10 Tips To Create A Logo Design On Android
Creating a decent logo doesn’t only stop in being the primary job description for graphic designers. We need decently-designed logos for representing many things, from our companies (and thus our brand positions) to the “just-for-fun” logos that have a huge emphasis on aesthetic values.
At the same time, Android has been the leading OS for users all over the world, including smartphone users. Android is so unlike other OS that the application programming is easy to understand. Plus, there are many free-to-download and free-to-use applications to create a logo design on Android.
In this article, we’re going to give you ten tips for creating a logo design on Android. When you execute these steps, you will be able to create a magnificent logo even when you’re on the go. For instance, you can create a logo while doing some grocery shopping.
10 Tips To Create A Logo Design On Android
- Select an App That You are Comfortable With
- Consider Using built-in templates
- Decide The Styles & Elements
- Sketching is still an important part
- Exercise on your fingers
- Don’t be so picky when picking elements
- Don’t use up too many applications
- Never expect to save in “just whatever” formats
- Still Befriend your papers and pencils
- Plan The Whole Process
1. Select an App That You are Comfortable With
You can find these applications on Google Play Store. We don’t advise you to download the APK or MOD versions of the applications. Even though these versions have the “unlock” features that let you use paid items for free (for example), these application versions can pose virus threats to your phones.
Adobe is one of logo designers’ eternal favorites when it comes to brands that can design logos. Adobe Express is the Android-friendly application that the brand has launched these days. You can also use the Photoshop Express Photo Editor application, which also belongs to Adobe.
Canva and dotpict are the alternatives we suggest if you feel bored with Adobe-based applications. Canva is the go-to application when you wish to post the logo design on your social media due to the template choices that have become the favorites of almost all social media workers. Meanwhile, dotpict is the application you should choose when you wish to add some pixel elements to your graphics.
2. Consider Using built-in templates
Developers these days make the Android-based design as practical as the OS itself. As a logo designer, you will notice the differences when you design pictures on Android phones versus when you do the same things on your other non-Android devices, especially on your computers.
Everything is practically ready when you design anything on your devices. Such things include in-app templates that you can choose. Thanks to these beautiful templates, you only need to tweak some elements before publishing your works.
Many graphic designers today are more familiar with more than 100 built-in templates. Another shocking point would be the fact that many people love the aesthetic templates in many free-to-use design applications.
So, these entire things about templates are enough for uplifting the visualizations’ selling points. Another pivotal point would be on the client's side that we can pay more economical prices for such pictures.
3. Decide The Styles & Elements
At some points, graphic designers should create templates from scratch. Even so, blank white (or black) canvases are not the only solid-colored canvases they work with. Sometimes, the designers can work with pastel-colored (such as baby blue or soft pink) or robust-colored (such as dark ruby red) colors as the canvases.
Canvases are the starting points for the entire visualization element. Other visualization elements that logo designers should pay attention to include the typography settings, stickers, brush strokes, and many more. Eventually, the combination between colored canvases and the visualizing elements creates a template that resembles the designer’s uniqueness.
At this point, we’d like to advise you to adjust the visualization elements as they should. The whole element should resemble the themes or the briefs that your clients have set up for you.
For instance, the clients have determined that they will take Halloween-themed logos. So, the designers can use a combination of black and orange colors for their graphic elements. They will also add red elements for apple stickers to resemble apple bobbing challenges.
The same thing also applies whenever there are different customized theme requests from the clients. The more visualization elements they request, the more we should adjust to our custom image templates.
4. Sketching is still an important part
Do you remember the times when you used brush strokes with lighter hues for sketching the Golden Ratio for your logo designs on other devices?
You will need the same thing for creating graphic designs on Android-based applications. In particular, the more solid-color backgrounds you work on in your projects, the more likely you are to sketch your pictures before you give them colors and darken the strokes with heavier brush strokes.
Here, in this tip, we will emphasize that sketching gives “rules” to our drawings. One of the most evident things about sketching is that we can see the basic rectangular and circular shapes where the picture elements come from.
For instance, a designer makes a sunflower logo based on a circular shape. With the correct sketching, we can see the circle shapes (or patterns) around the sunflower even though the person has deleted the original circle framework.
5. Exercise on your fingers
It’s no secret that we use our fingers a lot for every phone application. Android applications for logo design purposes are no exception. So, when we use these applications, we can expect to use our fingers a lot in moving the stickers, patterns, and other related elements.
We also need to zoom in and zoom out using our fingers when we create a logo design on Android applications like Adobe Express or Canva. At some points, we even need to do lots of finger-based zoom-ins and outs if our smartphones’ dimensions are not enough to contain more than one in-app canvases.
Adjusting the stickers and other decorations is a case where we exercise our fingers a lot in zooming in and zooming out. Some applications don’t even have the rotate, minimize, and maximize buttons. In such cases, we need to have pinching movements with our fingers to adjust the decorations’ dimensions.
At some points, we need to toggle comments on our design collections. We often find such acts on revision rounds where we need to check what the clients are saying and explain the revised elements. When we need to type something on our applications, we also need to remember the in-app keyboard settings are different from the usual keyboards on computers.
So, the combination of typing on the customized keyboards and doing some pinching movements with the stickers and decorations is crucial for our finger’s health during picture-creating sessions on our applications. Exercising our fingers this way will eventually lead to masterpiece pictures like the ones we create on computers.
6. Don’t be so picky when picking elements
After we’ve done with the canvases and the basic logo decorations, the next step would be to adjust the decorations, such as stickers, patterns, and the like. When we design a logo through a phone-based application, we should remember that the built-in decoration choices are not as extensive as in the computer versions.
Many Android-based graphic design applications emphasize picturesque template collections. At the same time, the clip arts, stickers, and other decoration elements don’t tend to have variations in the brush strokes and color compositions.
As a result, there is nothing much we can do about the decorations when we design graphic elements through a phone application. Cropping some parts of the decoration is one of the few things we can do, along with some minor adjustments like rotating the stickers 90 or 180 degrees.
At some points, creating decorations need further sketching, stroking brushes, and repetitions of the essential design steps for many layers. The more layers we work on the applications, the more likely our Android-based design apps will have bugs or experience crashes.
So, unless we work in other non-phone-based devices, we don’t need to be so picky about stickers, patterns, clip art, and other decoration elements for our logo. Our logo should be fine as long as the overall pictures answer the themes and/or the briefs.
7. Don’t use up too many applications
Focus is the key when we design a logo in any phone-based application, and Android applications are no exception. It doesn’t matter if our applications are free-to-use or if there are some apps that we have to pay for.
At this tipping point, we’d like to advise on opening two design applications at a maximum on one regular phone. By “regular phones,” we meant smartphones with around 4GB RAM. We can use other devices to open up additional applications when we need to. Such additional things also include guidebooks and FAQs about creating a logo design on Android.
Many graphic designers work on flexible days and hours. You can use these things by rejecting graphic-related jobs that require you to open up too many apps that can damage your phone’s RAM.
You may even wish to exercise your impulses by not opening up too many tabs in one application. You can do these things by activating auto-save modes whenever possible for your projects in case you wish to continue later on.
8. Never expect to save in “just whatever” formats
Android logo designs are as practical as the OSs themselves. Since Android apps come in more compact sizes, dimensions, and other elements than their computer-based counterparts, we can’t expect to save our pictures in “just whatever” formats.
We remember the times when we design any form of visualization through our computers or design-related tablets. At such times, we may experience no hassles in saving our projects in many forms of “strange” formats that our Android devices may not be able to open.
When we execute logo design projects through our phones, we may get surprised when JPG, GIF, and PNG are the only formats we can open anywhere on our phones. We can only open up other formats if we have the original versions of the software, and this is not always convenient for our clients.
Thanks to the updates of the OS and the entire related apps, we now find solutions to save files in PSD. Some even let us save and open up files in any vector format, such as (but not limited to) SVG. We don’t even need to convert “strange-named” files and change the dimensions just so the clients can access our projects.
Still, the types of graphic files we can open through our phones are limited. So, when we create any images on our phone devices, we can never expect to save in “just whatever.”
9. Still Befriend your papers and pencils
Papers are not only for manual drawing purposes. Nor that these drawing manuals become the things you sketch your logo designs to then move them to the scanners. Pencils are usually the best friends of papers, even though ballpoints and other types of brushes can go well with papers.
When we use the combination between paper and pencils correctly, these two manual drawing media will save us hundreds of MB for our storage devices. We can also treat these two things as planners. When we say “planners,” we refer to anything that can act as a helper in organizing our task lists that are related to logo design purposes.
When we befriend our papers and pencils as organizers, we can save lots of time and effort in opening up too many tabs or apps on our phones. We don’t even need to buy or use extra devices. As a result, our earnings as logo design professionals won’t suffer because we can handle extra projects with our Android apps, papers, and pencils.
Another useful thing about papers and pencils that we can use in our daily tasks is a calendar with reminders.
Even though it’s old-school in doing so, writing, sketching, painting, designing, and so on in these two things, then hanging the calendars somewhere near our work desks saves us from hassles when we experience unexpected things on our devices. After all, we have our logos, publishing schedules, and other schedules in our (manual) archives.
Given these two reasons, it’s important to befriend paper and pencils. After all, Android devices have everything else limited, including the possibilities for a decent logo design.
10. Plan The Whole Process
It’s no longer a surprise that creating a logo design on Android is nearer to one-step completion than doing the same things on other devices. Even the templates, decorations, and more are ready to use from the beginning.
If this is your first time doing so on your smartphone devices, thinking about simplicity is the stepping stone to creating fabulous images that represent your target brands and/or audiences. You can think of simple things starting from one of the essential things in your image designs, and that essential thing is the brush stroke.
Today, there are plenty of Android-based design apps that permit you to perform brush strokes with basic and premium brush choices. Nonetheless, the brushes are not always compatible with the OS, even though we’re sure that we’ve got the most recent versions of the OS and the apps.
Sticking to the basic brushes is the key to simplifying the logo design processes in Android devices. The output should consist of less complicated design elements than when we do the designing parts on other devices. For instance, the logo consists of lesser brush strokes on circular or wave shapes, has more defined green gradations in some parts, and so on.
We recommend for the stickers to be 25% of the whole decorations at most when you need to put on some of them. Some small-sized stickers are best when you place them at the corners of the primary image theme. Otherwise, we can stick to the basic color compositions and brush strokes.
These whole things are what we refer to as making the process-related elements less complicated. In addition, we should try to input as few in-app texts as possible (including follow-up comments) and continue through e-mail or other agreed-upon media when we need to.
Final words
We may immediately think about a smartphone when we talk about Android devices. Indeed, for logo design purposes, Android phones are what we focus on before other devices.
Android is one of the most practical OS. In other words, everything that relates to this OS screams practicality, from the programming of the apps to the graphic design executions by the app users.
So, we can’t treat graphic designing apps from these OS the same way as we do in devices with other OS. Thinking about simple things, including but not limited to brush strokes, stickers, and other decorative elements, are the keys to creating a one-of-a-kind logo design on our Android phones.
At the same time, we should exercise our fingers a lot, including zooming in and zooming out to adjust to the phone’s sizes. In addition, we shouldn't forget to befriend papers and pencils, as these two manual kits can be our best friends in planning our visualizations.
