Designing a logo for VA Recipes

As promised here’s a little bit of insight into the process of designing the VA Recipes logo.

I’m not a professional logo designer, but as I do dabble a bit in design, and have been discovering Illustrator recently I thought I might give this a shot. It can always be replaced later by something more professional. For a laugh I tried Fiverr to see what would come out, but basically you get what you pay for…

I’ve had a logo done on 99designs before for another project, although it was reasonably priced, I thought it would be a bit too expensive for this project. Trying to keep the costs low with the project not launched and all.

After a little brainstorming, I’ve decided the main symbols would be a task list with tick boxes and a headset to represent the virtual assistant aspect of the site as well as the focus on instruction lists. I’ve also chose a specific blue to be a theme colour when playing around with designs earlier.

A bit of research and a some time later I’ve had my first draft ready in Illustrator:

Now the initial idea was to stick the list inside the headphone, make them overlap, and so on. However no matter how I tried the headset would get lost or the list would look awkward. So it was time to simplify things. I took just the tick boxes and placed these within the headset.

 Time to add the name. Aside from the blue, I liked the idea of black & gray together next to it, o in search for inspiration I started with just the plain name with a hint of colour.

The obvious thing here, that can be problematic, is that the logo suddenly became very long. It’s not a disaster, but with my employer having more than a few issues due to a similar problem, I was keen to avoid a long logo, and aim for something closer to a square.

Now this isn’t bad. I tried to include the full name, which meant a bit more colour in there too. Though I wasn’t convinced it would work that great in smaller sizes. Plus the fonts were kind of bland defaults, and once I started trying other ones, nothing seemed to work well.

I then went back to the shortened name. Chiller somehow managed to look good on the VA part. Still struggled with a font choice for “recipes”. The tick boxes looked a bit busy, so I changed them from box outlines to just a gray box with no borders. This was also important to get the “on black” version looking better. It’s good to plan how your logo will look on both light and dark backgrounds, unless you plan to always bring a “white box” with it…

But I wasn’t completely satisfied with that design, the dark version had issues. And again trying to make it smaller would make the tick boxes illegible. It was time to simplify even more. This is when I moved the “VA” part inside the headset. The V does look a bit like a tick box, and bending the “recipes” text made it a little less bland.

So there you have it, the final logo: