Not that I’ve been involved in a ton of logo design, but it seems like the best ones are always fairly simple. Think about it, if you’re a designer you probably find yourself looking at artwork and putting it together in your head as I often do — but you rarely see a super complex looking logo and think to yourself, “amazing”. The amazing ones are almost always amazingly simple. One way to help with this — and simplify everything — is to work in two colors, probably black and white.

Maybe some people are thinking you can’t do much with black and white, but I’m going to tell you the opposite. Designing in black and white gives you so many more options. First of all, you’re ensuring a maximum of two colors in the logo which is what most companies will be looking for anyway. Those colors don’t always have to be black and white though. Giving a client a black and white logo is as good as giving them a logo with two arbitrary colors that don’t even exist because when they go to print their t-shirts, or business cards, or put together their website they can get it printed in any color they want. But many people already knew all that.

The reason I like designing in black and white is that you have so much freedom with color choice afterwards when you’re actually putting the t-shirt design together or the website. This logo for nfocus creations is one that I did for a local photography studio. And then I decided to colorize it. There’s so much you can do without going over the top.

Colorized version of the nFocus Logo