DIY: Learn How to Design a New Logo for Your Coffee or Chocolate Shop/Brand

Greetings from Washington, DC, dear readers. How are you faring the first three days of 2020?

Welcome to the newly designed timecupsoul.com! We’ve moved to a magazine theme with columns. This design echoes the intricacies of newspaper layout that we loved as features editor during our yesteryears…

In addition to the new theme that we’re trying out, we’re proud to present our new logo. Making this logo was completely a DIY project, done 100% at home with no prior logo design experience.

So how did we learn how to design and make a logo?! Skillshare. And ironically, we’re not receiving royalties from linking you there (!), we simply just want to share knowledge with the world at-large. There may be good videos on other sites such as YouTube, but we were not able to locate any, so Skillshare worked for us.

Here are the steps that you can copy to create a new logo for your company/blog/organization:

1. Request and join Skillshare (note that you will have a free trial period)
2. You may need to download Adobe Creative Cloud for Photoshop or Illustrator, or another photo editing software of your choice where you have similar tools to Adobe that the Skillshare instructors/designers use (note that you also have a free trial period with CC)
3. The number one Skillshare course that we recommend is: Design a Logo in Modern Style by George Bokhua. We also watched Photoshop for Illustrators I: Workspace, Layers, and Drawing by Matt Kaufenberg and there are numerous other courses to choose from.
4. One thing that we loved about these classes was the “mood board” exercise. Learners are prompted to find pictures to inspire the logo’s shape.
   1. In our case, we knew we wanted to create a logo evoking our brand and the why — why we write. What inspires our brand? The gorgeous, international, alluring, delicious, calming essences of chocolate, plus the incredible, tropical coffee origins and the art of brewing and enjoying coffee, create nourishment for an inspired, serene soul. A heart image came to mind. For our mood board, we searched for images of latte art and chocolate boxes. See some examples, below. This step really got our creative juices flowing. Don’t skip it!
   2. What is your brand about? Which emotions do you want it to convey? Create a mood board to capture the essence of your brand. 
5. After we happily learned and watched a few videos, we used photo editing software to create our logo and finished it… after a few iterations 😉 It takes time, but if you’re passionate, you can teach yourself!

As for the new time cupsoul logo, here it is:

As you can see, the new time cupsoul logo is one heart with two equal sides — one side is a box of chocolates and the other is a latte art heart. This logo captures our reverence for both products and experiences. Some images that inspired the vision/mood board exercise to help create the logo, via Skillshare’s Bokhua (link above), include:

Chocolate Box:

Knipschildt Heart Chocolate Box, Image Source: William Sonoma

Latte Art:

Do you like our new logo? Please let us know any thoughts that you have and/or what you think in the comments below. 

Happy creating!!