Creating a Homeschool Logo

As a creative I love the area of logo design and branding. With technology being what it is, it's a field that has opened up to people like never before. I myself am a huge sucker for great packaging or an awesome graphic tee. 

As homeschoolers we get to choose everything about our "school" and our way of life. Even though I don't run our homeschooling like a school I absolutely named our school!

We are Willms Grove Elementary. The elementary part is going to have to drop at some point. I even made the Scholastic people change the name on our scholastic orders to our school name instead of the boring Willms Homeschool that they first added. It turned out to be more of an awkward conversation than I bargained for...

Me: So this is a bit random but since we're on the phone can you change our name to "Willms Grove Elementary"?

CS: So are you a school?

Me: Well we're a homeschool... (which they already knew).

CS: Did the government issue you a license with that name on it?

Me: No... they don't do that. We don't get homeschool licenses... can you just change my name because I think it's fun?

CS: Oh yeah, I guess so. 

Me: Cool. Thanks.


So... we have a name. It's also a hashtag I use a lot to organize our school photos on instagram and print out yearbooks with Chatbooks ;). 

Every now and then I like to whip up a new logo for our school - because I can. Now I'm no photoshop genius but I have an elementary knowledge of how to navigate PSE. I tinker and I have fun and we have logos. 

Now like I said, I'm not uber adept at photoshop but if you wanted to try making your own... here are a couple non professional tips. 

1. Get a free trial of photoshop elements. That'll give you 30 days to tinker and see if it's something you'd like to have permanently. 

2. Create a new blank file. 
I often just use square dimensions like 6x6 as I'm not going to use it for anything crazy large. 
Choose a transparent background so that you can add it to things and it be able to overlay if that makes sense. (again - I don't know what I'm talking about). 

3. Choose a font that you like. If you're like me this will take you 3 hours. Check out www.dafont.com for lots of free fonts. 

4. Start tinkering with your design. Mix text with simple shapes, icons or clipart. I often find royalty free images that you can download and use for personal use. I'm obviously not selling anything with our homeschool logo on it so it's all good!
*Definitely check out youtube videos for tutorials on the basic tools in PSE.

5. Save your file as a .psd and as a .png if you want the background to stay transparent or as a .jpg if you want it to look like a picture. (Again... I'm a novice. I'm likely not using correct terms lol). 

6. You can overlay your .png file onto backgrounds like I have with the galaxy and wood images to use in things like your photo books or social media. 

So, this has been a far cry from a professional tutorial but it is pretty fun to mess around with and my kids love that we have school logos. Stay tuned for a project we're doing with our logo that we'll put up on the blog soon!