Blog

By Peter Yanefski, Strategic Communications Associate

Are you hosting a D-I-Y fundraiser this summer as part of Summer FUNdraising? If so you will need a catchy name and logo. While a name for the event is more personal and depends on the situation, there are a few key tips I can give you for creating a logo as a graphic designer.

First, let me share some of my bona fides on the subject. I have done graphic design through programs like Photoshop, Gimp and Illustrator since I was in High School (I’m currently 32), I was a freelance graphic designer for several years before doing graphic design for video at Rowan University, graphic design for social media for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, and I have done graphic design as a part of my position here at the Histiocytosis Association since 2022. Here are various simple logos that I have created personally and professionally over the years to show how a little simplicity can go a long way.

Simplicity is key. Each of these logos has around 5 different items, most of them duplicated for effect or depth. All are on theme with color and the idea behind them. The Vyteck logo on the top left is a simple circle with lines coming off of it that replicate the lines on a circuit board. The connected letters continue this theme. The top right logo is a license plate to go along with the fundraiser name (in this case the name was created first) and it just imitates the design of a license plate, but with the Association’s colors and logo (instead of a state name).

The logo on the bottom left was for our team – Team Different World. It contains a brain shape (royalty free image), for the brain condition (Hydrocephalus) containing a royalty free image of an earth (to represent the “world” in the title) and outlines of circles around the earth in red, to represent the pressure pain felt by those with her condition. The only non-simple part of this design was replicating the folds, which I just did by drawing various curved lines and swirls on the brain outline. And the blue in the background is the Hydrocephalus Association’s blue.

The Event

Like I mentioned above, the event name is personal and specific, and it helps the logo to be created more passionately, to share those feelings with those you’re fundraising to. It, however, can also be simple, or not even named until after the logo.

In creating this event, all I know so far is that I want to host an ice cream social in my town, to raise money for histiocytosis. I will walk you through the process, step by step. Making sure this is something you can replicate and iterate on, I will be creating this in Canva, and anything outside of Canva is royalty free, and I will link to the source of it. To read more about Canva if you decide to design a logo in that, you can read this guide.

Color

Colors is a good thing to start when creating it, since this is for histio, I am primarily going to be using histio’s colors which are:

Reflex Blue (#0055a4)

Green 369 (#6db33f)

Blue 282 (#002d62)

Green 367 (#b3d88c)

and Black (#000000)

You can also add in some other simple colors that you prefer. For example, I will add a grey background for my first simple object to sit on.

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The Design

Remember, simple is best, both for the design, and the people reading the message that comes through the design. So let’s start simple.

Starting with a circle in histio’s blue.
We are going to try to create an ice cream cone, so lets add a triangle next to represent the cone.

Next, we will add an ice cream scoop, with another circle, placed just below the top end of the triangle, and moved a layer back, so it looks like the ice cream is in the cone.

Now we are going to start to give it some cute attributes. In your own design you can go for flashy, bright, cool, etc. In this case, we are going to try to pull the eye to this design by making our ice cream cute.
So we will start with two more blue circles for eyes.

Then add a slightly elongated semi-circle for a mouth

Now let’s add some more details. Since the ice cream is light green, let’s make it mint chocolate chip flavored.

In this case I did that by adding in some squares, rotated to be diamond shaped, along the sides, so it both looks like chocolate chips, and freckles on our cute ice cream mascot.

For this part of the design, you can have all of the squares aligned for a symmetrical design, so it looks neat, or you can have them intentional asymmetrical to make it look more random.

In this case I am going to move the chips so its purposefully asymmetrical, like chocolate chips would usually be on an ice cream scoop.

Now, before we add text, let’s do some quick tweaks.

I want my chocolate chips to look more like chocolate, so I am going to change them from our Reflex Blue to the Dark Blue (282). I am also going to make the green circle a little bit bigger, so the ice cream scoop fills out the cone more. It’s natural to stop and tweak a design before moving on to other aspects of the design. Some people even craft multiple versions and compare and decide at the end of each process which they want, or their community wants.

Text

First we need to decide what we want the text to say. As I said earlier, the logo can come first, or it can be inspired by the name of the event. In this case, I’ll just keep it really simple and say that it’s my ice cream social. This works especially well if you are creating an event for a child’s histio disorder. Placing their name in the event name and including them alongside the logo in the promotional materials.

The text as an added effect of an arc, which you can add to text in Canva by selecting effects, then arc, where you can adjust the amount of arc you want. In this case I added it to have it curve with the circle.

A Summer FUNdraising event from last year, Mighty Miles’ Lemonade Stand exemplifies that.

Now lets adjust the size of the text so it fills out the logo more.

Now let’s select a font we’d like to use for the style of logo we have. Since we are going for cute, I want the font to look playful. In Canva you can search by style of font you want, and that’s what I searched for.

Ultimately, I decided on the font in the middle: “Lucky Bones.” Now that we’ve picked a font, let’s resize again based on that font.

Unique Aspects

You want to ask yourself, as you add more details to this design “what’s unique about the event?”, or the patient or where you are. Let’s say you were from North Australia, so you wanted to include a landmark from there to help represent this event. You could go to Pixabay.com and find this royalty free image of Ayer’s Rock, a plateau in the Northern Territory of Australia.

This addition also gives this rather simple design some depth. Where now it looks like a giant ice cream cone towering over a plateau.

Looking at it again, and I recommend taking breaks every few steps, so you can look at it with fresh eyes, I think it needs a little more detail. For example, I don’t think the eyes have enough pop, so I am going to add white circles that the blue circles can fit into, to make it look like the whites and the cornea of an eye. I am also going to duplicate one of the chips and add it to the middle of the “face” so it looks like its the ice cream guy’s nose.

Then I am going to adjust this vector image (completely editable, as gotten from pixabay) by making it Histio’s dark green color.

Looking at the face now, I have a great idea, I think it’s starting to look like a dog. So I am going to steer into that with the design. I will also add a smaller semi-circle and place it inside the other one for the mouth, and make it pink to have it pop more, and make it more of a mouth, specifically, a dog’s mouth. Then I added two large ovals, and placed them 1/4 of the way into the head, at an angle, to make it look like its ears sticking out.

In this hypothetical situation, I have reached out to the ice cream parlor, and since they have an outdoor space for eating, they will allow people to bring their dogs to this ice cream social fundraiser. Now that’s a big gimmick for my event. I have changed the title of the event to match, adding a little bit of alliteration with the P’s.

Here is our final design, once adding in more details of a time and who it benefits. In your own events, you can also add a location. Right above or below the event times. Since this event doesn’t have a location, I just left it out. You can also add it outside of the circle if you always want to have the box as part of the design like on the left below. You can also remove the background and save your design as a transparent version, like on the right below.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this tutorial for event logo design.

I plan to continue this series throughout the summer. Let me know what other topics in communications you’d like me to cover, whether fundraiser page design or writing, email campaign writing/organizing or even post-event communications, especially if it’s an event you want to start putting on annually.

Please feel free to reach out to me if you have any questions about logo design that you feel I didn’t cover here at Peteryanefski@histio.org and make sure to participate in our Summer FUNdraising event by creating your own fun summer event here.