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  Make a logo

Draw the rest of the ducking owl?

No one said it had to be an owl.

Facebook: F on squarish background

HackerNews: Y on orange square

Google: Google with coloured letters (or multicoloured G in white circle)

LinkedIn: blue `in` text

You get the idea... they don't need to be complicated and could be as simple as just text.

You trivialize that which is not: The good variety of simple does not come easy. Not in programming, not in visual design.

Making something look simple but not boring, mundane or like a copy of something you saw 10 times today, is hard because it is highly depending on context and context is depending on understanding.

Facebook can get away with an f (and more so, it works for them) because it makes identification easy when it is ubiquitous – but that is not automaticaly the case when you have no brand recognition. The simple f might just be forgettable or, worse, remind people of something else.

There is a ton of additional caveats. That is what is hard about visual design: It is infuriatingly different even when you think it shouldn't be, every single time, and understanding both how and why it doesn't work – and I guarantee you, it will not work before it eventually does – is a recurring challenge for every designer, regardless of how simple the design or how experienced the designer.

I think you're overthinking it. Throw something out there, try it out, see if it sticks. If it doesn't iterate on it. What won't get someone an icon is if they make it out to be some crazy, specific science that requires years and years of mastery to create. Creating artificial barriers for yourself never gets you closer to your destination.

It seems to me you are conflating hard with important. The case was being made for the former, certainly not the later.

Other than that I do agree.

You're assuming the logo will be good; which I didn't say. A logo is just another design exercise with constraints. By doing them, you'll see what you hate and work to avoid for your next design.

I completely disagree.

Tips that help me are the antithesis of what you said. In fact, I believe that if one follows these tips, you're worse off.

- Anytime you find a UI or mechanic you like while on the web, take a screenshot of it and save it.

Instead of blindlessly snipping things on the internet, try to understand why you like it. What fundamentally makes it fun/pleasure to use?

- Pick a palette from flatuicolors.com; congratulations, just use this forever (forever until you've gotten better at design to change)

What guides one from picking their "favorite"? You're omitting the entire "black box" that makes the designer pick their favorite. This black box is biases and training of looking endlessly on Dribble and other designers on Instagram. This is trend chasing. This is how you get practically every damn startup with a magenta-purple aesthetic we see all too often from Firefox to Datadog.

Instead start from the bottom-up. Can you get by without using a color? What does adding a color buy you? Why should you use different colors? Is there a hierarchy of importance that needs to be conveyed to the user? Why is a color needed in the first place?

- Make a logo with Photoshop, GIMP, or whatever graphics program you have using that above color palette

Also make an owl (from another comment)

- If you have the time, sign up for Daily UI (dailyui.co) and and practice making mockups. Even if you're trying to learn front end web development, this will let your creative juices practice.

IMHO - UI that emerges out of the product-user interaction rather than chasing some trends, pintrest board or inspiration from other sites, is guaranteed to be functional because it was the first checklist in the designers process. Once functional, you can work on context seperation using colors or whitespace or typography, whatever...

> Pick a palette from flatuicolors.com

Wow those are some gaudy colour schemes that all look the same.