How to Create A Great Daycare Business Logo

Creating a logo for your daycare business can be a stressful task for some owners. You are trying to squeeze every bit of your brand identity and what your daycare stands for into one image and maybe a couple of words, no wonder people stress about this.

While creating your perfect logo for your daycare may seem like a difficult task, there a certain steps you can take to make sure you create a logo that you are happy with and that customers will love.

To create a great daycare business logo, follow these easy steps:

Identify your brand
Build your message
Design your logo
Look at examples
Obtain feedback

Table of Contents

1. Identify your brand

Before you dive into designing your logo, you need to figure out what your logo is going to stand for. Your logo represents everything about your daycare, from your mission, to your values, to your overall brand feel.

To help identify your brand, think about the following items.

Mission

Your mission is the reason why you are in the daycare business industry in the first place. It is the reason you work late nights and take on the risks of being a business owner. Having a strong mission statement is not only good for you to have, but it gives your customers a sense of security knowing you are doing things for the right reasons.

So what is your mission? Are you wanting to help low-income families find affordable child care? Are you helping the gifted and talented children take the next steps to become leaders amongst their peers? Or are you trying to help special needs children learn and grow?

Whatever yours is, start to think of ways to incorporate this mission into your logo.

Values

Your values are the elements that make up your overall mission. They are what you believe in and will make sure they happen at your daycare. Some common values that daycare owners have might be:

Extra employees to ensure each child gets adequate attention
Provide a safe environment where kids can be kids
Open communication so children can work through their problems together
Treating each child as an individual
Making sure children have plenty of playtime
Helping children develop social skills

Your values are your guiding light as you build your daycare business, if possible, try to work them into your logo as well.

Tone

The tone is the emotional response you want your logo to give to customers. When they look at your logo, do you want them to think:

That’s the most fun daycare around
That’s where my kid will get the best education
That aligns with my core beliefs
That daycare looks safe and inviting

Your tone plays a big part in how customers perceive your overall brand. Make sure your logo aligns with this tone to give a consistent message across platforms.

2. Build your message

Not every logo has text associated with it, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a message that is being conveyed. Whether you choose to have words in your logo or not, you need to build out a message that you are trying to tell the audience.

This is a great next step after identifying your brand, because, for the most part, you are just trying to communicate your brand mission and values to the customer, you just have to figure out how to best do that.

Let’s look at an example:

You operate an expensive, top of the line daycare, that services the wealthy clients in your community. Your mission is to make sure every child has all the resources available to learn, grow, and succeed. You think it is best for kids to have plenty of playtime along with a few, short learning sessions throughout the day. You also emphasize the importance of safety at your facility.

What do you want your message to be?

“Here at ABC daycare, we give your child a one-of-a-kind experience that no other daycare can offer. They will have the best chance of success while under our care, while also having fun with their peers and staying safe.”

How do you make this into a logo?

This is where it gets tricky for a lot of daycare business owners. You are trying to condense so much information, and also transferring it from text to image. But let’s brainstorm some ideas that could give your logo this message:

Have a crest or border to give off a premium image, such as here
Use elements that convey premium care, such as here
Use luxury colors and a simple design to appeal to your affluent audience, like here

These are just some ideas to give you an example of how to translate your message into a logo. Later on, we will look at more examples so you can find what fits your specific message.

3. Designing your logo

Now that we have the “why” behind your logo, it is time to start putting those ideas into a tangible product.

General tips for creating a logo

Keep it simple

Making a simple logo makes it easy for the customer to identify and remember your daycare’s brand. A lot of times business owners make the mistake of incorporating other brand elements, such as a slogan or name, into their logo.

Remember that your logo will be used in conjunction with these elements quite often. This doesn’t mean you can’t have them in your logo, but if you put your logo with a title and slogan onto a flyer, right next to your title and slogan, it will be redundant and cluttered.

Make it unique

If you do a quick Google search for “Daycare logos” you will find a lot of rainbow colors, trees, and cartoon children. There’s a reason these elements are so popular, they are what appeal to the general customer base of a daycare.

But just because everyone is doing something doesn’t mean you should follow suit. If you create a logo that looks like everyone else’s, it’ll get lost in the noise and most customers won’t pay it much attention.

A good example of a unique logo is for Qidz, they differentiate themselves by keeping it simple, colorful yet over the top, and unique to their brand.

Proportional and well balanced

Humans have a natural tendency to enjoy looking at things that are symmetrical and proportional. Your logo doesn’t have to be perfectly symmetrical, but you should use certain principles such as keeping your main element at the center to provide a well-balanced logo.

Flexible

Your logo is going to be used in a variety of ways. Signage, clothing, and marketing material are just a couple of the areas where you will be placing your logo. Make sure your logo is able to adapt to sizing, coloring (black & white), and design requirements to fit into different formats.

Pick a logo style

There are a number of different logo styles out there that can help distinguish your logo from the competition, as well as incorporate the feel you are trying to portray with your logo.

Some basic logo formatting styles are:

Wordmarks – Just words
- CocaCola, FedEx, Mobil
Lettermarks – Initials
- CNN, ABC, UPS
Brandmarks – Symbols
- Apple, Twitter, Nike
Combination marks – Text & symbols
- Amazon, Burger King, KFC
Emblems – Text inside symbols
- Starbucks, Harley Davidson, Porsche

Along with the formatting style, some design styles include:

Fun & quirky
- Very popular among daycares. Incorporates fun colors, cartoons, and mascots to inspire a happy feeling in the reader.
Classic
- Simple, timeless design. No crazy colors or trendy images.
Retro/vintage
- Older look, earthy colors with dark elements. Sometimes incorporated with retro-style fonts.
Modern/minimalist
- Very basic with modern colors. Typically just a letter or image that inspires the reader to look into the company further.
Handmade and handcrafted
- Can give the logo a personal touch and help you stand out from the more digital style logos.

Pick a color palette

Picking a color palette is a relatively easy step in the logo building process. You may already have some brand colors picked out but you want to make sure you have a color palette so you are consistent across all platforms.

If you haven’t picked a color palette yet you can find great resources on the psychology behind brand colors here and here.

You can also get some ideas for your color palette with online generators such as Coolors and Colormind.

4. Obtain feedback

Hopefully, you now have a couple of ideas of what you want your logo to look like or even a rough draft drawn up. It is now time to put it to the test and ask friends, families, and colleagues what they think of your logo.

You want to ask both adults and children how they feel about the logo, because you are trying to appeal to both of them.

It is also a good idea to ask strangers or online communities what they think about your logo. When you ask these groups they will be less inclined to tell you they think your logo is great just because they know and like you.

Once you have this valuable information you can go back and make the changes or little tweaks to your logo to improve upon it until you have your ideal daycare logo.