Whether you’re looking to get started in logo design or want to sharpen your skills, here are the best courses you should consider taking.
1. Logo Design Masterclass: Learn Logo Design and Illustrator
This course is designed primarily for beginners who want to start their journey in logo design and expand it to the point where they can offer it as a freelance service. Unless you are a professional logo designer, you will likely find this course helpful. All you need is a paper and pencil, and Adobe Illustrator (Creative Cloud version) installed on your PC.
It begins with a brief look at quality logos and then explains how to onboard your clients and create a logo design contract. Next up is sketching, in which you will learn how to brainstorm ideas and put them on paper.
After that, an overview of Illustrator is provided to show you how to turn your ideas into reality. The covered content includes manipulating text and shapes, utilizing tools, using an eraser in the right way, and mastering gradients and blending.
Next, the instructor provides a short overview of Illustrator functions and workflows, then guides you through the process of designing a logo for your client using what you have learned in the course. Additionally, you’ll learn how to save, print, and export the design files and present them to your clients effectively in Adobe Dimension.
This course covers everything you need to start your career as a logo designer, with 7.5 hours of video content, six articles, and a special section on building a portfolio and finding freelance clients. Finally, you’ll receive a certificate of completion to use when pitching clients.
2. Typographic Logos: Typography and Lettering for Logo Design
This course targets logo designers who would like to improve their ability to handle typography and lettering when creating type-based logos. Prerequisites for this course include familiarity with Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop; if you don’t already have these skills, you may find it difficult to apply some course concepts.
The course begins by covering the importance of custom lettering and how it differs from typography, followed by a brief overview of how logo design businesses operate. Next, the instructor explains how to take inspiration from other sources and leverage it while borrowing ideas rather than fully emulating them.
Following that, you’ll be introduced to both analog and digital tools that can assist you in putting together a type-based logo correctly. After coming up with rough sketches, the main part of the course shows you how to enhance them with different sketching techniques, drawing vector paths, and fine-tuning the structure.
Then, after giving an overview of using 3D effects, colorways, and bitmap textures, the course concludes by teaching you how to export the Illustrator design into Photoshop to texture it quickly. In short, the 1.5 hours of video content and the downloadable resources will be enough for you to level up your skills in designing type-based logos.
3. Logo Design: Techniques
The course is aimed at intermediate-level graphic designers and those who have some experience but would like to advance their skills. You only need a creative mind, and Adobe Illustrator installed on your computer to take this course.
It begins by exploring different typefaces, teaching students how to choose the right one for their design. An overview of different type treatments will follow, including how to create a hand-drawn logo, a monogram, and a stacked type logo.
Afterward, there are two sections dedicated to using shapes in logo designing. The first part discusses how you can make your logo stand out with basic shapes such as lines, arrows, squares, circles, and ovals. The second part discusses using advanced shapes such as hearts, diamonds, concentric circles, polygons, strings, and so on.
Furthermore, the instructor covers some advanced design techniques, including offsetting multiple paths, working with stripes, and creating a camera shutter swirl. You will be taught how to give your logo a delicate touch with different logo effects, including gradient effects, bevel effects, and working with negative space and transparency.
Last but not least, the course concludes with a discussion of logo coloring, including color associations and combining multiple colors, and lectures on converting a process color into a spot color and converting process and transparency into tints. If these terms are unfamiliar to you, the course will explain them. However, to master the course content, you need some theoretical knowledge.
4. Graphics Design Specialization
As your skillset as a designer improves, this specialization will give you five courses that will act as stepping stones. Assuming you devote three hours per week, the course will take you six months to finish. You will need some previous experience with design software for all of these courses.
Let’s explore what each course in this specialization holds for you:
Fundamentals of Graphics Design: In this course, the instructor explains the basic principles of graphic design, including how to work with shapes, colors, patterns, and a general overview of typography and composition. Introduction to Typography: The main focus of this course is introducing typography into your logos to express your design better. Learning about letterforms, selecting and combining types, and the history of typefaces will help you become a better type-based logo designer. Introduction to Imagemaking: The goal of this course is for students to become better at making images, manipulating them, or arranging them to express their ideas better. Ideas From the History of Graphics Design: This course doesn’t with the usage of any tools in detail. Instead, it emphasizes the evolution of graphic design ideas from the middle of the 19th century to the mid 20th century. The instructor explains how history contributed to redefining graphics design. Brand New Brand: This course sums up all you’ve learned and allows you to apply what you’ve learned to represent your own imaginary brand visually. By taking you through the process of formulating an idea to creating it, this course is more like giving you some real-world application of what you’ve learned in the first four courses.
Which Logo Design Course Should You Take?
It depends on your expertise as a logo designer which courses you should take from the list. You may skip the first course if you are already experienced enough, while taking the rest will enhance your skills, make yourself ready to design for brands, and strengthen your knowledge of type-based logo concepts.
Do you want to design a logo without using any professional tool? Try Canva. It offers you all the tools you need to create an engaging logo that visually represents your brand or services.
