Your logo represents your site. You should spend a fair bit of time on your logo, perfecting it. You won’t make a very good first impression if you just have plain text at the top of your site reading “MySite.com”. Look at all the successful websites you know of, do you see a logo-less one? Didn’t think so.
Google, Amazon, EBay, Digg, Reddit, Wired… They all have logos. Each one of those companies invested a substantial amount of time (and probably money) designing a logo. Should your site be different? No. Spend a bit of time in Photoshop, designing a logo.
Before we cover a bit more on logo design, here are a few well-designed logos. Click the logos to see how they fit in with the actual site.
Logo design is an art, as is web design (or virtually anything with the word “design” in it…)
So, how do you design a good logo? First of all, it must match the way the site looks. If you’ve already finished a layout, save for the logo, make a logo that matches the site (color scheme, etc). The easiest way to handle things is to design the logo first, then design the rest of the site around the logo.
The current trend with logos is to make them look “Web 2.0″. Basically that means use gradients, borders, drop shadows, gloss effects, etc. There are plenty of tutorials on “Web 2.0 logos”. My advice: Look at the tutorials and learn from them, don’t just copy what they’re doing. Then, you can make your own logo with all the techniques you learned.
Your goal as a designer is to create a logo that will (excuse overused phrase) knock visitors socks off. You want a logo that looks so cool, people will stare at it for five minutes before looking at the rest of the site. If you can do that, they’ll remember the site and come back. Of course, the site’s content has to be good too for them to come back, but my point is that the logo should make a lasting impression.
So how do you make a logo?
- Open Photoshop
- Create a sizable document, about 8×10 inches, 300dpi. Why that big? You’ll be sure you can use the logo for anything, without running into the problem of your logo having to be scaled up. You resize it down to something like 230×80, 72dpi when you export it for the web.
- Experiment. Start with some text, style it. Then continue on from there. Inspire yourself by looking at other logos.
Three steps, easy isn’t it? 
