How To Start A Logo Design Business

Ian Paget: How did you start your freelance design business?

Kyle Courtright: Moving forward it was, "Okay, so what do I need to do in order to really pay the bills here and get this freelance business off the ground and hit some of the goals that I've wanted to reach?" The dream was owing my own freelance business without having that full time job. So the way that I went about it, this isn't the right way necessarily. There's a lot of different stories that people have and paths that designers take to get where they need to go.

But for me it was learning SEO, Search Engine Optimisation. It was one of the best decisions that I've made. I set up directories across the country where pretty much small business owners can find local printers in their area. So I set up these directory listings in the form of webpages where people could land on those pages and, "Hey by the way I do some logo design and website design. Things like that." And I got some inquiries from that.

But that was slow going. As you know Ian I know you have a lot of knowledge on SEO. It's more of a long term game, especially these days.

Ian Paget: Yeah. I mean to be honest, I find it interesting that you brought that up. Because I mean this is a podcast about logos but then I know a lot of people that are going to be listening are going to be thinking, "I want to do that too." And being honest, the only people that I really know that are only doing logos, I mean I'm sure you're doing some other things, as am I, but I mean in terms of the thing that we want to do, we're trying to get projects to work on logos and the bulk of people I know that are doing that have done it freelance.

So if you want to take this as a career option and you only want to work on logos, the only way to do that is by going freelance. And that's why I wanted to bring you on, because you've kind of done something very similar to me and we both started at the same point. And I just find it interesting that you've spoken about SEO because that's the same thing that I've done too. I mean, I'm curious. How did you know that you needed to do SEO? What was it that you found, or read, or how did you know to do that?

Kyle Courtright: Right. I hopped on a blog called Quick Sprout. I don't know if you're familiar with Neil Patel and Quick Sprout at all but he's pretty much a digital marketer that knows a little bit about everything in the digital marketing world. And he would continue to preach SEO. And so I was, "Oh, let's see how this goes." And, I don't have much to lose because it's all organic so it's not necessarily paid advertising or traffic. It optimising your website, as you know, so you can get found in those search engine results. And of course the big one is Google.

He's a lot smarter than I am and so I really respected what he had to say along the way. So I was, "Okay, let's try this out. I don't have droves of clients coming in. I have nothing to lose." So that was kind of what brought that on and I knew that I wanted to do logo design. That was my passion, still is. I've really tried to build my business around logo design even to this day and I love everything that goes into that. But I knew that at least starting out that I couldn't just build the business just around logo design.

Logo design is kind of they're very one-off projects. So once you have the logo it's kind of, "What's next?" So I know that of course once you have that icon, that typography, that colour scheme in place, these small business owners, they might need a website, they might need marketing collateral, other branded materials.

So I learned HTML and basic HTML and CSS. I learned WordPress and those were a couple of the other avenues I took to kind of build out the business so I was more of a one stop shop starting out. So that's kind of the story there.

And I guess to add to that I hopped on a site called thumbtack.com in order to get some logo design leads, some web design, and that was very successful actually. At the time, it was five to seven dollars you pay for a lead and you compete against a few other designers for that lead. And you can land some big projects. They were probably medium quality leads. Some were very low and some were higher. But I was just glad that leads were coming in at that point. So that was kind of the path that I took as well as kind of hopping on Craigslist and floating my resume and portfolio out there as well.

Ian Paget: So am I right in assuming that when you first started out you was literally almost taking on any project that essentially brought in some money? Am I right? Even quite small projects?

Kyle Courtright: No doubt about it. For sure.

Ian Paget: Yeah. I think that's good advice. I mean it's a very real way of starting a business essentially because you've set up your website, you're focusing on SEO, you're getting all the advice. I assume that you were using just Google in just searching for training courses.

Kyle Courtright: Right. Yeah. Yeah. That's it.

Ian Paget: Yeah, pretty much. So you're just finding out what you need to do online and that's the beauty of the internet now, right?

Kyle Courtright: Yeah. Right.

Ian Paget: And then you just start taking on projects as you could so that you could build up a portfolio. And I guess it's basically escalated from there.

Kyle Courtright: Right. Right. No doubt about it. Yeah. It's been quite a wild ride. Everybody starts somewhere and so the main thing is setting those goals and I know you're a big goal setter from talking to you over the years here and being able to set loft but attainable goals that are very real and that you follow up on so you have some direction along the way. So that's some advice that I would give for sure is to set those goals.

Ian Paget: Definitely. Well you know I'm a big supporter of that too. I don't think it has to be real bolted down goals but some kind of loose goal of where you want to be and then at least every day you can do small incremental steps that works towards that thing.

Kyle Courtright: Yeah. And I remember you talking about not too long ago that really resonated with me was to kind of set the goal and then kind of work backwards from there. So, yeah.

Ian Paget: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I mean I love that advice. One of my favourite books and I think I mention it all the time. The One Thing where you basically you've got this 'somewhere out there' goal. This could be the most ridiculous dream that you can ever imagine, but reverse engineering that back to what you could do in five years and then what you could do in one year to achieve that thing in five years. And then what you could do each month to get to that thing. And basically reverse engineering it back to one day or what you can do now, here at this very second to work towards that.

And I mean every single successful person has used that model. There's no doubt about it. So I think without goals you don't know where you're going.

Kyle Courtright: No doubt about it man. Yeah. I don't know to you but it does seem kind of counterintuitive but in the same breath it's, "Wow, that makes even more sense than doing it the other way around." So yeah. Yeah, that was great advice and I've taken that to heart.

Ian Paget: Yeah. Yeah, you should do it. And I think everything that listens to this needs to do the same thing. Just create goals even if they're the most ridiculous goals and here to today you can't do them. You can at least keep working towards that.

Kyle Courtright: Agreed. Agreed.

Ian Paget: Okay. So I understand that you've used quite a few different tools throughout your business. What have been the most valuable for you including design tools as well?

Kyle Courtright: I'm a guy that tries to stray from the cliché as much as possible so we'll get the cliché stuff out of the way here. Adobe Creative Suite, and even a site like WhatTheFont. It's kind of been around for a while but pretty much what WhatTheFont is, is you can hop on their site. If there's a font that you're not quite sure what it is but want to use it for a project, you can take a screenshot of it and then upload it straight to this program and it's pretty intuitive actually even though it's kind of just a small online free program. It kind of recognises those characters, you click submit, and it's I'd say about 75, 80% of the time, it works really well for me.

And then coolors.co. I think that's how you pronounce it but I've been using that for colour inspiration and man, you can do a lot with it. It's a really easy use interface. You can look at other designers and the different colour palettes that they're uploading. You can download different colour palettes, save your own, stuff like that. So that's really cool.

I guess one more that I would say is Librestock. Again, I don't know if I'm pronouncing that right, but libreStock.com pretty much especially if you're a web designer or even doing marketing materials, things like that too along the way, pretty much it curates all the different stock photography sites and curates that into one free kind of resource. So...

Ian Paget: I haven't heard of that one. That sounds useful. For anyone that's listening I've kind of got a part time job and I will I also work on logo gigs. So within that job I work on a lot of websites and yeah. We work with royalty free images, but not that one, is it free?

Kyle Courtright: It is. It's all free for commercial and it's-

Ian Paget: So free for commercial use and it's basically sourcing everything that's online that is commercially available?

Kyle Courtright: Exactly. Exactly.

Ian Paget: That sounds brilliant. I need to check that out. I mean just to add everything that we're talking about now. I'll add links into the show notes.

Kyle Courtright: Great. Great. Perfect. Honing in more on logo design, for inspiration for instance, Dribbble is a great one. Man, they've got a whole community of really high quality designers there and you can even pick some colours on there and you can hover over certain colours and it's got your hex codes and things like that.

And the logo inspiration generator tool. It's actually something I created originally for designers to have really targeted logo design inspiration and I use it quite a bit. So it's a good test. "Oh this is hopefully helpful to other people too." But it's been shared a decent amount across the web and it was something pretty much out of necessity that I built to help logo designers, even business owners being able to get some inspiration for their next logo project that's really high quality, highly targeted as opposed to maybe a quick Google search that you'll get a lot of different types of quality along the way there.

Ian Paget: So how is that working that logo inspiration tool? I mean it's been a while. I remember when you released it, but in terms of using it, how does it work? Say if you want some inspiration for a logo project. How does it work? So you get on there and you enter in certain keywords?

Kyle Courtright: Right. So I've got it set up so there's different colours on there, there's different... Man, I mean there's a lot but if you want to search a colour for a specific logo, you could click on the little check mark there for blue and you've got all of these article that it kind of curates that you can link directly to that I've looked through individually to check for quality and to make sure that you're really honing in on whatever that keyword is.

So it's sort of by creativity, modern logos, monograms, things like that too. And then some other kind of miscellaneous items on there as well so you can kind of check off some different items there so you know exactly what you're targeting and then you click on the link and it's straight away there for hundreds of logos at a time, 50 logos, different blog posts that have been curated along the way.

Ian Paget: That sounds really useful and that's free to use, isn't it?

Kyle Courtright: It is. Yeah. Yeah.

Ian Paget: Fantastic. Everyone needs to go and check that out. It sounds good.

So, yeah. Like me you're also pretty big on building communities and tools and resources and blog posts and lots of different things for the community essentially. And you recently started working on Logo Wave where I'm a judge alongside Jacob Cass, Nadir, I can't say his surname.

Kyle Courtright: I'm going to guess Balcikli. But, yeah. It's a tough one.

Ian Paget: Yeah. Sorry Nadir if I said that wrong. And he's from Logorado. And most recently you've managed to get Bill Gardner of LogoLounge on as well. He was a guest on this podcast just a few episodes back.

Kyle Courtright: Very good. Very good.

Ian Paget: So for our listeners, can you briefly explain the idea behind Logo Wave and how that came about as a project for you?

Kyle Courtright: Of course. Yeah. I was looking to start some sort of a side project here and man, the logo awards space was always intriguing to me. I didn't see actually too many that were just specific to logo design. So that was one thing, but you can't build a business around just that. The need has to be there but how do you go about it? How do you brand yourself? These things that are really important.

So it was really birthed out of I was looking around and the logo awards sites, not to take away from anything other sites are doing, but I felt like it was a little on the pricier side. And so having an affordable but still high profile logo awards platform was what I wanted to build.

And adding to that, our profession can be kind of a thankless job a lot of times, along with other professions. But I'm all about building up other designers and encouraging them. On my Twitter profile I try to spotlight different logo designers that are just reeling off amazing quality work.

And so I love that idea of building this community of designers, of encouragement, and building people up when it comes down to it. So that's kind of the heart behind the brand. And so it kind of just started from there and I wanted something that was a little bit different from the others as well.

Again I try to tend away from the cliché. I tend towards, and you know this more than most, that I tend try to keep things more minimal and simplistic and not too convoluted. So it's just a flat rate price that people would pay. At the time it was very, very low. I think my closest "competitor" in quotes was around $65, 70 bucks for a logo entry, and I was at the $12 price point there for a while as you know.

So being able to have an affordable solution, kind of test the model with a really super low price point and see, "Are logo designers going to really take this in? Or are they going to push it away? Is the need there?" And so along the way there's been, man, coming up on hundreds of logos that have been submitted by various designers around the world.

And just recently decided that, "You know what? In order to make this a truly high profile logo awards site, I want to up the ante a little bit." as they say. So before it was a $12 logo entry and you could upload your logos at that price point for a $300 prize to the first place winner. And at the time there were about 25 designers per wave.

And so it was just an easy way to kind of get the word out. All the top five finishers would get recognition on the site, social media, things like that, a digital prize pack. So recently as you know I tried to up that price to $1,000 and then a crystal engraved trophy as well to each first place wave winner, where each wave is now 50 designers at a $49 entry which is still one of the lowest in the industry, but really trying to raise the stakes a little bit.

Ian Paget: You want to enter now, because there's a bigger prize and you get the trophy. And I mean you've been working on it now for what? You said two years? Or is it longer? I can't remember how long it's been.

Kyle Courtright: It's been a year.

Ian Paget: Is it only a year? Wow. You know when something new starts you're never really sure if you want to enter but now, I've seen it grow and there's a lot more entries being added in, the quality is increasing as well and now the fact that the prize is bigger as well. I think you're on to something and I think it's going to get a lot bigger. And that's why I thought it was good to talk about this as well because the more entries that get in there, the better they get. It's going to be good. Imagine winning that prize. $1,000 and the trophy. That's an awesome prize.

Kyle Courtright: Oh, very cool. Well I'm glad you like it, and you're being modest too because the judges panel really helps and guys like you and Jacob Cass and now Bill Gardner, of course Nadir being on there, I mean I think that really does help with more of the credibility factor.

And so these well known thought leaders in the design space like you guys are, I think that helps up the value a little bit and raise the stakes. But, yeah. I'm hoping that people really get excited about it. I don't want it to be this kind of stiff, upright, logo awards platform. I want it to be fun and encouraging and building up like I was saying. And there needs to be that credibility factor there of course, but I want it to be a little bit more free flowing than some of the other awards platforms out there.

Ian Paget: I know you recently did a live version as well, didn't you?

Kyle Courtright: Yeah. Yeah, Creative South Conference in Columbus, Georgia. Yeah.

Ian Paget: That's pretty cool. So I mean if anyone wants to enter Logo Wave, where do they need to go?

Kyle Courtright: So yeah. Thanks. It's just mylogowave.com So, M-Y logowave.com. And, yeah. All of the info is there and you can upload your logos and it's just trying to make it a fun way for these logo designers to really get recognised and awarded for their stellar work.

Ian Paget: So I'm curious, what's the future plans for Logo Wave?

Kyle Courtright: Yeah, great question. Oh man. I got to take one step at a time. Sometimes I just try to take on too much at one time, but right now we're trying to... So the judges panel is very solid right now but very male. It's male heavy. So being able to add some influential female designers in the mix, that's kind of the next step here. I'm trying to make some connections, reached out to Paula Scher. Kind of waiting to hear back there.

Ian Paget: Fingers crossed.

Kyle Courtright: And Debbie Millman, even someone like Alina Wheeler who are, man, design giants in our industry. And so it's a very young panel too, so I want to kind of up that a little bit. Not too much. I'm not saying that these people are old are anything, but it's very young right now. So being able to have a good mix of judges and generations along the way here and I guess to add to what's kind of on the horizon here adding an affiliate program as well that will be implemented probably within the next couple weeks where designers can...

There's a lot of people that are getting the word out on Logo Wave. So I want to really reward those people too for getting the word out and have a little bit more motivation too there where you can make a commission off each designer that you refer to Logo Wave.

So that's kind of another thing that's on the horizon and I want to keep iterating, listening to the feedback from designers. That's the thing. It's not me. I'm just kind of asking people like you and other designers that come in, "What's your experience like? What do you like? What do you dislike?" And really iterate and hone in on the best possible experience that you can have with Logo Wave.

Ian Paget: That's amazing. I just think it's just going to keep getting better. So I'm just going to keep an eye on it. I'm looking forward to the future for it.

Kyle Courtright: Sounds good.

Ian Paget: So through Logo Wave we're seeing quite a lot of logos. In your opinion what are some of the most common mistakes that are being made? What I'm trying to highlight here is where are people screwing up? I'm mean what small things could be doing that give them a better chance of maybe winning?

Kyle Courtright: Right. That's such a great question and I know I'd love to hear your thoughts on this as well. But my first inclination would be that over-complicating logos a little bit too much.

There is beauty in simplicity and logo design is no exception to the rule. So being able to find the most minimal form of a logo that is still recognisable, and matches up with that brand, I mean that's huge.

And as you know, you got to be recognisable with that logo like I said. So being able to view it from a distance and it doesn't get all clumped together with all the details and the over-complicating things and I think that's the mark of a good logo. That's one of the many aspects that go into solid logo design is being able to still maintain its recognisability and direct relationship to the brand, but have it in its most minimal form.

I guess the other thing that I would mention is it's amazing what typography can do to a logo and how some can really kind of throw in the type at the end or the beginning of the project and that's not as much work that goes into that as the icon itself or the graphic portion of the logo. So it can make or break a logo where there's a font or typography that just doesn't quite match up or it's something that you've seen before that's not Tahoma, Times New Roman.

I have a respect for some of these fonts but, man, you want to have some sort of stylised factor to it so it's not, "Okay, I've seen that before. That's not really a differentiated brand in my mind."

So, that. And more of the logistics, I think that from a purely mathematic standpoint, I've seen a lot of designers upload two plus logos along the way. A lot of people upload around that two mark. And so if you're just uploading one logo, from a mathematic standpoint, again, it can decrease your chances right out of the gate, just again, just from a math standpoint. So just uploading a couple logos and making that investment. So...

Ian Paget: I could probably throw in a couple as well. One thing for me which is a little bit of a bugbear, and I feel like context is important and I know when you enter a logo into the contest, there are the occasional person that they don't add any information along with the logo, or they'll add just one short two or three words which just doesn't feel like enough. And I feel like it's important to explain what you're trying to achieve because sometimes you can create a beautiful looking logo but if it's not relevant to the project, obviously it's not right.

So I personally think it's quite important to be able to explain what you've done and how you've achieved those goals and that that's what kind of differentiates you. And people that upload just an image without any context, for me it can look good but it's I don't feel like that person has made enough effort.

Kyle Courtright: Yeah.

Ian Paget: So that's one thing that I like to see. Also I think you made a good point about typography, that sometimes it can kind of be slapped on as an afterthought. There are a lot of people that are creating beautiful icons that are fantastic that you can tell that there's been a lot of time and effort that's been put into that, but then just a box standard, or the box font has been added along with the icon and it's got a slight disconnect and what I recommend to do, and this is what I do and I'm sure you do the same Kyle, slightly modify the typeface so that it's got some characteristic that keeps it in harmony with the icon so it's got that something about it so it all works as one unit. And I think when you don't do that it just looks like two pieces that are kind of plunked together.

Kyle Courtright: Right. Right. No doubt about it.

Ian Paget: I think the usual stuff, I'm not a big fan of logos with too much detail. Obviously if you scale it down to the size of... I know it's social media, but you know social media when you use Twitter on your phone, sometimes those icons are as small as eight millimeters. They're tiny. And if a logo doesn't work at that size it can be perfectly illustrated. But for me I don't feel like it's a successful logo. So I'm also looking at lots of different things like that as well. And, yeah. You generally find the one that does win kind of ticks all of the boxes.

Kyle Courtright: Right. Right, yeah. And this is kind of going back to what you were saying before too, that the top five from each wave, I should have said this before, but it gets recognised on the site and social media. So it's not just first place wave winners. There's some recognition and you get a certificate and all these things that go into it. But I've noticed with the top five of each wave, that it's pretty uncommon to see some of the more conceptual work or people that just decide not to have that description or context to go along with the logo. So I know that it is definitely more helpful than detrimental. We'll say that.

And like you were saying to, I think you made a good point there where you were talking about how I think it really talks to the logo designer itself too, and says they put in the time to the logo and that directly is related to the time that they put into this context or description to kind of give us an overview of the brand and what this particular company or entity is looking to do and how that problem was solved, how the solution was formed.

Ian Paget: Yeah. I think it's worth saying we're not talking an essay but there are the occasional designs that are uploaded and there's nothing that goes with it. It's just an image. And it could be a really nice logo but the fact that it doesn't have anything that kind of explains who the logo is for and what you aim to achieve, it doesn't add anything to it. But on the opposite end of the spectrum, sometimes you look at a logo and you think, "Yeah, it's okay." But then you read and you understand what they were trying to do, and what it was trying to represent, and you realise, "Wow. That's a really clever solution."

I mean I kind of mentally give each logo a score. It's not an official scoring system but say, if I score each logo out of five, if say I look at the logo on its own I might just think, "Oh, it's maybe a three." But then I read what they were trying to do, it might put it up to a five, and then suddenly it's one of the contenders for the top five that I'm sending over to Kyle.

Kyle Courtright: Right. I completely agree with you man. Yah. It helps to have that context there and, yeah. It can take it to the next level because it's, "Wow. This decision was made because of X, X, X." Whatever it may be. So, yeah. I couldn't agree with you more.

Ian Paget: Okay. So you set up your own business and you're basically living the life of your dreams and I know a lot of people listening to this, they would want to do the same thing. So if you could give the listeners one piece of advice to take away from this, what would that be?

Kyle Courtright: Oh man. Just one, huh? Oh gosh, that's tough.

Ian Paget: You can give more if you want to.

Kyle Courtright: No I tend to be long winded sometimes. No. Gosh man. I would say building out that online portfolio and just honing in on that quality and how you present yourself is so important. And again, here we go with the list of things. But local SEO. So setting yourself up for some keywords on your... If you have a website being able to search the city name and logo design or city name logo designer, that can only be helpful.

Ian Paget: I think with local SEO it's a quick win because literally I would go as far as saying all you really need to do is include a H1 on your page with, "Logo design in..." whatever your location is, and update the metadata.

So the title tag and the description and then maybe upload your site to a few directories like you did. And I genuinely think that's probably all you need to do because it's not the most competitive term. I mean unless you're in a big city, trying to do that in London, it might be harder, but most places, if you live in a town, you can optimise and be on page one, position one on Google for that just by doing something as simple as that along with blog writing and guest blogging for back links and all that sort of stuff.

Kyle Courtright: Right. Right. And if I may, if you're looking for a kind of a one stop shop type of blog, I would recommend Quick Sprout for everything and anything that you need to know about SEO in my opinion is on that website. So another good one is backlinko.com by Brian Dean, just to try to get back links which is another kind of SEO factor. But, yeah. I completely agree.

Set your H1 tags on your site for those relevant keyword phrases, have it in the body copy a little bit, especially on the home page and optimise a little bit. It doesn't take that much and it might take 10, 15 minutes tops to set that up or have a web designer set that up if you're not into the web design side of things. So, yeah. Completely agree there. And then I was going to say make connections. Build those relationships. I've learned this more the last two years than any other time and I wish I would've been better about that early on in my career.

And one thing that I've noticed with some of the best logo designers out there is that they are very well read. And so I would say find a couple favourite blogs, read books from some of these thought leaders and influencers out there.

Hop on a really helpful Twitter feed like Logo Geek himself or Jacob Cass has a great feed. Chris Do, I know he's just has a feed that's just chock full of value as well. So yeah. Hop on those blogs, read books, and this is the last thing I'll say. I promise.

Learn from other designers who are doing it "right" in quotes, who get it, who have built up their following and there's a reason for that. Their quality of work is usually on point. And so follow some of these designers that inspire you specifically. Don't worry about anybody else.

I'm convinced each designer has their own style in some way that they tend towards. So find those logo designers that really inspire you and then find your own style. There's different avenues that we can be inspired by it but find your own style along the way and hold to that, and it might change and adapt but that's where kind of the passion and all the fun comes from. You got to have fun with it, and if your not having fun, then what's the point in the first place?

So yeah, that's kind of some of the things that I would say, and along the way, and... Man, I guess, okay. One more thing. Promise.

The last thing, I would say you got to remove unnecessary distractions from the day to stay on point and focused. I'm talking to myself here. I can really get distracted with different things. It might be social media, it might be reading a blog that is not even close to related to design, and I'm putting off a project or whatever it may be. So, limit those distractions if you want to...

I know for some people they turn off notifications for social media and that can help. Each person is different, so figure out what that is so you can really stay focused and honed in on your goals, and what you're trying to do in the end.

Ian Paget: I think everyone has that same issue. I'm exactly the same. It's even worse now because I created a Facebook community and I get all these alerts and I kind of want to check it. So it's terrible. But I mean some advice for me, write down what you need to do, put that list by your side and force yourself. "You have to get that, that, and that done, and anything else that's not on that list is not important."

And there's all these tricks that you can do. There's all these little tools and things, but at the end of the day, if you're going to run a freelance business you just need to keep focusing on what needs to be done and if you do want to take 10 minutes to do something else, it's okay. But you need to make that time back up so that you can get that job finished. Right?

Kyle Courtright: Right. Right. That's excellent. Yeah.

Ian Paget: Okay. Fantastic. Kyle, thanks so much for your time and, yeah. It's been great to have you on.

Kyle Courtright: Well thanks so much for having me. It's a great opportunity and I'm honoured to be a part. So thanks so much.