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The Ultimate Logo Design Questionnaire Every Designers Needs [+ Free Templates]
Learn how to build your own questionnaire or use the pre-made templates instead.
The logo questionnaire is an essential part of the discovery phase before any logo design project begins. It provides a solid understanding of your design brief and helps you accurately convey your client’s brand. We’re going to look at how to construct a logo questionnaire, what questions to include, and give you a pre-made logo questionnaire template you can download for free in three variants.
What Questions Should You Ask When Designing a Logo?
As with any other type of research, asking as many questions as possible brings you closer to understanding the problem. On the other hand, you wouldn’t want to overwhelm your client with a 4-page questionnaire, so you’d want to stick to the most important questions. For this purpose, it’s best to separate your questions into different categories. Usually, these categories include brand-related questions, design-related questions, and practical bits.
Table of Contents
- 1. Brand-Related Questions – Understanding the business background
- 2. Design-Related Questions – The visual side of things you need to know
- 3. The Practical Bits – Questions about the project details
- 4. The Ultimate Logo Design Questionnaire – Free Downloadable Template
1. Brand-Related Questions To Include
If you separate your logo questionnaire into sections, start with a section related to the brand values and attributes. It will give you a better understanding of how your client wants to be perceived by their audience and what type of clients they wish to attract. This, respectively, will help you visualize an image that best represents it.
Business, Services, and Client Profile
Start with the obvious questions that will give you clarity about the business and its services. On the other hand, knowing the client’s target audience gives you instant knowledge of what logo elements to exclude from your design right away. In some cases, new businesses might not yet know the specific audience they target their services to. However, this may also give you an opportunity to upsell developing this.
- What is the name of your business?
- What are your products and services?
- What is your business’ value proposition?
- Who are your ideal customers?
- How do you envision your brand’s image?
Speaking of brand presentation, a great way to grasp the essence of your client’s vision is to ask them for the brand’s characteristics. One way to do this is to list opposing characteristics and ask the client to point out where their brand image stand. List the characteristic pairs that will help you visualize your client’s logo. Including a neutral option will guide your client in selecting the characteristics that matter the most. This will leave you with a specific vision for the logo. For example, a friendly, fun, sporty, and extreme logo for a snowboard brand; or a natural, retro, elegant logo for a craft beer brand.
Competitors
These questions will give you valuable insight into what your clients are going for with their logo. By knowing who the competitors are, you can research how these brands represent themselves. In addition, you will also learn if your client wishes to follow someone’s lead or set themselves apart.
- Who are your competitors?
- What sets you apart from your competitors?
- Is there anything you dislike from your top competitor’s branding choices?
2. Logo Design -Related Questions (The Visuals)
With the brand values and attributes out of the way, comes the next section that will help you narrow down the purely visual aspects of the logo. Your client will be able to select their visual preferences in terms of colors, shapes, style, and fonts.
Overall Preferences
Sometimes your client already has a specific idea for what their logo should look like. Knowing whether your client wants a text-only logo in advance will spare you from designing emblems, mascots, or pictorial elements later.
- Do you have an idea for your new logo?
- Are there any elements you want to see included in your logo design?
- Do you have any visual preferences or constraints?
- Do you want your logo to include text-only, text and graphic, or graphic only?
- Does your logo have a tagline?
The Logo Style
You will sometimes work for clients who already have brand guidelines. These clients will usually send you the style guide as a reference in their initial inquiry. However, if you haven’t received one, or the client hasn’t mentioned it, it’s best to ask.
- Do you have current brand guidelines?
- Are there any well-known logos you like?
- What emotions or meanings do you want your logo to convey?
- Which type of logos do you believe best represents your brand?
To avoid vague answers that will lead you to ask follow-up questions, you can always add options:
- Yes, they’re attached/available here: ………… (URL)
- Not yet, but expect a style guide soon.
- Not yet, and I need help with them.
- A style guide would be irrelevant for this project.
Having to work without a style guide leaves more room for creativity, but also mistakes. It’s easy to avoid these mistakes by asking the following questions.
Now here comes the best part. It’s fair to assume that most of your clients aren’t professional designers. You, however, are a professional designer and you can showcase your knowledge by giving actual visual examples of the different types of logos.
Remember that mascot logos involves character design, so if you don’t offer vector illustrations or charge extra for designing and vectoring a character, make sure you mention it. Mascots usually play the role of brand ambassadors and are present in commercials, product packaging, and other forms, not just in the logos.
Colors
If your client doesn’t have a specific color scheme in mind, they should at least have an idea of what colors they want in their logo.
- Do you have an existing color palette for your brand, and would you like to use it in your logo?
- What colors would you like in your logo?
- Are there any colors you specifically DON’T want in your logo?
You can easily encourage your client to choose a color by listing what each color conveys in a few keywords. For example:
- Black: power, authority, control, mystery, intimidation, elegance, class
- Grey: neutrality, indifference, reservedness, seriousness, compromise
- Brown: strength, solidarity, comfort, earthiness, maturity, reliability; practical
You can learn more about color psychology and what messages each color communicates in our articles about the Psychology of Neutral and Warm Colors, and the Psychology of Cool Colors in web design.
Fonts
One of the most important aspects of the logo’s presentation is choosing the right fonts. In most cases, you will have the full creative freedom to choose, modify or create fonts, however, some clients may have something more specific in mind.
- Is there a particular font you want for your logo?
- What style of font do you feel best represents your brand?
3. The Practical Bits (Project Details)
The last section includes the project details, such as budget, timeframe, and additional requirements.
- What is your timeframe?
- What is your budget?
- How do you plan to use your logo?
- Would you like additional brand design services with the logo, such as business cards, envelopes, letterheads, promotional products, etc.?
- Additional notes, comments, requests, or concerns.
Asking about the usage will help you present your design the best way by choosing the right mockups that will impress your client.
- Online: Website, Email Marketing, Social Media
- Brand Identity: Business cards, envelopes, letterheads, stationery
- Product Packaging: Promotional products, mugs, t-shirts
The Ultimate Logo Design Questionnaire
Depending on your own workflow, as well as what kind of client you’ll be working with, you can decide whether to give them the complete questionnaire or to keep it brief with a minimum amount of questions. We compiled the questions we listed and discussed in the article into three templates.
- The Complete Logo Design Questionnaire – Which included all 25 questions you need to ask
- The Standard Logo Design Questionnaire – With 15 of the most important questions
- The Essential Logo Design Questionnaire – The 10 questions every logo project must start with
The Complete Logo Design Questionnaire (25 Questions)
The full template consists of all the questions from the article and includes visual examples.
- File: PDF (Interactive)
- Number of Pages: 4
The Standard Logo Design Questionnaire (15 Questions)
A shorter version of the full template with essential questions mainly.
- File: PDF (Interactive)
- Number of Pages: 3
The Essential Logo Design Questionnaire (10 Questions)
The very minimum and most essential set of questions you need to ask to make sure you understand what your client needs.
- File: PDF (Interactive)
- Number of Pages: 2
Conclusion
You can now use these questions to build your own logo design questionnaire and share it with your future clients via online form tools, Google Docs, or PDF. Or, you can also download the free template we prepared for you in three variants based on the number of questions.
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