How to make a logo in minutes without design skills

As a solopreneur, being able to create my own logo in 5 minutes is bliss. No back-and-forth with a designer means more time shipping.

I used to suck at design but after creating 30+ logos, I found a simple blueprint that works all the time. No skills required. Let’s start.

Estimated reading time: 3 min 34 sec

What are you selling?

Before jumping on Figma, we need to talk about why your startup exists. Your product solves a problem. The problem solved upgrades the lives of your customers. Let’s explore a few examples:

• A habit tracker helps people struggle to be consistent to get in shape

• A code boilerplate has templates to avoid writing code from scratch to help developers build faster

• A PDF AI chat app saves time by not having to read long and boring documents

Find how your startup upgrades your customers’ life. It’s hard. But once it’s done, you’re minutes away from having a beautiful logo.

Start with a shape

The shape of your logo shouldn’t be about the product at all. Instead, it should depict the life upgrade you’re offering. Let’s use the previous examples:

• Habits tracker: A seed or a strong biceps represents a life transformation

• Code boilerplate: A lighting bold or a Formula 1 represents speed.

• PDF AI chat app: A clock represents time saved.

If you don’t know which icon could represent the life upgrade, google it: Icon to depict [life upgrade]

For our example, let’s say we’re designing a logo for a habit tracker for people who want to work out consistently. A strong bicep is a perfect fit.

Have you got your shape? The fun part begins. Head over to any free SVG libraries. I always use one of these:

1. Iconbuddy

2. React Lucide

3. Heroicons

Search for your shape, download the SVG, and import it in Figma.

Let’s paint

At this point, you’re almost done. A few colors and you’re ready to ship.

If you’re a designer reading this, you’ll go bananas: ditch color palettes. Solopreneurs don’t have the time and skills for this.

Pick one primary color and stick to it. If you need help picking the color, search for symbolic color meanings—it’s how colors make people feel. Red brings passion or excitement (Tinder), yellow is hope or joy (McDonald), and green is nature or growth (Instacart).

For our habit tracker, we could have used green but we’ll go with red because we’re targeting fitness.

Just add the primary colour in the background, and fill the icon with white. You can also swap the background and filling color. And here’s our logo!

Let’s explore some alternatives. Gradients are trendy for AI products. Just select the SVG and change the stroke color to a beautiful gradient. Keep the colors of the gradient in the same zone, for instance, red with yellow or green with blue. Avoid mixing hot and cold colors.

You can also stick to black and white. That’s what Twitter did when rebranding to 𝕏 and it looks slick/noble. Play around with the SVG fill color and the background color to find out what’s best.

Finally, if you’re shipping a startup that’s mobile-first, you can easily give it an app feeling: Add a large border-radius to the edges and a shadow.

The first logo will take some time. The second one will be faster. The third one will only take 5 minutes. Keep shipping and you’ll be unstoppable.