LOGO DESIGN - A journey through a logo design project

A process course, not a design-technique course

Faye Brown's class is upfront about what it is: a walkthrough of one designer's workflow for a single logo project, from a stranger's first email to the final invoice. It is not a tutorial on drawing better logos or mastering Illustrator's pen tool. Anyone expecting step-by-step instruction on constructing letterforms or building geometric marks will find only glimpses of that, mostly in the initial-ideas lesson where Brown sketches shapes in Illustrator and later vectorizes scanned botanical drawings using Image Trace. The real subject is the business machinery around the design work: how to talk to a client, what to charge, what files to hand over, and how to keep the relationship from falling apart.

The case study running through the course is a logo for a garden designer named Katherine, built around the Fibonacci sequence and fern and leaf motifs Katherine mentioned in an initial meeting. Watching one project develop across sixteen short lessons gives the course a narrative arc that keeps it from feeling like a checklist. The color lesson shows Brown pulling palettes from Design Seeds and a set of Pantone postcards, then testing whether the design still reads in black and white. The file-delivery lesson is unusually granular, covering EPS for print, JPEG on white backgrounds, PNG with transparency, and when to hand over Pantone-coded versions for a client who needs exact color matching later. Few logo courses spend this much time on the unglamorous mechanics of what actually gets delivered.

Where the value concentrates

The strongest material sits in the business layer. The quoting lesson centers on a specific mistake: Brown once let a client keep requesting new directions without a change-order clause, ending up with roughly 30 unpaid logo concepts before walking away. That single story does more to justify a course purchase than most generic advice about "setting boundaries," because it produces a concrete quote structure of three to four initial concepts, one paid development round, and hourly billing for anything past that. The getting-paid and showing-your-work lessons are similarly grounded, covering deposit terms for remote clients, 14-day payment windows, and the etiquette of waiting for a client's public launch before posting a logo to social media.

Where it thins out

The design execution itself is comparatively thin. The initial-ideas lesson moves quickly through sped-up screen capture of shape experimentation with little explanation of why one direction was kept over another, and the brand board lesson, while useful as a template, treats layout and typography pairing as a quick add-on rather than a taught skill. Viewers with no client experience at all will get real value from the quoting and file-delivery lessons alone. Viewers looking to improve their actual mark-making or vector skills should look elsewhere, since this course assumes that ability and instead teaches everything that surrounds it.

What you will learn

• ·How to structure a client quote that covers initial ideas, one development round, and separate hourly billing for extra revisions
• ·What questions to ask a client to dig into brand personality before designing anything
• ·How to build mood boards and color boards from sources like Design Seeds and Pantone books
• ·How to prep and export final logo files as EPS, JPEG, and PNG, and when to supply Pantone versions
• ·How to assemble a simplified brand board with color codes, typography picks, and usage examples
• ·How to time client presentations, handle feedback, and ask for follow-on work and payment