead of going through all of this... hire a PROFESSIONAL who knows what they are doing.
