# Branding Your Creative Business: Designing Your Logo - review & insight | Gareth B. Davies Source: https://garethbdavies.com/course-insights/branding-your-creative-business-designing-your-logo/ [← All courses](https://garethbdavies.com/course-insights/) Graphic Design · Quick win · Rated 6 /10 # Branding Your Creative Business: Designing Your Logo By Gareth B. Davies · Updated August 2026 Faye Brown · Faye Brown Designs All levels · 70 min A tight, practical seven-step walkthrough of logo design that trades depth for speed, useful mainly as a checklist rather than a skills course. [Get a Free Month on Skillshare](https://skillshare.eqcm.net/c/3155494/298081/4650?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.skillshare.com%2Fclasses%2Fbranding-your-creative-business-designing-your-logo%2F1968571368) New to Skillshare? Your first month is free, enough to take this course at no cost. Branding Your Creative Business: Designing Your Logo is the second installment in Faye Brown's three-part branding series, and it shows. The class opens by assuming familiarity with a companion course on defining a brand, and several lessons lean on that prior work rather than standing alone. Viewers who skip Part 1 will still get value, but the logo brief and customer profiles referenced throughout are treated as already in hand. ## Structure and content The core of the course is a seven-step framework: consider usage, get inspired, choose typography, design a symbol, plan for scalability, pick a color palette, and finalize the artwork. Each step is short, often five to ten minutes, and built around real examples from Brown's own client work rather than abstract theory. The usage step is a genuinely useful reframe, pushing students to think about whether a logo needs to work as a watermark, a stamp, or a tiny social avatar before a single line is drawn, using her own wedding photography logo and a deliberately overdesigned counterexample to make the point concrete. The middle steps on inspiration, typography, and symbol design follow a familiar creative process: mood boards, doodling, then narrowing toward a typeface and a mark. The typography lesson is compressed, understandably so since Brown points students to her separate typography-focused class for depth, but it still delivers a workable framework of classifications (serif, slab serif, script, blackletter, and so on) tied to brand personality. The color palette lesson is the most content-dense unit, running through the emotional associations of a dozen hues and recommending a 3-6 color system split between primary and secondary use. ## Where it delivers and where it thins out The most tangible payoff comes late, in the two-part finalizing lesson, where Brown walks through building a logo in Adobe Illustrator: importing a rough photo, using live trace versus manual pen-tool tracing, cleaning up bezier points, and outlining text for print-ready EPS export. A follow-up lesson shows the same process applied to hand-written signatures, tracing a scanned name into clean vector strokes with the Pathfinder tool. These are the only lessons with real hands-on software instruction, and they are explicitly framed as a quick demonstration rather than a full Illustrator tutorial, which limits how much a design beginner can actually replicate. That gap is the course's central weakness. Most of the runtime is conceptual guidance and mindset coaching (get inspired, don't rush, ninety percent perfect is fine) rather than technique a novice can execute independently. Someone with zero design software experience will finish the class understanding what a good logo needs to accomplish, but not necessarily how to produce one without either outside skills or a lot of independent trial and error. The closing lesson on developing a visual identity is a brief coda, mostly using one student's branding as a case study for consistency across a website, Etsy shop, and social channels, and it functions more as a bridge to Part 3 than as standalone instruction. For its stated audience, non-designers running small creative businesses, the course succeeds as an organizing framework and a confidence builder, even if it stops short of teaching the software fluency needed to execute the final result alone. The standout The Illustrator demonstration of converting a hand-drawn sketch or scanned signature into a clean vector logo using the pen tool, stroke outlining, and Pathfinder operations. ## What you will learn - · How to weigh hiring a graphic designer against designing your own logo, including when clip art is an acceptable shortcut - · How to audit where a logo needs to function (watermark, stamp, shopfront, favicon) before starting to design it - · How to run a mood-boarding and doodling process to find a personal design direction without copying references - · How to choose typefaces by classification and personality, and when a logotype alone is enough without a symbol - · How color psychology and a 3-6 color brand palette translate into practical choices for a logo and secondary materials - · How to trace a rough sketch or handwriting into a clean vector logo in Adobe Illustrator, including outlining strokes for print Best for: Sole proprietors and craft-based creative business owners (photographers, bakers, pattern designers) who need a structured way to think through their own logo, not professional designers seeking new technique. Skip it if: Anyone wanting hands-on Illustrator training, in-depth typography instruction, or a polished logo delivered by the end of the class, since this class assumes prior branding work and treats software use as a brief demo. Helpful Examples Clarity of Instruction Organization of Lessons Actionable Steps [Get a Free Month on Skillshare](https://skillshare.eqcm.net/c/3155494/298081/4650?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.skillshare.com%2Fclasses%2Fbranding-your-creative-business-designing-your-logo%2F1968571368)