Designing a handwritten logo: What are the best initial steps?

Question

I want to design a logotype which will be basically made of the handwritten name of the brand. The thing is, that I want to stylize and vectorize the curves, and I want to do it properly (I'm not a design professional).

The shape of the letters obviously depends on the handwriting style; I'm rather asking what steps should I follow to get a good design (after I write it in a paper and scan it, how to stylize the design)

Here are some examples of what I want to achieve:

Answer 1

Apologies, I misread your question.

• You're asking how to make something, look good, that's difficult to answer. Find some styles you like on Google (hand lettering) and take inspiration from there. You can use a layout pad to do iterations on designs. Or a grid pad to keep it tight and neat.

• Keep nice balanced spacing between the letters, no massive and tiny gaps, keep it consistent.

• You could try using a calligraphy pen, to give contrast in the vertical and horizontal strokes.

• Try to stick to basic typographic principles to keep it looking neat:

• If it's for something that has rich visual connotations like sailing for example, you could work one of the letterforms into something like an anchor, a tentacle, a fin or a nautical star.

• You can add flourishes, swirls etc. to the letters, you will find loads of reference material googling hand lettering

• Look at Holly Dickens and Rob Clarke, as you an see there are many possible designs that can be considered 'stylized' if you stick to some of the above principles and find some good reference material it's a matter of practice, a layout pad will be good for that purpose, so you can see the older design beneath.

Answer 2

You will need a vector editing program like Adobe Illustrator or Inkscape.

You will need to hand draw it, either with a pen and paper, then scan it in. Or with a graphics tablet, that will skip the scanning it in step.

I will use Illustrator for this explanation.

If you've scanned in a drawing, you can open it in Illustrator and trace the artwork by selecting the image and clicking the image trace button at the top. Once clicked you can tweak the results by clicking this button.

You can then click the expand button to edit the paths more precisely.

Or if you really want to make sure it's perfect I would trace it by hand with the pen tool