If you’re starting a business, you’re going to need a logo—and not just any old logo, but a smart, creative logo design idea that clearly differentiates you from other businesses in your niche. 

We’ve written 35 Creative Logo Design Ideas as a guide for new businesses like yours to help you identify best practice when it comes to creating an effective logo and to help you tap into the best logo creative design ideas around today. 

We’ll start by discussing seven core design trends. Then we share creative logo design ideas from Envato Elements and Envato’s Placeit logo maker for each trend!

How to Create a Creative Logo: 6 Essential Tips

1. Start With Your Brand Identity

A logo’s job is to act as the face of a company, but it can’t sum up everything about a company.  A logo is just one part of your company’s larger brand identity and grows out of your brand story. Take some time to think about why your company does what it does, who it serves, where and how it’ll make a difference, and what it stands for. Contemplating these questions will help you create an effective brand strategy and create well-considered visuals and messaging that’ll support the meaning of your logo and over time make it memorable.

2. Understand the Basic Forms Logos Take

Before you create your own logo, it’s important to know the three basic forms logos take so you can decide which is best for your particular brand. A logo is either:

• an image-based symbol, e.g. Twitter
• a text-based symbol, e.g. Google
• a combination image and text-based symbol, e.g. Puma

3. Be Aware of the Qualities That Make a Good Logo

Good logos are:

• simple
• relevant
• memorable
• versatile 
• use colour thoughtfully
• reference trends intelligently

If you want to learn more about these qualities, read the article below:

4. Look to Trends for the Best Creative Logo Design Inspiration 

Trends aren’t to be followed blindly, but they’re a great reference point for creative design ideas and inspiration. Current trends and styles may:

• embrace simplicity
• celebrate colour
• use typography imaginatively
• experiment with geometry 
• make creative use of negative space
• go retro
• get playful

Later, we’ll look more closely at these style creative design ideas and show you some cool logo design ideas for business that apply them tastefully.

5. Be Aware of the Competition

Studying the logos of businesses both in your niche and outside of it is a great way to find the best creative logo design inspiration and to refine your own creative design ideas. When you look at cool logos, ask yourself whether the logos reflect the six qualities of good logo design. If so, how, and if not, how do they deviate? When you look at the logos of companies in your niche, do you see any commonalities between them? If so, ask yourself how you can buck their trend to differentiate yourself and make your logo stand out. 

6. Experiment 

The best business logo ideas probably won’t come to you in your sleep—although they might. More likely, you’ll come up with cool logo creative design ideas through a process of experimentation with some trial and error. If you don’t hit on just the right design immediately, don’t be discouraged—just keep working on your creative design ideas until they’re resolved. 

35 Creative Logo Design Ideas

Here are seven current logo trends with a logo design idea for each trend from Envato Elements and four logo creative ideas for each from Envato’s Placeit logo maker.

Trend 1. Embrace Simplicity

Because your logo is the foundation of your brand’s identity, you may believe that it’s got to be complicated. In an attempt to create something original, you may try to cram as many ideas and elements as you can into this small symbol. 

What you need to do is actually the opposite. If you’ve done your homework and studied the logos of a variety of brands for logo style ideas, you know that simplicity is a dominant feature of the best logos. Simplicity has been the buzzword in contemporary graphic design, and by extension logo design, for a long time. 

A simple logo allows a viewer to recognise it at a glance and to remember it long after they first laid eyes on it. The other benefit of simplicity in logo design is that it allows the logo to work in a variety of applications, from digital to print. If you use lots of lines, colours, gradients, and fine details, your logo is probably going to break down when scaled and lose its integrity. To test your design, try fitting it into a one-inch square and judge the results. 

If you want your logo to be memorable and versatile, remember the old adage: Less is more. 

Create your own cool logo with these great templates:

Trend 2. Celebrate Colour

Bright colours have been a dominant trend in graphic design for a while. And with good reason: colour has a profound effect on the human psyche that you need to take into consideration. You should understand the impact of the colours you choose on your target audience and select company logo colours they’ll respond to positively.  

When you’re looking for creative logo ideas, keep your eye on the way colour is used and think about the message you want to communicate with colour in your branding and logo design. If you want to know more about colour and how to combine it effectively in logo design, read 10 Best Logo Colour Schemes & Combinations.

Like what you see? Customise one of our templates to come up with your own logo style ideas:

Trend 3.  Use Typography Imaginatively

One of the most exciting developments in contemporary logo design is the creative use of typography, which has seen many brands moving away from image-based logos and text-and-image logos and embracing purely text-based logos. 

With this type of logo, typography is used imaginatively to represent the company’s full name, monogram, or initial. Text-based logos are a good option for a business with a relatively short name as it gets the name out there and is easy to associate with the brand.

Typographical experimentation can also be applied to text-and-image logos where, as in the example below, a letter in the company’s name is replaced with relevant objects while keeping the company name recognisable. Experimentation can also lead to developing new typographic shapes, incorporating photography, modifying existing typefaces, and more. 

How would your company name look with one of these cool logo templates?

Trend 4. Experiment With Geometry

We learn all about geometric shapes—squares, rectangles, circles, triangles—in primary school, and as it turns out, these shapes play an important role in logo design. These basic shapes bring symmetry and a structured look and feel to logo design. 

Geometric logos are so simple that they can be scaled easily and consistently, and they’ve got the added benefit of communicating the fundamental qualities of a business in a direct way.

• squares = reliable, stability, order
• circles = wholeness and harmony
• triangles that point up = power  
• triangles that point down = instability

These qualities make geometrical shapes a perennial favourite in logo design. When used in the contemporary context, think of keeping their look fresh with bright colour palettes.

Experiment with one of these creative logo ideas to create your own cool logo:

Trend 5. Make Use of Negative Space

Making use of negative space in innovative and clever ways is quite a skill. Negative space is the background space around and between a logo symbol. 

For example, if your logo is two birds sitting on a branch, the birds and branch, the shape of the birds and the branch are positive space, and everything around them is negative space. Shaping the birds and the branch in such a way that an area of the background (the negative space) forms another image is what we mean here by making creative use of negative space. Doing so strategically adds another layer of meaning to your logo and can charm and entertain your target audience. 

See how to use negative space to create your own logo with one of our terrific logo templates:

Trend 6. Go Retro 

As a counter to the clean simplicity in contemporary design, ever so slowly, the design aesthetics of anywhere from the 1950s to early 90s are beginning to creep into logo design, maybe as a result of a pre-digital nostalgia. 

Whatever the case, design influences from the past are resurfacing, albeit with a contemporary twist, and give brands an opportunity to set themselves apart from competitors by mashing together a variety of elements to come up with cool logo ideas. 

How would your business logo look in one of these cool retro styles:

Trend 7. Get Playful

Getting playful with your logo designs will always win you points with your target audience. Though a playful logo is an obvious fit for businesses that target children, it doesn’t mean that they’re the only businesses that could benefit from adding playful twists to their logo design. 

It’s true, however, that this approach won’t work with every business. If you’re a financial or legal business, for example, you may want to stay clear of this style idea, but there are a host of other business that would do well to communicate a penchant for lightheartedness and fun through their cool logos. 

Have some fun with these logo creative ideas and see where it leads:

If you’re looking for more logo style ideas, it’s always helpful to check out more than one source. That’s why we’re including a few creative logo design suggestions from Envato Elements. 

If you’ve got a bit of experience working with Adobe Illustrator or Photoshop, then Envato Elements has tons of great templates to help you come up with interesting logo ideas. These three examples embody many of the style ideas we’ve discussed. They all come in EPS and AI file formats, are simple to edit, and can easily be customised to meet your business needs.

Great business logo ideas for those with Photoshop and Illustrator chops:

These are just a few of the great logo templates available at Envato Elements, and you can download as many as you want for one low monthly price.

Placeit’s Logo Maker 

Coming up with cool logo ideas isn’t easy. But if you need help, tap into more of the best creative logo design inspiration by checking out the online logo maker at Placeit. 

The Logo Maker is a fun, hands-on, low-stress way for design novices to try out various logo creative ideas for business, get familiar with making design decisions, and understand how a logo is put together. Best of all, it’s free and easy to use, though you’ll pay a small fee to download your high-quality logo creations. 

For tips on how to get the most out of this incredibly versatile logo maker, check out this step-by-step tutorial:

Take One of These Cool Logos for a Spin

In such a crowded marketplace, coming up with cool logo creative ideas isn’t easy, and nor is creating an amazing logo from scratch. Using the tools at your disposal like the online logo maker from Placeit and the ready-made templates at Envato Elements can give you the best creative logo design inspiration and help you create beautiful logos in no time. 

So, take one of these fabulous designs for a spin today and let us know what you think in the comments below. 

Editorial Note: Our staff updates this post regularly—adding cool, modern and creative logo templates and designs.