My New DIY Logo and Free Logo How-Tos

I’ve never been fully happy with the MyShingle logo – though I’ve never been quite sure of how to fix it so I just left it alone. But I decided it was time for a change.  After all, let’s fact it, the .com logo is so last decade — no one ever refers to Facebook as Facebook.com. And even though my site still celebrates solos, for many readers, solo still has connotations of a one-man band rather than a state of mind as I’d intended. So returning to one of my earlier tag lines would correct that problem.

Still, I’ve had some bad logo experiences in the past. As I said, I’ve never really loved the logo I have now – and I’ve had dozens of others prepared that have never seen the light of day. Yet each time, even when working with a designer, I just couldn’t get the look I wanted. In fact, I grew so frustrated that I nearly breached my principles and considered using spec-work sites to generate a bunch of ideas for free just to see if any came close. But I didn’t go there.

Instead, I decided to try DIY. Bear in mind, I have no design skills and limited patience for figuring out new tools. But I knew what I wanted the end product to look like and it didn’t seem as if it should be difficult. Plus, I’d recently discovered a free graphics program called PicMonkey.com and creating a logo presented a good opportunity to give it a test drive. Because I’m impatient, I just dove right in and played around with PicMonkey until I figured it out (it’s very intuitive) – but you could also Google around for tutorials or take a look at the ones I found here, here and here.

In addition to logo creation, you can also use Picmonkey to change the colors on social media icons or create a banner for your blog. There’s even a photoshop feature that you can use to retouch your website photos.  You can also meld an icon of your choosing on to a .jpg file of your name and create a logo that way. In fact, PicMonkey also handles many small tasks that a reliable virtual assistant can perform – or that you can procure quickly and inexpensively online for between $5 and $15 at sites like Fiverr and 99Design’s new Swift.ly (which isn’t spec work).

Granted, my self-designed logo isn’t high art. But for now, it works, it’s fast and it’s what I want – and that’s enough.