Humans are prone to seeing patterns in objects. Due to how our brains function, a phenomenon known as pareidolia causes us to unconsciously associate patterns and emotions with particular objects.
Designers use the Grid System or Logo grid to accomplish geometric perfection when designing a brand’s identification. This helps to create a remarkable, timeless brand filled with feelings.
A contemporary or minimalistic logo can make a design feel excellent. Circles, grid systems, and structural patterns for logos can all be incredibly effective techniques for creating logos and highlighting their value to customers.
However, not everyone can use them effectively, and as a result, they don’t always enhance the value of a logo design.
What Is a Logo Grid?
A logo grid is a tool that helps in achieving geometric harmony in a logo. It is helpful to comprehend the structure for the reconstruction of a logo.
In other areas of graphic design, logo grids are often referred to as construction guides.
A logo grid is simply a geometric design approach when used appropriately in a logo design. It can take a business’s visual identity from zero to hero in branding.
What Are the Purpose of A Grid System?
The Grid system is not a new concept. For many years, photographers, illustrators, typographers, and architects have used grids to solve visual issues.
Books, magazines, brochures, logo designs, and all other forms of design are created using grids by graphic designers since it drastically simplifies the process.
An excellent technique is always digging into the markings and asking why they look so contemporary, innovative, impactful, and timeless.
How did they do it? What techniques did they employ? What standards did they use to reach the perfection mark? The main purpose of the grid system is-
- Ordering system: The design is structured using a grid system.
- Design Simplification: Grid systems are used to simplify work.
Griding is important but not required. The aesthetic balance of a logo is reinforced by griding. Once you get the fundamentals nailed, you can easily break the grid to meet your specific requirements.
A brand’s logo will be used in all aspects of design. The logo grid vastly simplifies this process by offering an ordering system, streamlining work for future use, and maintaining visual consistency.
What Are the Benefits of Using Logo Grids?
Each logo designer will have their own reasons for adopting grid systems while creating a logo.
Graphic designers typically turn to this well-known design style because of a few key advantages. Let’s find out what they are-
Remain Organized and Consistent
Your design approach will remain organized and focused, which is one of the most important advantages of adopting grid systems.
You can design one aspect at a time and review your design process as it advances.
As a result, you can correct mistakes while you’re on the go, saving a tonne of time and money.
Uphold a Uniform Look
Maintaining accuracy and consistency across various design aspects is made much more straightforward as the grid system employs a mathematical approach.
Although some grid systems may appear restrictive, they can enable you to achieve visual coherence. You’ll be able to design straightforward yet powerful logos as a result.
Stay Away from Cluttered Design Layouts
You can align all the components of your logo using grids. Hence, you don’t have to be concerned about presenting a cluttered appearance.
When your logo contains more than two or three parts, you can use the margins to minimize cluttered layouts.
Remember that your logo design will seem better the more open your margins are.
Make Scalable, Well-Executed Designs
Scalable logo designs can be made using grid systems.
You can use the same logo on various media, from company brochures to tiny mobile websites. Even when scaled up or down, the logo design maintains its visual coherence due to the rule of thirds.
Collaboration with Other Designers Is Made Simpler
Working with other designers is sometimes necessary for logo designers to complete large projects.
Collaborations, however, sometimes end up in chaos. Your project may be delayed for a long time if miscommunication occurs when discussing design concepts.
Misunderstanding can be reduced by using grid-based design approaches.
The grid system provides a foundational framework for your design.
It can benefit other designers in understanding where and how to use specific design elements.
What to Know About Pareidolia & Grid Structure in Logo Design in Stimulating Emotion?
A psychological condition called pareidolia leads people to detect patterns in seemingly random objects. This frequently results in individuals attributing human traits to inanimate objects.
- Making sure that the viewer understands what the brand wants them to see is the responsibility of the logo designers.
- To rapidly and effectively engage your audience, you must evoke emotion through your brand’s visuals.
- It’s said that it takes about 2.7 seconds to attract someone’s attention online, which is done ten times faster through graphics than copywriting.
- Make sure that your logo (or a client’s logo) stands out from the competition and attracts the target audience’s attention by deliberately triggering an emotion.
- Some brands may attract customers with a friendly smile, while others may use a dark or seductive line.
- All of this hinges on the skill of a logo designer to graphically express the appropriate content in an incredibly powerful way.
We’ll consider this when we sketch, grid, and complete the logo design. When we choose the emotion, we can experiment with various expressions and gestures linked to a particular feeling and seamlessly integrate them into the subject using a grid structure to achieve utmost perfection.
What Are The Basics or Fundamentals of The Grid System?
Continuing with the logo design learning grid system, you can use various grid types.
However, these are essentially combinations of a circle, square, and rectangle, or occasionally they involve adding an angle from a certain point. Designers typically use 45° or 90° angles because, in their opinion, they appear more natural.
Designers find mathematical ratios like the Fibonacci series or the Golden Ratio helpful for creating balanced logos.
Actually, grids are not all that significant. The Grid System is similar to a tool in your geometry toolbox. You can also make a visually appealing logo with balanced shapes.
There isn’t a set principle that every designer must adhere to. Using it might sometimes result in a poorly designed logo as well. This is where skill and experience come into play.
Let’s explore the basic steps that usually comprise the process of Logo designing using a Grid Structure-
Step One: Compile Supplies
We’ll start by gathering our supplies- Pencil, Graph Paper, Ink, Laptop, Adobe Illustrator (or your favorite design software), and Ruler Stencils.
Step Two: Graph Paper Varieties
There are various types of graph paper available. However, the top three are Dotted, Multi-Line, and Isometric Graphs. We will focus on multi-line graphs since it’s the most prevalent and adaptable.
Step Three: Pre-Sketch
It’s useful to sketch freehand for 20 to 30 minutes before starting to work on your logo to ease up your doodling fingers and get you thinking creatively.
Gridding should be considered as a guide, not a prison. It shouldn’t ever make you feel confined to specific shapes or aesthetics; its sole purpose is to help you create harmonious and balanced designs.
Step Four: Select Your Topic and Emotion
Select your subject and your feelings ( these can be gathered during the intake stage of your project). What makes a logo genuinely excellent is how emotion and subject work together to convey a direct and logical message.
When sketching, we advise using rounded shapes, uneven lines, and non-standard compositions. Also, consider how your subject would seem in grid lines and how you can think creatively.
In fact, you can always make optical tweaks after you’re in the final phases of designing your logo when you’re drawing.
Optical correction is when your logo design is tuned by your eye and looks perfectly aligned but is not always in line with the exact dimensions of your graph. There is always room for ultimate optical adjustment.
Step Five: Configure Your Grid
Open a new file of any size in Illustrator to utilize a gridded background. After selecting a view, go all the way down to “Show Grid” and check it.
Using the drawing as a framework, start creating your unique grid. When constructing a shape, it snaps to those lines separately if you choose the Snap to Grid option.
Pressing down the ‘Shift’ key while drawing a shape will help you maintain the accurate dimensions of a circle in Illustrator. There is a lot of copying and pasting, so keep in mind the shortcut keys (command+C and command+V on a Mac or ctrl-c and ctrl-v on a PC).
Step Six: Trim and construct your shape
Remove the grid lines you don’t want and attach them to the lines you wish to keep for your end logo design with the Cut Tool.
The result will be a single, streamlined shape of your original sketch. Once you’ve finished, you can add any more colors, gradients, or effects you want.
If you’re having trouble getting your lines to intersect properly, choose View > Outline to streamline your logo design to just outlines so you can see where your lines start and finish. This will maintain the neatness of your logo’s design.
Note: It is best practice in logo design to copy and paste your work as you go so that you can always return back to a previous version, therefore, copy/paste.
Step Seven: Complete the design of your logo.
When you’re satisfied with your logo design, with its lines connected into a solid shape, just delete any unnecessary gridlines and make any final cleanup, coloration, and features like shadows, gradients, or accents.
If people instinctively look for and discover emotion in objects and logos, it could often be vital to intensify that feeling to effectively deliver the message.
As a logo designer, you can decide how much dramatization is needed for the specific logo you are creating with the help of time and practice.
If you’re stuck and don’t know how to include emotion in your next logo design, seek that expression and emotion online and take some notes on how it appears in humans.
It could be as basic as a head tilt for curiosity, a brow raise for sarcasm, an arm motion for grief, or a spine bend for welcoming.
You can use this strategy to break down your next project into a simple feeling and a simple topic and then combine them and see what happens. You’re probably only one or two changes away from hitting the emotion you wish to achieve through your work.
What Are The Don’ts While Incorporating Grid Systems In Logo Designing?
Now you have understood the application of Grid Structure for logo design. You must know the do’s and don’ts to get the most out of this grinding technique.
Before we focus on the do’s, let’s discuss the mistakes and don’ts of using grid structuring for logo design-
Don’t: Adapt mathematical ratios to a design where they do not exist.
Although the Apple logo was not made with the help of this widely known construction guide, some have used it to explain the design’s classic appeal.
According to this image, the Apple logo is an excellent design because it uses only perfect circles and adheres to the Fibonacci sequence and golden ratio. However, this claim has been widely discredited by a number of mathematicians and designers.
If you look attentively, you can notice that the lines of the apple do not comply with precise geometry and that the numbers do not add up to the golden ratio.
It’d be fantastic if there was a magical mathematical formula we could use to generate ideal logo designs. But it’s nothing but reducing a beautiful design to geometry and numbers.
Remember that perfect geometry isn’t always visually appealing, and one could argue that geometrical inaccuracy is the ideal reason behind the apple logo’s success.
Don’t: Using Construction Grids, Make a Client Believe that A Weak Design Is Stronger.
In this case, designers often misuse the concept of the grid system. Creating a logo in a grid structure produces great value in terms of perfection.
But in some cases, the grid features are added afterward to give the impression that the designer gave the logo a lot of thought, even if they weren’t used in the design process.
A layout grid is an unobservable factor that provides the visibility of the framework and keeps everything in its right position. For visual appeal and long-term success, learning how to integrate your logo design with the grid is essential.
If you decide to incorporate a construction manual into your logo design process, be sure it has a purpose and truly improves your design rather than stepping away from it.
Your thoughts won’t be visually consistent from one product to the next and will always be difficult to produce, much like anything lacking a firm foundation or framework.
Don’t: Over-Rationalize Each Line of Your Logo with Fictitious Geometry, Empty Measurements, and “mathematical” Grids.
Using a ‘mathematical’ plan as a building manual, CEO Marissa Mayer and the company’s in-house design team redesigned Yahoo’s logo in 2013.
They made a video to highlight the “so-called cool/mathematical feature” of the design and to detail their precise design process.
Mayer claims that the last step of their whole designing process was to tilt the exclamation mark by 9 degrees to add a little bit of fun. But this was a mistake!
Some experts found these mathematical justifications to be illogical, and the design received a lot of criticism.
Many designers dismissed its ‘mathematical’ features as nonsense. This exemplifies how ‘mathematical consistency’ doesn’t always translate into a superior design.
What Are the Do’s While Incorporating Grid Systems in Logo Designing?
Once you have understood the mistakes and don’ts of using grid structure, now let’s focus on the do’s so that you can achieve perfection while using a grid system to create aesthetically pleasing logos-
Do: Create a complete design identity with applicable grid systems and geometric forms from day one.
A successful logo design uses a grid structure, as seen in Sagmeister & Walsh’s identity logo for the Jewish Museum in New York.
A cohesive and eye-catching graphic design was produced by structuring the entire brand identification on the grid system of the Star of David emblem.
Their ideas reflected the past while still delivering a fresh, modern style to the museum’s image with the application of a logo construction guide.
Do: Make Your Design More Polished and Symmetrical by Using Grids and Geometric Forms.
Designer Kaelgrafi used a building guide to produce the classy winning logo and become the finalist in the September Top 9 at 99designs.
This design shows excellent use of a construction guide for the “All Day Ruckoff” logo contest in order to achieve symmetry and retain constant spatial correlation between each line and curve.
Each shape’s corners were formed with perfect circles, indicating that the designer had created a detailed sketch of the design and polished it in vector software.
This is undoubtedly the best example of using a grid and fundamental geometric forms to construct a visually appealing and polished design.
Do: Create a Classic Logo by Using a Grid as A Guide
To create an iconic design for Shell Oil that hasn’t altered much since 1971, Raymond Loewy used a logo construction guide as inspiration.
Although not every line of the logo precisely corresponds to the grid, the grid is a core component of the design, which was stronger and more noticeable than the prior logo designs.
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