You might have heard of the Nine Muses, Greek goddesses with their own creative specialties like dance, comedy or even math. Well, we’re here to be the 10th muse; the one that showers you with logo inspiration and ideas. As you start dreaming up your logo design, we’ll show you the right places to go for logo inspiration so you can come up with great logo ideas. You can stop chasing inspiration and let it come to you.
Whether you’re a small business owner, entrepreneur or designer, here’s where you can find logo inspiration and create something new and beautiful.
- Coming up with a logo is important because it helps establish your brand’s identity and makes a memorable impression on your audience.
- Experiment with logo generators like Logomaker by VistaPrint to kick-start your logo creation with tailored, editable designs.
- Browse galleries of logo samples on platforms like 99designs, Behance and Dribbble to find inspiration from professional designers.
- Look to design history by studying famous logos from big brands or exploring design awards for high-quality examples.
- Gain inspiration from real-world sources by analyzing your competitors, browsing social media, exploring ready-made templates, visiting art museums and checking out design blogs and magazines.
Why is it important to find the right logo?
Before we get into where to go for logo ideas, let’s go over two things: What is a logo and why is a logo important? Understanding the role a logo fills in your company will help you think up the best one for you.
Logo design by ananana14 via 99designs by Vista
In general, a logo’s goal is two-fold:
- Create a memorable link to your company for brand awareness and recall.
- Visually depict your brand identity to appeal to your target customer group.
The details in a logo affect both memorability and target marketing. Typically, you can break down a logo’s visuals into three areas: color, shape and typography. Different colors, shapes and styles of writing elicit different emotions and attract different types of people—for example, circles reflect a more casual and fun company, while less fun squares suggest strength, durability and prowess instead.
Understanding logo color meanings can also help with conveying emotions and behaviors you want to evoke—for example, yellow is cheerful because it’s bright, and blue is trustworthy and mature, which is great if you want your brand to be taken seriously.
We don’t have time to explain all the details here—for now, it’s enough to know the main components of a logo (color, shapes, typography) so you can be aware of them when drumming up logo ideas.
Top places to find logo inspiration
Waiting for logo inspiration to strike might sound like a good plan… until you realize the deadline is fast approaching. If your company is still stuck on how to come up with a logo, every delay could be costing you business. Take control and discover how to find a logo that suits your brand with these top 12 sources for logo design inspiration.
1. Experiment with logo generators like Logomaker by VistaPrint
If you’re struggling with coming up with a logo or just staring at a blank page, AI-powered logo generators can be a real game-changer. These tools take the pressure off by giving you a solid starting point and helping you quickly generate logo ideas that suit your business.
One tool that does this particularly well is Logomaker by VistaPrint. It makes it easy to find a logo idea tailored to your specific business.
Logomaker by VistaPrint makes it easy to quickly generate lots of good logo ideas for your business
The tool asks you a few simple questions about your business, like your company name, industry and even specific icons or colors you might want to incorporate. From there, it generates a variety of logo options for you to choose from—each designed to reflect your unique brand.
While these initial designs may not be perfect, they offer good logo ideas that you can further refine. Logomaker allows you to try different color schemes, layouts and typography, all with a simple drag-and-drop editor.
2. Browse galleries of logo samples
If you’re still figuring out how to find logos that work for your brand, browsing through a collection of logo samples can be a great way to spark ideas. At VistaPrint, we’ve put together a special hub full of logo design ideas for you to explore. Whether you’re in retail, real estate or launching a startup, you can find plenty of options tailored to your industry.
Logo design ideas across different industries
And it gets even better—we also feature a range of hand-crafted logos designed by professionals from our global community. These logos offer fresh, creative inspiration, helping you visualize what your own brand could look like.
A gallery of hand-crafted logo inspiration on VistaPrint
This gallery is a fantastic way to get an inspired logo and see what’s possible for your brand. You can easily browse through different styles, color schemes and design elements to get ideas for your own logo.
3. Pore over some of design history’s most famous logos
Big brands hire only the best (or at least, the most expensive) designers, so more often than not, they have some of the highest-quality logos around. They’re usually more aware of logo trends, so seeing how they update theirs can help keep your logo modern.
The arrow hidden between the E and X may be subtle, but its dualistic symbolism is almost Shakespearean—which you might not expect from a shipping company.
Pay attention to the logos of big corporations. Don’t worry, they’re everywhere. Take a look at the world’s most famous logos and see if you can isolate which parts work really well and where there’s room for improvement. Pay attention to any similarities between logos, like common shapes or fonts, especially if they’re in your industry. Chances are, if the big brand is your competitor, their logo is the one customers will compare yours against.
4. Explore professional design communities
Want to see all kinds of original logos from top-tier professionals? Check out 99designs by Vista and browse through a database of logos from expert designers filtered by industry, skill level or topic. Over a million professional graphic designers from all over the world are part of the 99designs by Vista community, so you’ll find a diverse range of design styles and techniques—perfect for getting inspired.
When using 99designs by Vista Discover, you don’t just find new logo ideas; you also find designers you could work with.
Use the Discover filters to select the parameters you want, such as the industry you’re in. The Advanced tab makes it easy to limit your search to “Top Level” designers or specific languages. You can even enter your own keywords in the Search tab so you can find exactly what you’re looking for.
Another option is Behance, which acts like a social media platform for artists and designers, where they can showcase their portfolios to the public. Although it doesn’t differentiate beginners from pros, Behance lets you browse the work of serious designers in a variety of styles.
Each card is its own gallery of logos, sometimes by the same designer, sometimes collections built around a single theme.
Behance covers a wide spectrum of visual art, but you can easily find galleries of logos tucked into the Graphic Design category. Each card is its own gallery of logos, sometimes by the same designer, sometimes a collection built around a single theme.
Dribbble is yet another excellent platform to explore. It’s a hub for creatives to share their latest design work, including logos. The high-quality designs you’ll find here are perfect for getting inspired logo ideas that can help shape your own logo.
Dribbble lets you explore branding projects from designers all over the world
5. Check out design awards
If you’re on the hunt for good logo ideas, look no further than design awards. These prestigious competitions recognize the best of the best, with logos and branding that have been selected by experienced juries as prime examples of great design.
Start by checking out the winners, but don’t overlook the submissions that didn’t snag the top spot—they could still hold some hidden logo inspiration gems. Focus on more recent years to keep up with current logo trends, but if you have time, dive into the archives to see how logo design has evolved.
The One Show awards archive is a goldmine for anyone looking to find a logo design idea
And remember, don’t limit yourself to just the branding and logo design categories. Browse other categories, too—like product design or advertising—for a broader view of how logos interact with overall branding.
There will likely be an overlap in projects as designers often submit their work for multiple awards, but make sure you explore different design awards, like:
- D&AD Awards: Recognizes the best in design and advertising. The logo design category is full of cutting-edge, innovative work.
- The One Show: Celebrates excellence in creativity, with many standout logos and branding projects showcased annually.
- Awwwards: Focuses on web design but includes branding and logo design in its recognition of the best digital creatives.
- Red Dot Design Awards: A globally recognized award that honors exceptional design across multiple industries, including logos and branding.
- A’ Design Award and Competition: A prestigious international design competition that includes logo design as one of its categories.
The branding category of the D&AD awards archive is filled with logo inspiration
6. Study your competitors
It always pays to keep your eye on the competition—for what to do and what not to do. Typically, your competitors have the same business goals as you do, so their logos will use many of the same elements you should consider.
For example, take a look at the prevalence of blue in bank logos. Blue is the color of trust, which is always a top priority for a company asking people to give them their money.
These four competing banks use the same logo color because it works while keeping their individuality in other aspects.
It’s also worth checking out your competitors’ logos to see how you can best stand out. Sometimes, going in the opposite direction as your rivals is the best way to generate business, especially if you can steal a customer’s attention on the store shelves.
7. Do a deep dive on social media
If you’re looking for a bunch of ideas on any topic, social media can help. Visual platforms like Instagram and Pinterest work best for logo inspiration because you can see multiple logo examples on your screen at the same time. That makes browsing and comparing a lot easier. Don’t forget to refine your logo search by using hashtags or following specific Pinterest boards.
Just some of the different boards Pinterest users created for logo inspiration.
Finding logo ideas on social media can be a great source of inspiration because of the limitless number of designs alone, but there are some drawbacks, too. You’ll probably need to sort through a lot of amateur designs just so you can find the gems. Of course, you can always find logo inspiration from non-professionals, but it can be a challenge to filter out the lower-quality designs.
8. Browse ready-made templates for logo inspiration
The internet is full of customizable templates for nearly anything—logo design included. Graphic design tools like VistaCreate offer predesigned templates that you can edit and adjust to your liking.
While these templates aren’t finalized logos you can use as is—and oftentimes, they’re pretty basic—they’re still fantastic starting points. They provide ideas for logo design and help you explore different styles, layouts and elements that you might not have considered.
VistaCreate offers a pretty vast gallery of logo design templates you can use for logo inspiration
9. Wander around stores
Don’t forget the “offline” logo inspiration galleries: store shelves. Every product box or bag is an example of a logo, and the best place to see them all together is at the store.
If you’re stuck for logo ideas, walk around a mall, supermarket or store for your industry. They’re like a smorgasbord of successful logos. You even get to see them in their “natural habitat,” where you can notice that certain colors or fonts draw attention better in person than on a screen.
Products on the shelves of stores can be used for logo inspiration
The physical activity of getting up and moving around is also a great way to help get your creative juices flowing, according to research by the British Journal of Sports Medicine. In other words, just walking around the store might inspire you just as much as the logos you look at.
10. Ask your friends, family and co-workers about their ideas for logo design
Sure, it helps, but you don’t need to be a professional designer to collect some good logo ideas—you can bring in a professional later when it comes to the execution of your idea. Sometimes, the perfect logo idea comes from the most unlikely sources, but you never know until you ask. Ask around the office to see if anyone has any worthwhile ideas or thoughts about what represents your brand, even if they need a little tweaking first.
You can even ask your friends and family—there’s no penalty if they don’t have any good ideas, but if they do, your search is finally over!
One of the most famous logo mascots in the world, Planters’s Mr. Peanut, was actually created by a schoolboy as part of a 1916 newspaper contest.
Under certain circumstances, you can even leave the logo inspiration up to your customers. Running an official contest could either bring in a new crop of logo ideas or even present you with the final product on a silver platter. After all, that’s how Mr. Peanut was born.
11. Explore art museums (offline and online)
Although graphic design has only been applied to marketing for just a few centuries, the artistic principles it draws upon have existed as long as art itself. The perfect logo idea for your digital smartphone app could come from a Renaissance painting, Buddhist statue or prehistoric African vase.
Even if you don’t come back with logo ideas, it’s comforting to know artists throughout history also had inspiration issues at times, too. Source: via Pexel
Art museums are filled with inspiration at every turn. Surrounded by centuries of artistic mastery, you’re immersed in creativity, and just like wandering through a store, you get a bit of exercise to fuel your imagination.
However, while visiting a museum in person is a deeply immersive experience, it’s not always practical. If you’re not near a museum, you can still tap into that inspiration from the comfort of your home.
Many world-renowned museums, like The Louvre in Paris, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the British Museum in London, offer virtual tours of their collections. These online galleries provide access to a wealth of art movements, colors and shapes that could inspire your logo design.
12. Make use of design blogs and magazines
Last but not least, design blogs and magazines know how challenging it can be to find logo inspiration, which is why they frequently publish content dedicated to this very topic. These often include logo galleries or image collections curated by design experts. For example, we often share stories of real businesses along with design insights on the pages of our VistaPrint blog, offering inspiration for your own logo creation.
Other great options include LogoLounge, where you can browse a curated collection of logos from top designers, and Creative Bloq, which offers logo design inspiration alongside expert advice.
To stay updated, subscribe to newsletters from these sources and more. For instance, Muse by Clios provides a newsletter full of the latest in creative branding and design, delivering logo inspiration right to your inbox.
Creative logos always start with logo inspiration
If you’re a small business owner, entrepreneur or a company decision-maker, creative tasks like designing a logo can be an exciting change of pace from business as usual. You have all these options in front of you: colors, shapes, styles, fonts and more.
So, gather as much inspiration and as many big ideas as you can, and you’ll be able to collaborate with a designer to dream up the perfect logo that fits your brand.
Want to learn more about logo design? Check out this article on how to design a logo.
Logo inspiration FAQs
Where can I find logo inspirations?
You can find logo inspiration by exploring big brand logos, browsing design communities like 99designs and Behance, checking out design awards like D&AD and Red Dot, and even visiting art museums—either in person or virtually. Social media, design blogs and ready-made templates are great for fresh ideas, too!
How can I come up with ideas for a logo?
Start by thinking about your brand’s values and personality, then explore existing logos for inspiration. Use tools like Logomaker by VistaPrint or browse galleries of logo samples. Don’t forget to check out design awards and keep an eye on competitors to spark new ideas.
What are the key elements of a great logo?
A great logo is simple, memorable and versatile. It effectively represents your brand through color, typography and shapes. It should work well in different sizes and on various platforms, while resonating with your target audience.
Can I create a professional-looking logo without hiring a designer?
Absolutely! Using tools like Logomaker by VistaPrint or exploring customizable templates lets you create a polished logo without needing design expertise. You can experiment with color schemes, fonts and layouts until you find the perfect design for your brand.
