The ultimate guide to beauty logo design in 7 steps

You’re ready to start your beauty brand but you don’t know where to start when it comes to designing a logo. Well, read on! This ultimate guide to beauty logo design will help you in 7 easy steps.

With this guide, you can design a logo that…

  • Reflects your company’s values
  • Resonates with your customers
  • Helps prospective customers instantly recognize your brand

So, you might be asking… What are the 7 steps?

  1. Reflect on your story
  2. Brainstorm adjectives
  3. Create a mood board
  4. Choose a type of logo
  5. Look for patterns
  6. Find beauty logo design inspiration
  7. Sketch, review, refine

1. Reflect on your story

Your brand story is the vital element to creating the perfect logo.

When customers can trust and resonate with your brand mission and story, your logo should evoke those same feelings.

You can start by digging deeper into your “why”.

What was your reason to create a beauty company?

Some questions you can ask yourself are:

  • What does your brand stand for?
  • What’s your story? How did you get here?
  • Why did you create the company? What was missing in the industry?
  • What are your goals moving forward?

These are not easy questions to answer. If you need a little more guidance in finding out your why, we go deeper into finding your brand story and voice in this blog post.

2. Brainstorm adjectives

For this exercise, write down a list of adjectives that best describes your brand. Think about how you want to be perceived by others when they look at your logo.

You can also think about the emotions and feelings you want to evoke in others. Maybe you want to evoke feelings of excitement, feelings of playfulness, or feelings of luxury.

Write 15 adjectives on a sheet of paper and then narrow it down to 3. This won’t be easy but narrowing down your adjectives will guide you to design the perfect logo.

3. Create a mood board

Now we’re getting into the fun part! You can choose to either make a physical (think paper, scissors, and a glue stick!) or a digital mood board. We recommend using free tools like Canva or Figma.

You want to start by going on Unsplash, Pinterest, or Etsy to look for images that represent the list of adjectives you’ve written. If your list of adjectives included the words “modern” or “playful”, what images might match that adjective?

Be flexible and fun with this exercise!

collection of artwork
My mood board for a beauty brand logo I want to create. The adjectives I wanted to capture my brand were “modern”, “minimal” and “bold”.

4. Choose a Type of Logo

The 3 types of logos that correlate best with beauty brands are as follows:

1. Wordmark

If you have a shorter brand name, this is the ideal logo you can test out! This is where typography (the art of arranging and designing font text) can stand out to be the centerpiece of your logo.

There are eye-catching ways to shape and arrange your brand name. We’ll discuss in a couple of sections on how you can play around with colors and typography to create the best logo for your brand.

logo type examples
Review these black and white wordmark logos and see how different they all look solely on their typography (font, spacing, design).

2. Monogram logo

If you want your beauty logo to look good in small spaces, consider designing a monogram logo.

Use your brand name’s first letter or initials and turn it into a bold, memorable visual. Since it’s compact, you can use monogram logos as favicons, buttons, social media profile images, and fit them in small spaces such as lipstick tubes in your next lipstick line.

chanel c's logo
Example of monogram logo, the Chanel C’s.

3. Combination

Play around with combining your wordmark logo and your monogram logo. The images and text can be side-by-side, nested within one another, combined in any way you want!

branding example
Anastasia Beverly Hills combination logo shows different styling techniques. The Body Shop nested their wordmark logo in their recognizable abstract image.
 

5. Look for patterns

Now, take a step back and look at your mood board, what patterns can you pick out?

Look for color and style patterns. For example, you can look for floral patterns, straight edges, grey scale, or a colorful palette.

Whatever patterns you pick out from your mood board, that’s the cohesive style you should use for your logo!

 

6. Beauty logo design inspirations

Wordmark logo examples

In the beauty industry, you see a lot of logos that are solely wordmarked. Milk, MAC Cosmetics, and Anastasia Beverly Hills are examples of this. Their lettering, spacing, and styling makes their name unique enough to be recognized.

logo examples
From left to right, Milk, MAC Cosmetics, and Anastasia Beverly Hills logos on their products.

Monogram logo examples

Charlotte Tilbury, Dior, and Fenty Beauty are good examples of monogram logos! Their well-known brand can utilize this logo to make their products easily recognizable.

branding examples
From left to right, logo examples from Charlotte Tilbury, Dior, and Fenty Beauty.

Combination logo examples

Some use combination logos like Estee Lauder, Tatcha, and Drunk Elephant.

branding examples
From left to right, logo examples from Estee Lauder, Tatcha, and Drunk Elephant.

When you view other company’s logos in the beauty industry, see what you like and don’t like. You can reflect these insights on your own beauty logo design.

With these examples, you now get the sense that it really all comes down to the combination of design elements that can trigger an emotion or a feeling.

From the color, style, placement of letters and images, they all work together in harmony to reflect your brand.

 

7. Sketch, review, refine

When you start designing your logo, go back to your mood board and your trusted acquaintances to review what you’ve designed.

Sketch, review, and refine again until you’re satisfied with how the logo reflects your brand.

Turn to professionals for help

Remember that you also don’t need to do it all by yourself. There are professionals you can find on Fiverr to design a logo for you. You can give them your brand story and mood board to guide them in designing the perfect logo for your cosmetics brand.

Conclusion

You want your cosmetics brand to stand out in a crowd. So when you’ve designed a logo that stays true with your brand values and defining adjectives, you can be sure that your logo is unique only to your beauty brand!


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