Creating A Logo for Your Podcast

The First Impression Is The Most Important One

Your podcast's logo is part of your podcast's "brand" and is the first impression you make on potential subscribers, since the logo for your podcast will appear as the "album art" on iTunes and in other podcast directories. Importantly, iTunes considers the attractiveness of your logo as one consideration when deciding whether to prominently feature your podcast. So, it's worthwhile to create a simple and appealing logo.

Good Logo Design

When designing your logo, select an image and/or type face that works well in a variety of sizes, and that is legible when reproduced in a small size (it will be appear quite small if it is featured in iTunes and in embeddable podcast players). It should also look well when expanded. iTunes prefers square .jpg images that are 600 x 600 pixels (my logo isn't square, but it still was accepted, thank goodness!).

Logo Symbolism

Your podcast logo should reflect the tone and content of your podcast, as well as the preferences of your audience. The symbolism associated with the logo may be personally meaningful for you, and may subtly convey characteristics about your podcast to your subscribers.

For example, the logo for my podcast "Living Well With Autism" features a "Brady Bunch"-style font that suggested "family" to me. I made the words "Living Well" larger than "with Autism" because I want my subscribers to understand that having a child with autism doesn't preclude a good quality of life. I made the words slightly askew to suggest a child-like playfulness--which my podcast advises as an approach to engage children with autism.

Selecting Logo Colors

Your colors of your podcast's logo can be especially meaningful. For simplicity, you may want to select one or two colors. For my logo, I chose two upbeat, friendly shades--lime green and citrus orange--because those colors are popular on the web right now, are associated with health, and convey the positive tone of my podcast's content. The color orange is also associated with RSS feeds.

Creating Your Logo

So, now that you know about logos, how do you go about creating one? If you aren't the artistic type, you can hire a professional graphic designer to create a logo for you. The price for a professionally designed logo starts at about $1,000. If that's out of your budget, you can create your own logo for about $50 using Logo Maker (http://www.logomaker.com).

Uploading and associating the logo image you create (in .jpg format) is pretty straightforward if you use a program like GarageBand (for Macintosh) or a podcast host such as Podomatic. iTunes also has online instructions for podcasters who can do programming.

And don't forget...you can put your logo on t-shirts and blog posts!