Logo design principles
A good logo for a marketplace company often just has the name of the marketplace in a brand font:
Sometimes there's an icon before the text:
What you notice is that the logos are simple and "horizontal": they are quite wide but not very tall. This is because logos like this look good in the top bar of a website, where the logo is usually placed. This is a best practice we recommend for you too, when creating your logo. If your logo is square, it won't look good on your website, as there's not enough vertical space in the top bar.
We recommend choosing a logo format that also includes an icon. The icon comes in handy as you also need a "Favicon" and "App icon". These are both square images. With Airbnb and Rover examples above, the icon is used for these:
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If your logo is just the brand text, the icon is typically the first letter or two:
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How to design and upload a good-looking logo, app icon and favicon in 15 minutes
Logo
Designing the logo with logo.com, to create and download a free logo and download it:
Go to https://logo.com/.
First, it asks for the name of your business: give the name of your marketplace.
Then, it asks you to choose logo examples you like: pick some "horizontal" logos, which only have text or a text + icon combination.
Then it asks you to choose an icon: search for icons related to your industry and pick one you like.
It then gives you a list of options: choose one you like (remember to pick one which has only your marketplace name in a brand font or icon and marketplace name side by side)
Finally, it allows you to adjust the color and font: it's a good idea to use the same color as you're planning to use for your marketplace brand color.
Uploading the logo:
Logo.com provides you with a zip file that contains pdf, png and svg versions. Unpack the zip and open the "png" folder. It has a file called "logo-no-background.png".
Upload the "logo-no-background.png" to "Logo" in Console > Design > Branding.
Press "Save changes".
App icon and favicon
Designing the favicon and app icon with the free image cropping tool https://www.iloveimg.com/crop-image for creating your favicon:
Open "png" folder again. It has a file called "logo-color.png".
Upload it to iLoveIMG.
From the crop options, choose width of 256 and height of 256.
Drag the square above your icon.
Press "Crop IMAGE" and download the cropped version.
Tip: If you'd prefer to have your desktop logo without the icon, you can use the same iLoveIMG tool to remove the icon from your logo file, to get a logo that only contains your marketplace name.
Uploading the favicon and app icon:
Upload the file you received from iLoveIMG to both "Favicon" and "App icon" in Console > Design > Branding.
Press "Save changes".
That's it! You now have a great-looking logo and favicon for your marketplace for no cost.