: Any books on actual how-to of logo design? I have been stacking up on books for logo design and scouting dribbble fairly intensely. I read (and loved) David Airey's book Logo Design Love, but

@Rambettina927

A professional's guide to process

Designing Logos: The Process of Creating Symbols That Endure
This is a detailed, sometimes dry, but comprehensive work.



Logo, Font, & Lettering Bible
I hate recommending this one because it has to be one of the ugliest books in the business. Nonetheless, the author knows his stuff.



The bigger picture

Designing Brand Identity: An Essential Guide for the Whole Branding Team
This is several steps above what you're asking for but it's quite valuable to the branding process as a whole.

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@Kaufman565

It's maybe not so current (2008), but you want a book to helps you understand the ingredients of good logos (and not-so-good), Really Good Logos Explained by Rockport is great.


A collection of 500 great logos critiqued by a panel of internationally acclaimed designers


...though that actually misses what's great about the book: they're not all "great logos".

It's a collection of real-life logos, all for mid-level brands of the type the readers might well work on (plus a few famous classics in a separate chapter). Some are great, some good, some pretty good and (in the just-for-fun final chapter) some are terrible. All have experienced designers explaining why they work (or why they don't), and, where appropriate, what could have been improved.

Really good practical hands-on stuff: the next best thing to actually sitting in on 500 high level logo design critiques. Some comments are incredibly insightful picking up in key subtle details and interplay, some seem odd - but all are valuable food for thought.

There's no hands-on tutorial element (but the hands-on manual skills are the same for any other type of design). This teaches good judgement about logos better than anything I've seen.

Examples: (the very light grey text is a quick profile of the client for context)

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@Pierce403

I would suggest devising your own exercises and practicing. Brands are fairly abstract so it might help to start with a more concrete topic. One assignment that I give sometimes is to illustrate a Jean de LaFontaine fable in negative/positive space. You could do the same with any movie or any simple story.

Also, you might want to try some Escher like exercises.



If you really want to jump into the theory, you will want to look up principles of Gestalt theory. Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye by Rudolph Arnheim is one of the best in-depth book I've read on the topic. Be warned, it is definitely not a how-to, however it did help me immensely in my work; whenever something looked wrong, I knew much more quickly how I could go about fixing it instead of doing trial-and-error.

In the meantime, if you look up Gestalt theory applied to logos and you will find a bunch of condensed versions online.

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@Marchetta832

The principles for minimal logo design are good illustration skills paired with brand identity.

The examples you gave are not logos but merely animal illustrations. It is easy to illustrate something that has a clear message, like "elephant", or "dog". And the clever use of negative space is simply practice. What makes this process so much harder for logos is that brands don't have a clear identity. They have abstract values that they want to communicate to customers. If you get a grasp on that then drawing up the logo itself is the smaller task.

If you are asking about negative space specifically: look into pictures/drawings with hard shadows, find out how one single shadow can define an entire face or body. And look into illustrations/tutorial that focus on drawing negative space. This is a pure drawing/illustrating and analytical skill and has little to do with logos.

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