Logo Design for a Realtor

Logo Design for a Realtor 848 310 Nick Saporito

Howard Figueroa is a licensed realtor out of Houston, TX. After coming across some of my Youtube videos, Howard reached out to me for a logo design he could brand himself with.

Goal

Howard left creative control in my hands, with his only request being that the logo be designed with an elegant and upscale look & feel in effort to target higher caliber clientele.

With this information in mind and an agreement reached, I set off to begin brainstorming some design ideas with confidence that he and I were on the same page.

Every industry is plagued with cliche logos, and in real estate the common theme is having an outline of a roof going over the name. The difficult part of this is that realtors tend to really like this concept and want to use it. I always try to convey to the client (in a respectful and diplomatic way) that this concept is so common in the industry that it makes them blend in and gives their audience the feeling that they’ve already seen the logo before, which is bad for branding.

Go ahead and do a Google image search for “real estate logo” and tell me if you don’t see hundreds of designs that look like this…

A Cliche Real Estate Logo

A Cliche Real Estate Logo – just swap out the name with yours and voila!

So my aim for this project — as any designer’s should be — is to avoid cliches and create something personalized and unique. After all, it wouldn’t make sense to hire a designer to create something that could be purchased from a stock photo site for $20, and I’d be shortchanging my clients if I did.

Preliminary Designs

I don’t know if I was just going through a brief phase of “designer’s block,” but I seemed to really struggle with wrapping my head around this project and coming up with effective designs. After several hours, the best I could come up with were designs that I wouldn’t deem acceptable and would feel embarrassed to present to a client…

hfng

The first design is self-explanatory, and although cliche, is personalized. Still, it didn’t look elegant and I simply did not like the look. The second and third designs were crude depictions of an abstract house with an “H” in the negative space, with the former having a roof above it to emphasize the fact that it was indeed a house. It seemed like a good idea in my mind, but once it was drawn out I didn’t like these designs either.

I eventually decided that I needed to step away from the project for a little while and see if approaching it later on with a refreshed perspective would help, and it did.

Building it From the Ground Up

I decided to start with just the name and build the logo around that. After trying out various fonts, COM4t had that elegant look that I was shooting for, so I ran with it.

hfwordmark

After spending another 30 or so minutes staring at my screen, a light bulb turned on. I decided to take the initials (H and F,) pair them next to each other and see if I could conceptualize a house within the horizontal portions of the letters, and it worked out quite well…

hficon1

I decided to add a curved horizon line beneath it to help accentuate the house and give the entire icon an enclosed look, and I think it also lends itself to furthering the elegant look. I made the horizon line a slightly lighter weight than the rest of it, because I wanted the H, F and the house to be the focus.

I was certainly onto something, but for some reason I still didn’t like it. I eventually realized it was because the letter F didn’t immediately look like an F upon first sight. Same for the H. So, I decided to make some slight alterations, which made all the difference in the world…

hficon2

As depicted, I simply slanted the tops of the letters so they would run paralel with the house outline. Perfect! The design was just about complete.

Real Estate Logo

Although I shunned the prospect of depicting a house or roof outline earlier on in this post, I think it works in this context. The main reason being because it’s personalized — the H & F are what makes this design work, and the house is conceptual; not literal. The house depiction doesn’t look like any other house icon out there. In fact, it can stand nicely on its own…

hflockup2

The client was delighted with the design and decided to move forward without any need for further revisions. Another one in the books.

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Nick Saporito

Hi, I'm Nick— a Philadelphia-based graphic designer with over 10 years of experience. Each year millions of users learn how to use design software to express their creativity using my tutorials here and on YouTube.

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6 comments
  • Christian

    Dunno, the logo looks like a construction site to me (the bars being the steelbeams), but if the client is happy, thats all that counts.
    I think the logo looks very “Bauhaus” and its elegant too !

    How do you choose fonts ? And how much is the price of a font a criteria ?

    • Nick Saporito

      Thanks for the feedback. I see what you’re saying about it coming off as a construction site and do agree, but I guess it’s open to interpretation. The main thing is that it conceptualizes real estate in some way. Plenty of logos can be interpreted in different ways (Google image search “pepsi logo fail” for example.)

      I don’t let the price of a font be too much of a factor. If I’m working on something and feel a licensed font would be better, I’ll communicate that to the client and let them decide whether or not they want to purchase a license. 9 times out of 10 they’ll decline and ask me to use an open font instead. If the font creator’s license allows me to transfer it to the client after purchasing it myself, I’ll likely purchase it with my own money and do so if practical. Different designers have different restrictions as far as licensing for their fonts goes though, so I’m always careful about that.

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