5 Sites to Learn About and Create Business Logos

Need a logo? Or just love learning about them? Here are a few sites you should check out.

Maybe you’ve read our beginner’s guide to Adobe Illustrator, or tried to create a logo using custom shapes in Photoshop, but need some more guidance and inspiration. Or maybe you just love learning about the history of logos, and the thought that goes into making them.

Today Cool Websites and Apps points out a few sites that offer you free logos to use as you wish, or that give you insight into the branding that you’re already surrounded by. Let’s take a look.

Logo Dust: Unused Logos You Can Use for Free

Perhaps you’ve tried out a few tools for quickly making professional looking logos, but if you need some help I recommend checking out Logo Dust. It’s a site of unused logos from Fairpixels, a company that designs logos for businesses, that you can download and use however you like.

The downloads are a simple Adobe Illustrator file you can use as a starting point, or simply use as your logo. It’s probably not the best idea if you plan on becoming a Fortune 500 company eventually, because you won’t “own” the mark. But if you’re setting up a mom and pop shop it could work, and if nothing else seeing how a finished logo looks in Illustrator could be a great starting point for your own creativity.

Logopedia: See the Evolution of Almost Any Logo

Companies refresh their logo to keep up with the aesthetics of the age, and sometimes that annoys people. Lots of people didn’t like Google’s new look, for example, only to get over it and stop noticing in about a week. A few months after a logo is replaced and it looks dated – and the effect is even more severe a few decades later. Here’s a Microsoft logo from back in the day:

It’s so 70’s it hurts, right? And there’s another one that looks like something from the cover of a Metallica album. You can explore so many other logo evolutions if you head over to Logopedia, a user-contributed site where people obsessively track down old logos so that you can explore them. Check out a few of your favorites and point out the best ones you find in the comments below, okay?

Brands of The World: Download Vectors of Various Logos

Speaking of famous logos: sometimes you might need to use them for your projects. Whether it’s a school project or the “Press” section of your webpage, Brands of the World is a quick way to find vector files with famous logos.

Simply heading to Google Image Search and downloading them gives you a mish-mash of different aspect ratios, so having one place to go for vector files is nice. Keep this one bookmarked in case you need it later.

Brand Colors: Collection of Colors from Various Brands

Logos are cool, but branding goes beyond just iconography. A distinctive color helps companies stand out, and Brand Colors lets you explore how that works. On this site you can browse a variety of colors used by different companies to establish their brand.

This is interesting to browse, but also potentially useful if you’re looking to accurately mimic a brand for satire or any other purpose. Dive in.

Hipster Business Logo: Design Something “Cool” That The Youths Will Enjoy

And now for something completely different. If you live near a “cool” city, you might have noticed that several of the unique local businesses have logos that have the same 1890s aesthetic. Hipster Business Logo mocks this by letting you quickly make your own such logo.

It’s more of a jock than a useful tool, but taking just a few minutes to mimic an established style of logo is a pretty good joke. Give it a shot and let us know what you come up with, okay? Or, if you’re too lazy, try out Hipster Business Name – it generates a name and a logo for you in just one click, and even lets you buy the domain if you’re feeling impulsive.

What Is a Logo, Anyway?

What makes a logo valuable? This recent video from Vox explores the question, even pointing out how little the creator of the Nike swoosh was paid for her work.

What makes a logo valuable is, ultimately, the value of the company itself. You can’t create something and have it instantly become iconic. It’s a strange thing, isn’t it?

Let’s talk about this, and any other thoughts you might have about logos, in the comments below.