How to Create a Free Salon Logo by Yourself
Aimee L.
A salon logo is an integral part of your brand identity, and it will shape the way consumers perceive your business.
It will also help your clients understand what you do, your brand identity, and your core values.
Moreover, all your clients will associate the logo with your salon, so they’ll recognize your business immediately whenever you place your logo in your branded materials, promotions, or advertising.
You recognized this brand in less than a second, right? That’s exactly what I’m talking about. If you create a meaningful logo for your salon and you use it on all your advertising materials, people will learn to associate that logo with your salon and will think of it more often.
This is why you need to have a professional-looking salon logo, and thankfully, this is not a difficult thing to achieve.
So, whether you’re just starting designing it or you need to make some changes to the existing one, there are free tools that allow everyone to make a salon logo for free, regardless of their design skill level.
Before showing you how to create a hair salon logo, let’s briefly go through the basics, so you’ll understand what a logo is and why it is so important to create an engaging one for your business.
What Is a Logo and Why Is It Important?
A logo is a visual symbol depicted by an image, shape, typography, or a mix between two or all these elements.
When designing your logo, you should pay attention to all the details because you will use it everywhere: on your website, on social media profiles, and in marketing materials.
It is also the symbol that will help you stand out from your competition while defining your brand identity and building brand recognition, helping your audience become familiar with your brand.
Another important thing about using a salon logo in all the previously mentioned places is the consistency it can give to your messaging across all the channels.
What Is the Process of Creating Free Beauty Salon Logos?
A professional-looking logo makes your brand appear more trustworthy. Just think of the times you entered a website and immediately left it because although we’re in 2022, it looked like it’s from the ’90s.
Of course, there are old logos that still look good, but that’s because they were designed well in the first place.
Creating a salon logo is a process that needs a deep understanding of your company’s values and plans for the future. Sure, logo trends are good and helpful, but will they serve their purpose in the future?
If you want to keep people for further discovery when finding your website or social media profiles, you need to design a free salon logo that is anything but basic and not easy to forget.
Let’s see which steps you need to take to create a salon logo.
1. Define your brand identity
Like I said before, brand identity is part of your logo design because one can’t exist without the other.
To help you better start and define this process, you can take the time and ask yourself a few questions:
- What’s your company’s story?
- Who is your target audience, and how do you want them to perceive your salon?
- How would you describe your brand’s personality (fun, minimalist, quirky, elegant, etc.)?
Answer these questions and have a brainstorming session to gather all the defining words, characteristics, and company values.
2. Find logo inspiration
In this step, you should study everything carefully.
First, assemble all the inspiration you can get by bringing together fonts, imagery, famous logos, and colors. Websites such as Pinterest, Dribbble, or Behance will help you with this part. This will shape the vision of the future salon logo.
Secondly, you should check out your competition to see their logos. This will give you extra inspiration, but it will also keep you from accidentally copying their logos.
You should also look at your industry to see common practices.
To keep everything organized and not lose any good ideas throughout this process, you should create a mood board with everything you find along the way.
Add everything, including colors, fonts, imagery, patterns, and textures.
It will look something like this:
You can make a physical mood board or have everything at hand digitally in a graphic design platform, such as Canva.
3. Check out the competition
I briefly mentioned this before in the previous step, but it is essential to see what’s out there. This will keep you from coming up with the same logo, but more importantly, you can design something different that will pique your audience’s interest.
So, while checking out your competitors, define what makes you different from them and how you can create a free salon logo that will clearly set your salon apart from your competitors.
For example, if you see many logos with bright colors, try creating a salon logo infused with pastels.
4. Choose the type of logo
Before starting with the design process, there still are a few things you need to think about, such as the type of logo.
There are seven types of logos you can choose from:
- Emblems. This is defined by a geometric shape with a text or symbol inside. If you need an example, think about Harley-Davidson.
- Pictorial marks. These are just symbols that hold the entire identity of a business. They work best for already popular companies that don’t need to say their name every time, such as Apple.
- Logotypes. They rely on typography as the entire logo is the company’s name, such as Google.
- Lettermarks. These consist of acronyms of a brand’s name, and it works perfectly for those companies that have several words in their name, such as HBO (Home Box Office).
- Abstract logos. They are a visual representation of something you want your brand to transmit. Think about Pepsi’s logo.
- Mascot logos. They are a drawing of a person or an anthropomorphic figure like KFC’s logo, for example.
- Combination logos. They are a mix of two types of logos. For example, you can create a salon logo consisting of a symbol with the right typography, as Dove did.
This is an important decision to make, and you have to pick the one that will best represent the elements you choose for your salon logo.
This takes us to the next step.
5. Decide on the logo elements
A logo can consist of three elements: typography, imagery, and color.
Typography
The best font for your salon logo is the one that matches your company’s personality, but before even making the decision on the fonts you wish to use, keep in mind that they have to be legible everywhere, regardless of the logo’s size.
The main logo font categories you can choose from are serifs, sans-serifs, slab serifs, script fonts, display fonts, and handwritten fonts.
As a rule of thumb, you shouldn’t pick more than two fonts for your logo to keep it simple and clean.
Imagery
The imagery refers to anything from a simple shape or a geometric element to a more complex image, and you can choose anything you feel works for your logo.
The only thing you should pay attention to is to match the imagery with the fonts.
However, if you choose to create a salon logo with imagery alone, ask yourself if your brand will stand out in this way and if your audience will easily recognize it.
Colors
Color plays a significant role in your salon logo design because it shapes more than just your salon’s personality. It’s also a way of presenting your brand and how you wish your audience to perceive it emotionally.
This is why colors bear an entire psychological theory, and each color sends a specific message in the right context.
So, before choosing your colors, you should read into color theory and decide which emotions you want to evoke through them.
Moreover, your logo needs to look equally good on light and dark backgrounds since the dark mode is what many people choose these days.
6. Start designing
Once you have everything you need to start the design process, you can put everything together and see all your ideas taking the right shape.
If it doesn’t look the way you want it to be, you can go back and make the necessary changes.
You can even have more logo variants and compare them to pick the best one.
What Tool you Can Use to Design a Logo
You can ask a designer to help you, or you can do all the work by yourself. I know this may sound a bit scary, but it’s not.
You can make a free salon logo with tools that are very easy to use, and with a bit of inspiration from your research, you can design a great logo.
Let’s see a few graphic design platforms you can use.
Canva
Canva is the go-to graphic design platform when you need a highly intuitive editor with many elements for creating impactful visuals, including logos. The free plan comes with many creative assets, but you can always upload more to personalize your logo.
Wix Logo Maker
Wix Logo Maker gives you two options: hire a professional designer or create your salon logo by yourself. If you choose the latter one, you’ll answer a few questions to get a selection of colors, fonts, and icons. Then, it’s easy to edit your logo just the way you want.
Hatchful
Shopify’s Hatchful is an easy-to-use logo maker that will help you with the best logo style recommendations based on a few facts about your brand. Once you pick one, edit everything intuitively.
LogoMakr
Another straightforward free logo maker is LogoMakr. Once you’re in the editor, browse for a shape, add text, change their colors, and more. Everything can be done in just a few minutes.
DesignEvo
DesignEvo is a platform perfect for creating your salon logo, as it offers thousands of templates whenever you wish to start already inspired. If you don’t need a template, you can start from scratch. It’s equally easy.
Conclusion
If a salon appointment scheduling system will help you stay organized in your daily work activity, branding materials and other marketing assets will contribute to creating a perception about your salon and will make it easily recognizable in your area. As you can see, you can design a free salon logo with no effort. All you need is a bit of inspiration and research.