Importance of Drawing in a Logo Design Process

Hey designers! From my last project on logo design I would like to share some observations that would make the design process easy and fun.

We all were taught the importance of sketching and drawing in our design/art schools. In the beginning I used to follow the design process as a part of my assignment submission. Being aware about the process, I hardly followed it in real projects. Understanding the brief, brainstorming, collecting references, sketching the ideas and then jumping onto the computer used to be my process. Following the process correctly, I still used to feel unclear about the result.

When I was assigned to make a logo for a client at Lemon Yellow, I was constantly taking feedback from my mentor after each process. Here I was reminded of “drawing” my sketches to get a clear idea of what I was ideating. Sketching gives a basic idea of how the logo would be. To make the sketch work technically, its proportions and sizes should be defined properly. Directly jumping onto the computer after sketching consumed more time and effort to reach the desired result. I'd find myself getting stuck between coordinating the sketches with the references. This would send me down a rabbit hole that was ultimately more harmful than helpful.

For me, sketching is penning down the ideation. Well, drawing and filling colour books is what we all enjoyed then and still do! Now, to make my ideas real, I prefer graphing the sketch. Drawing/ graphing a sketch is constructing your ideas on a paper in respect to the measurements and proportions. Constructing a logo with appropriate shapes, lines, angle, colour scheme and typeface takes a little long, but more importantly, it gave me a clear idea of how I want the logo to be.

This process reduced the effort and time on screen as it cleared all the doubts and questions right at the inception stage.The drawing itself can be shown to the client; this will make the job less laborious and sorted as the initial changes can be made at this stage. After getting the drawings approved, I moved ahead with digitising the drawings which got much simpler and clear than it used to be.

Obviously, a design job is not called complete unless there are multiple changes - but these changes are mostly minor which don't force a change to the whole design and can be easily done on the softwares! This learning taught me instead of using the softwares as a crutch, they can be used as a tool!