How To Design Your Salon Logo

Business owners have mixed feelings about how important a quality logo is. Some feel that it is just a small image that no one pays attention to, while others think it contains every bit of their business identity and needs to be perfect.

The truth is, a logo isn’t going to make or break your salon business, but it is a crucial element to your brand that will help customers recall your business and book your services.

Follow these easy steps to help you design a quality logo for your salon:

Identify your brand
Build your message
Design your logo
Look at examples
Obtain feedback

Find your brand identity

Your logo is supposed to be a reflection of your overall business. What’s your mission, values, and how do you want customers to feel when they think about your brand? These are all critical questions to ask to help you figure out what elements need to be included and what should be left out.

To help identify your brand, think about the following items.

Mission

Your mission is the reason why you are in the hair salon industry. It is the reason you work late nights and take on the risks of being a salon owner. Having a strong mission statement is not only good for you to have, but it gives your customers a sense of pride that they are supporting a small business with a mission instead of a faceless chain-salon.

So what is your mission?

Do you want to provide premium care and service to high-end customers?

Do you want to volunteer your services to help homeless people get haircuts?

Are you wanting to make people feel more confident by giving them the best haircut they have ever received?

Whatever yours is, start to think of ways to incorporate this mission into your logo.

Values

Your values are the elements that make up your mission. They are what you believe in, and will make sure they happen at your hair salon. Some typical values that hair salon owners have might be:

- Having a standard of excellence for yourself, your employees, and your service
- Having integrity and resolving issues in a civil and friendly way
- Offering reasonable pricing so everyone can get the service they need
- Providing an excellent work environment for employees
- Providing extra training, so your staff is knowledgeable
- Treating each customer as a friend
- Extra employees, so there is no wait time.

Your values are your guiding light as you build your hair salon; if possible, try to work them into your logo as well.

Tone

The tone is the emotional response you want your logo to give to customers. When they look at your logo, do you want them to think:

- That’s an excellent hair salon.
- That’s where I want to get my hair styled.
- That looks like a fun, inviting place.
- That hair salon looks fresh and new.

Your tone plays a big part in how customers perceive your overall brand. Make sure your logo aligns with this tone to give a consistent message across platforms.

Build your message

Not every logo has text associated with it, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a message conveyed. Whether you choose to have words in your logo or not, you need to build a message that you are trying to tell the audience.

This is a significant next step after identifying your brand because, for the most part, you are just trying to communicate your brand mission and values to the customer; you have to figure out how to do that best.

Let’s look at an example:

You own and operate the most premium hair salon in your area. You service wealthy clients who expect unmatched service and professionalism.

Your mission is to have every client leave your salon feeling like they just had the best treatment they’ve ever received and have a newfound confidence.

You train your staff extensively and give them a great work environment to be ready to service your clients at the level they are expecting.

What do you want your message to be?

“At Serenity Salon, it is all about you. Our goal is to have you leaving our salon confident and ready to take on the world. While at our salon, you will experience unmatched quality, care, and friendliness.”

How do you make this into a logo?

Now comes the tricky part. You are trying to condense so much information and also transferring it from text to image. But let’s brainstorm some ideas that could give your logo this message:

- Have elements that suggest you service high-end clients, such as here
- Use elements that convey premium care and excellence, such as here
- Use luxury colors and a simple design to appeal to your affluent audience, like here.

These are just some ideas to illustrate how to translate your message into a logo. Later on, we will look at more examples so you can find what fits your specific message.

Designing your logo

Now that we have the “why” behind your logo, it is time to start putting those ideas into a tangible product.

General tips for creating a logo

Keep it simple

Making a simple logo makes it easy for the customer to identify and remember your hair salon. Often, business owners make the mistake of incorporating other brand elements, such as a slogan or name, into their logo.

Remember that your logo will be used in conjunction with these elements quite often. This doesn’t mean you can’t have them in your logo, but if you put your logo with a title and slogan onto a flyer, right next to your title and slogan, it will be redundant and cluttered.

Make it unique

A lot of hair salon logos look the same. Silhouettes of a woman’s head, scissors, and pink or purple coloring are all pretty standard in this industry. There’s a good reason for this; these elements tend to be what catches your potential customers’ eye.

But just because everyone is doing something doesn’t mean you should follow suit. If you create a logo that looks like everyone else’s, it’ll get lost in the noise, and most customers won’t pay it much attention.

An excellent example of a unique logo is Color To Dye For; they differentiate themselves by incorporating a skull instead of an average person. But this element ties into their specialty of hair dyeing.

Proportional and well balanced

Humans have a natural tendency to enjoy looking at things that are symmetrical and proportional. Your logo doesn’t have to be perfectly symmetrical, but you should use certain principles such as keeping your main element at the center to provide a well-balanced logo.

Flexible

Your logo is going to be used in a variety of ways. Signage, clothing, and marketing material are just a couple of the areas where you will be placing your logo. Ensure your logo can adapt to sizing, coloring (black & white), and design requirements to fit into different formats.

Pick a logo style

There are several different logo styles out there that can help distinguish your logo from the competition and incorporate the feel you are trying to portray with your logo.

Some basic logo formatting styles are:

- Wordmarks – Just words
  - CocaCola, FedEx, Mobil
- Lettermarks – Initials
  - CNN, ABC, UPS
- Brandmarks – Symbols
  - Apple, Twitter, Nike
- Combination marks – Text & symbols
  - Amazon, Burger King, KFC
- Emblems – Text inside symbols
  - Starbucks, Harley Davidson, Porsche

Along with the formatting style, some design styles include:

- Fun & quirky
  - This is usually for children or family-oriented salons. It incorporates fun colors, basic shapes, and a simple design to portray a laid-back and fun atmosphere.
- Classic
  - Simple, timeless design. No crazy colors or trendy images.
- Retro/vintage
  - Older look, earthy colors with dark elements. It is sometimes incorporated with retro-style fonts.
- Modern/minimalist
  - Very basic with modern colors. Typically just a letter or image that inspires the reader to look into the company further. These are popular with many salons in larger metropolitan areas.
- Handmade and handcrafted
  - Can give the logo a personal touch and help you stand out from the more digital style logos.

Need help finding the perfect salon name? Check out our article here!

Pick a color palette.

Picking a color palette is a relatively easy step in the logo building process. You may already have some brand colors picked out, but you want to make sure you have a consistent color palette across all platforms.

If you haven’t picked a color palette yet, you can find great resources on the psychology behind brand colors here and here.

You can also get some ideas for your color palette with online generators such as Coolors and Colormind.

Obtain feedback

Hopefully, you now have a couple of ideas of what you want your logo to look like, or even a rough draft was drawn up. It is now time to put it to the test and ask friends, families, and colleagues what they think of your logo.

It is also a good idea to ask potential customers or online communities what they think about your logo. Potential customers are the market you are trying to appeal to, and online communities will be less inclined to tell you they think your logo is great just because they know and like you.

Once you have this valuable information, you can go back and make the changes or little tweaks to your logo to improve upon it until you have your ideal logo for your salon.