How to Create a Logo and Wordmark for Your Website or Publication.

Of Brand Kits, Digital Assets, Design Tools, and How-to Videos.

Photo by Sunder Muthukumaran on Unsplash

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If you are a newcomer to content creation or someone who wishes to build brand assets, you have options based on budget and difficulty levels: the easy way, the medium or expensive way.

• Easy Way: Create the minimal set yourself by following a guide like this post or YouTube videos with easy-to-use software online.

• Medium Way: Use professional software products¹ and still do it yourself. Alternatively, hire a budget designer on 99designs.com (recommended) or Fiverr.com (less optimal, so be prepared to spend time seeking the right person).

• Expensive Way: Hire a professional to create a custom branding kit just for you. This can result in a great look that you can reuse for at least 2 years before needing to refresh it.

Before deciding which option is best for you, consider this:

The most read and highest monetized (earning approximately upwards of $5M in annual revenue) newsletter on Substack, ‘Letters from an American’ by history professor Heather Cox Richardson, does not even display a logo or custom branding. Her display image is her profile photo. Sometimes, an ‘L’ lettered logo (easily created using a free tool) occasionally shows up on a post in the website. But mostly, it is devoid of digital design assets.

So, if you are worrying about the perfect logo, wordmark, and banner image on Substack, I hope this gives you some pause.

The name of your publication is probably more useful than any digital branding asset, as it needs to accurately reflect the intent of your publication. Branding enhances your publication but is only a 'nice to have,' not a 'must-have.'

For the two publications I author,

helloIndia!

and this one, I created all the Substack assets within 30 minutes, the easy way.

You can have fun with it and not implode your budget, even if you are not tech-savvy.

I'll demonstrate how with videos below using a sample publication.

My go-to² software product is Canva for its ease of use, professional designs, extensive range of free features, affordable and flexible pricing for upgrades (you can buy a day option too), and the simplicity of its designs.

While there are other products available to create these assets, including free AI tools, I prefer Canva for its wide variety and high quality of professional designs that I can customize quickly.

Substack also recommends - the Noun Project and Looka, an AI tool. I checked out both, and while they're good for finding icons, images, etc., I found them less helpful for pulling together the entire set easily. However, it's up to you to decide what works best for you.

Do you have other favorite design tools you prefer?

The method I share below works for any product branding on your solopreneur journey, though I am using Substack assets as an example to illustrate the design process.

Pro-tip: Substack design assets, including the wordmark, are optional and not required for launching your publication on Substack. You don’t need any of them, ‘wordmark’ option only appears in Settings after you create a logo!

However, if you still want to create a nice look and feel for your publication (or would like to have fun creating!), then keep going!

First, let’s gather specs on what we need to create:

List of assets for Substack (Optional)

1. Logo: Substack expects a square logo with a minimum quality specification of 256x256 pixels and a transparent background. This ensures the logo is visible on the publication site and the Substack home page carousel. See below.

   

2. Wordmark: Substack states: “This is a stylized image version of your publication name that will show up in the navigation bar above. It should be at least c×256 pixels, with a maximum aspect ratio of 21:4.” They recommend sticking with text, as it works best. I agree.

They also offer you the option to customize banner images for the welcome page and email post headers, but I'll cover that in the next post.

How-To Using A Sample Publication

For this exercise, I decided to create a sample publication and first focus on creating a logo and watermarks. I'll cover banner images in the next post for the same publication.

Name: “The Strange Diaries of an Alien.” or …

Tagline: “For when you are alone!” or ….

I'm experimenting with both the title and tagline as I design the digital logo, watermark, and banner images to get it just right!

Using how-to videos, I'll walk you through how to create these assets, modify them for this sample publication, and experiment with Substack’s own logo generator.

Thank you for reading! Substack does not allow the option of comments from everyone on a free+paid content post. If you have any comments, please join the

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