Skilled artisans make their craft look easy–effortless even. A good musician offers no indication of the hours and hours of time spent practicing. The same is true for cakes. I often get calls from potential clients–fans, no doubt, of popular television shows like Ace of Cakes–who request a cake for 30 guests in the shape of a Prada shoe sitting atop a Ferrari. When I tell them the price, they’re floored. I don’t blame them: On television, a 40 hour job is edited down to 20 minutes. Combine that with the artists’ expertise, and a challenging cake design looks ridiculously easy.

Logo design is no exception. Effective logos are eye catching, artistic, and memorable, all while accurately representing the organization or business. If you’ve ever thought, “I could do that myself”, you’d be wrong. There is a whole process to logo design. There are fonts to consider, issues of balance, design principles and theories, not to mention the psychology of branding. Color, I found out, is the last step. A good graphic designer, like any artist, makes the whole process look deceptively simple.

I turned to graphic designer Monica Majors of Paper Cut Industries to design my new logo. Hers is an in-depth process that begins with a questionnaire (I just love a questionnaire) about your business. The answers help her identify your style, taste, brand, and look. Then, after careful consideration, she presents “Round 1″ of your logos.

Round 1 includes three options, all in color and black and white. A good logo, Monica explained, should stand on its own and not be dependent on color. She further fine tunes and tweaks the logo in subsequent rounds until she arrives at the perfect design.

These are my “Round 1″ logos. I really liked Option No. 1, but I wanted the logo to somehow be more symbolic of cake. I asked Monica to create variations of Option No. 3 using different fonts and colors.

I narrowed down the colors to pink and a greenish aqua. I liked the round shape because I felt it best represented cake. I thought perhaps we could create a border around the circle to symbolize the piped border found on a cake. Here’s “Round 2″.

Finally, “Round 3″. My idea for a piped border around the logo didn’t have that “clean” look I really like, so we scratched that. While I like a lot of the script fonts Monica chose, they too lacked the streamlined style I’m known for, so I opted for two different sans serif fonts. I had a really hard time choosing between Option No. 3 and Option No. 6 in the Round 2 logos, but I finally settled on Option No. 3. In Round 3, Monica recreated the final design in a variety of color combinations.

And finally, introducing my new (larger-than-life) logo.

Thank you so much Monica. I love it.

Please note: All images are copyright material of Paper Cut Industries and are not intended for reproduction without their express written consent.