How to make a logo yourself: the path from the name to the files, and where it stops

What a first logo has to do before it has to be beautiful

The question of how to make a logo yourself usually arrives with a deadline: the sign is being ordered, the shop page needs an avatar, the labels go to print. An owner can make a first logo alone, provided the job is understood correctly. A logo is not a picture of what the company does. It is a mark by which people tell you from the others, and it works when they recognise it without reading.

That gives three plain requirements. The mark has to survive being small: MDN Web Docs describes the favicon, the icon shown in a browser tab, as a 16-pixel square. It has to work in one colour, because stamps, receipts and cheap print do not offer a second one. And it has to look different next to the competitors a customer compares you with. Anything beyond these three is taste, and taste can wait.

Before drawing: the name, three words and the places the mark will live

Most weak logos fail before the first line is drawn. Start with the name exactly as it will be written: the capitals, the spaces, with or without the word that says what you do. A long name and a short one call for different solutions. If the name is not final, finish the name first.

Then write three words about the company that a customer would agree with: careful, fast and local, for instance. They are the whole brief. Last, list the places where the mark will live in its first year: a sign above the door, an avatar in a messenger, a label on a jar, a marketplace card. The smallest and the roughest of those places set the rules. A mark that must be embroidered on an apron cannot depend on a hairline or a gradient.

Three roads: a wordmark, a simple sign, or a generator

The first road is a wordmark: the name set in one well-chosen typeface, with nothing added. The work lies in choosing the typeface and in small adjustments: the distance between letters, one capital or none, a weight that still reads when the word is two centimetres wide. For a non-designer it is the safest road: the result is clean by default, because the letters were drawn by a professional.

The second road is a simple sign next to the name: an initial inside a shape, a monogram, one object reduced to a few strokes. It serves where the full name does not fit: an avatar, a stamp. It is also where self-made logos most often break, because even line weights and clean curves are skills of the hand. A fair rule: if a customer could not sketch the sign from memory after one look, it is too complicated.

The third road is a logo generator or an image model, which offers dozens of directions in an evening. What it returns is a picture, and a picture is not yet a logo. Every letter has to be checked, a bitmap has to be redrawn as a vector, and the rights depend on the terms of the service. Used as a sketchbook, a generator saves time. Used as the last step, it moves the problems to the print shop.

Type and licences: what free for commercial use actually covers

A typeface is software, and the licence, not the price, decides whether its letters may appear in a logo. Google Fonts answers this directly in its FAQ: all its fonts are open source and without cost, they can be used commercially, and you can use Google Fonts within any logo. The conditions, the same page adds, are specified in each licence. The most common one there is the SIL Open Font License; some fonts come under the Apache licence or the Ubuntu Font License.

SIL International, which publishes that licence, spells out the details in its own FAQ. Logos are listed among the permitted uses, no additional permission is required, and you remain the author and copyright holder of the graphic you make. What the licence forbids is selling the font by itself. Free to download, however, is not the same as licensed: a file from a random archive may carry no permission at all. Even the Google Fonts FAQ names a closed typeface, Product Sans, which it says is available only for Google products.

Files: a vector master, and what SVG and PNG are for

A logo lives in two kinds of files. A vector file describes shapes; a bitmap describes dots. MDN Web Docs defines SVG as an XML-based vector graphics format that specifies an image as a set of drawing commands, and calls it ideal for icons and other images that must be drawn accurately at any size. A logo needs exactly that: a favicon today, a three-metre banner tomorrow. One that exists only as a bitmap has a maximum size, and everything above it will be blurred.

PNG is the working copy for places that do not accept vectors. According to the same MDN guide it uses lossless compression and supports full alpha transparency, so a PNG logo sits on a coloured background without a white box around it. The minimum set is short: the master in SVG, plus PNG exports with a transparent background, in colour and in one colour. Convert the lettering to outlines before saving, so the file does not depend on an installed font. The full list is in the guide linked below.

Five quick tests: sixteen pixels, one colour, a photo, upside down

Testing takes ten minutes and saves a reprint. Shrink the logo to 16 pixels and look at it from arm’s length: if it turns into a grey smudge, it carries too many details. Fill it with solid black, then with white on black: if a part disappears, the mark relied on colour to hold together. Put it over a photograph, because sooner or later it will end up on one.

Then turn it upside down. The trick removes the meaning and leaves the shape, so uneven gaps and heavy spots show at once. Place it in a row with the logos of three direct competitors at the same size. If yours could be swapped with a neighbour’s and nobody would notice, it is not doing its one job.

The legal side in brief: similar marks and the generator’s terms

A logo can pass every visual test and still be unusable because it resembles someone else’s registered mark. WIPO defines a trademark as a sign capable of distinguishing the goods or services of one enterprise from those of other enterprises, protected through registration with a national or regional office. The USPTO, the American office, speaks of a likelihood of confusion when a mark is confusingly similar to another and the goods or services are related, and names it the most common reason for refusing registration. The marks need not be identical: they may simply be similar in sound, appearance or meaning.

The practical step is simple: search before you print. WIPO’s Global Brand Database gives access to over 28 million records from international and national sources. The USPTO calls a comprehensive clearance search the best way to avoid such a refusal, and adds that an attorney can provide a clearance search and interpret the results. An owner’s search removes the obvious collisions. Whether a remaining similarity is dangerous in your country and your category of goods is a question for a trademark specialist.

If a generator was involved, read its terms before the logo goes anywhere. Recraft is a fair example. As updated on 11 August 2026, they say that images made on the free tier are owned by Recraft and may not be used commercially, while a paying subscriber owns the images created; on either plan the user alone is responsible for how they are used, including any conflict with a third-party trademark. Copyright is a separate layer. The U.S. Copyright Office concluded in January 2025 that the output of generative AI can be protected by copyright only where a human author has determined sufficient expressive elements, and that the mere provision of prompts does not count.

When your own logo is enough, and what to prepare before ordering one

A self-made wordmark is enough when the business is young, the name may still change and the mark lives in a few simple places: an avatar, a price list, a small sign. It stops being enough when the mark has to be registered, when it goes onto packaging and into print runs that are expensive to redo, or when you catch yourself avoiding showing it. Those are the moments when a designer’s eye and a proper set of files earn their cost.

If you decide to order, what you did alone is not wasted. Bring the name in its final spelling, the three words, the list of places, your own attempt and the competitors you tested against. A designer starts faster from a clear attempt than from a blank page. VITON13 Studio does this work; the price guide and the service page linked below say what is included. Whichever way you go, asking how to make a logo yourself will have done its job: you will know what to request.