Modern tech logos for 2023/24 + fonts to use
Designing a modern tech logo follows the same principles as designing any logo that looks professional and communicates the company’s strategic positioning.
In this article, we’ll look at how to design a logo for a tech startup the lean way. You’ll learn how you can integrate brand strategy and positioning without knowing exactly where to take your startup and how to ensure you can pivot without having to redesign any of your assets every time you change your business direction.
Check out how you can use an online logo maker (that’s unlike any others you may have tried before), design a unique wordmark or logo with a tech symbol, find your color palette and font suitable for a tech business in a couple of clicks and see preview mockups of a website and business card.
I’ll also share a few tips with you in regards to how pro designers think about designing a logo and how to set up a brand system for growth.
Get started with cool logo ideas here or by typing in your startup’s name below:
Popular tech logo styles
Wordmarks vs. logos with symbol
In the example above, a screenshot of Y Combinator’s startups, around half of the company logos listed are wordmarks. Wordmarks are logos without a symbol; some people also call them text logos or typography logos.
Many of the logos with symbols use a monogram or lettermark style, where the symbol resembles the first letter of the company’s name. Examples are Airbnb, Doordash, Whatnot, and Podium.
Other startup logos illustrate the company name. For example, OpenSea shows a boat on a blue background, Rippling’s logo symbol is a circle with two ripples, Dropbox’s symbol is an open box, and Groww’s logo shows a growth graph.
Another common tech logo style is using cute or fun symbols. Examples are Instacart’s carrot, Twitch’s robot speech bubble, Benchling’s jellyfish, and GitLab’s abstract fox.
Font styles for tech logos
Popular font styles for tech logos are sans-serif fonts. sans-serif typefaces don’t have feet—they look more casual, approachable, and friendly, especially when set in all lowercase letters, another common logo trait for technology logo design. A subcategory of sans-serif type is “rounded fonts.” These are fonts that have either rounded letter stems and terminals (think of Arial Rounded, the Instacart, Zepto, and Reddit logos use a rounded font), or rounded letter shapes (think of missing up-strokes, such as in the Cruise logo (first row), or, the Zepto logo in the last row).
While brush and handwritten fonts are usually a popular type choice in all industries, they often get replaced by a serif or sans-serif font in a professional redesign. Cursive, handwritten, and brush-style fonts make companies often look more whimsical and smaller than they are. They communicate that a company cares about personal and / or creative values which is rarely in the foreground of a tech brand. An example of a brush font tech logo is Rappi in row three. Airbnb (first row) used to have a brush-style wordmark before its simplified sans-serif type took over.
Minimal logo design to make a tech brand memorable
Way 1: Make one of the letters of the brand name stand out
Stripe, the old Zapier logo (shown here in row 3), and Reddit’s logo all feature a particular letter i. Stripe’s i looks like a credit card in use, Zapier’s old i reminds us of a settings icon that lets users connect things, and Reddit repurposes its red dot from the symbol again.
Way 2: A unique typography design feature
Tech logos often make use of text style typefaces as opposed to “display type.” These two are different in style: Text fonts are readable when used in text (but they look a bit more boring overall), display type is usually only readable when used for headlines or posters. When you can’t read longer text sections because the font is too particular, you’re likely looking at display type. Examples of display type in the logo collection above are the Twitch logotype, Cruise and Scale, Rappi, and Webflow. An in-between design solution that is classy but stands out at the same time, is the font used in the Deel and Gusto logos.
