We have all heard it before.  First impressions are everything.  This is especially true in marketing and branding your business.

A business logo is one of the first things your customers will see.  It is important for your logo to communicate to potential customers a sense of what your business is about.

The logo makes the first impression and sets the tone of what your business is about.  The logo above is one I made in just a few minutes just for illustration purposes.  You will want to spend more time on yours but it shows you that creating a logo with photoshop is actually quite easy.

To pay someone to make a pretty logo for you can run anywhere from $100s to $1000s of dollars.  This can be a potential roadblock for many entrepreneurs that are bootstrapping their business and need to get things done on the cheap.

The good news is that even if you have limited skills you can learn to make your own logo with photoshop, and hopefully a pretty nice one at that.

But before you do that why don’t you join my email list?  For joining you’ll get a free Goodie Bag of handmade clipart that are lovely, if I do say so myself.  And just between you and me you may get some other goodies too but shhh don’t tell anyone!  Oh and you get first access to all my sales and discounts on my other clipart collections.

Choose a Font

Assuming that you already have a name or text that will be used in your pretty logo you will need to choose a font.  The font you use is just as important as any image you use as it sets your logo apart from others and makes the text immediately recognizable.  You want to use a font that is unique and not what everyone else is using.

You can buy a font to use or you can find a free font that you want to use.  There are many places to look for fonts like designcuts.com or free fonts from 1001fonts.com.

Once you have found the font you want to use, download it to your computer and install it.

Open Photoshop

You can now open Photoshop and start a new project by going to file and clicking on “new project”.

Go ahead and give your project a name then change the width and height to whatever you want.  If you have no idea what width and height your logo should be than a good approach is bigger is better so maybe start with something like 3500 x 3500 if you want a square or adjust accordingly if you need a rectangle.

Next set the resolution to 300 and set the background to transparent.

Note: making the background transparent will allow you to add a texture in the background of your logo if you want or you may want to leave it blank so that you can easily use your new pretty logo on your website.  Also if you are using your logo for print you will want to set the logo to CMYK instead of RGB as this will allow you to save the logo as a tiff file.

Adding The Text

Now that you have gotten this far you are ready to start actually making your logo.  First you will need to click on the text tool.  It should be easy to find on the left side of the Photoshop window as it is marked with a capital T.

After you click on the text tool go to the top of your screen and put your cursor in the box where you can choose your fonts.  Hopefully you haven’t forgotten the name of the font you chose so you can type it in instead of scrolling through all the fonts in Photoshop to find it.  After you have the correct font you can also go ahead and choose the size you want your font to be.

Note: You may want to put each word of your text on a different layer so that you can easily move each word into the exact position you want on for your logo.  To add a layer click on the icon to the left of the trash icon.

To work on a specific layer just click on and highlight the layer that you want to work on.

Import Your Clipart

First create a new layer to import your clipart into.  To import your clipart or image you are using go to file and click place embedded.  Find your file from the finder and click okay.

Now you can start to place the clipart and the text of your logo in the positions you want them.  To move things around use the move tool at the top left of the Photoshop window (the one with arrows running north, south, east and west).

Here is what you can quickly come up with.

Export Your Finished Logo

Now that you are finished your logo you are ready to export.  If you are only using your feminine logo for the web and not for print you can export it either as a JPEG or PNG file.  Also don’t forget to save your project in photoshop first!

The easiest way to export is simply to go to the drop down menu under file and then click on export.  From there you can either select export as or quick export as PNG.  Follow the remaining steps to save the file in the folder you want and your logo is ready to go!

I hope this was helpful to you if you are trying to make your own logo.  The real key is to practice and your logo making skills will improve.  I have covered the basics here but there are a ton of other resources out there on how to make logos and a lot of other cool features and tricks you can do in Photoshop.  You just have to use it!

Of course, if you don’t have time to make your own logo or if you need clipart for your logo I have lots of resources for you in my premade feminine logo pack or my graphic designs for sale.

Happy Creating

Kris