Your food truck logo is an tremendous powerhouse for shifting your food truck into full gear!

Why does your truck’s logo matter? A solid logo is essential for a successful food truck, as logos are used to:

• Stand Out From the Crowd. A clear, compelling logo will naturally draw attention to your truck and separate you from competitors, especially if those competitors are lacking an identifiable brand.

• Be Memorable & Recognizable. A strong logo really works in your food truck’s favor. A logo (like a picture) is worth a thousand words – when eaters see your food truck – with its unique logo – fly by them on the city streets, they’ll know exactly who you are without having to attempt at reading any text on your truck (a nearly impossible feat on a fast-moving vehicle). That instant recognition is what helps build your food truck biz into an authentic brand, and a powerful logo is one of the key ingredients!

• Craft Your Larger Brand Identity. Your logo is about more than just your truck – it’s about your brand and what you represent. Your logo will be found across all areas of your business, so make sure you love it!

Brand Identity: What’s Your Truck All About?

Before you even think about penciling out your food truck logo, you’ll need to spend some careful time creating your truck’s brand identity.

Your brand identity is what your truck stands for – what’s the core mission statement of your food truck?

Sure, feeding hungry bellies is the first and foremost goal, but what’s at the heart of your enterprise? Are you looking to introduce eaters to new flavors from different parts of the country (or glove)? Or are you celebrating local tastes and homegrown traditions?

Who is the type of person that will eat at your food truck? What is important to your audience – what causes move them and drive them? Do your customers love nothing more than a day at the beach with a surfboard in hand, or is their idea of a perfect day involve a baseball game and a bag of peanuts?

These may seem like trite things to consider, but knowing your customer – really knowing them well – is key to being successful. When you understand your audience, you can create imagery and messaging that resonates with them personally. It’s these kinds of connections that turn customers into fans.

So, while mulling over your food truck logo, social media strategy, and even your business plan, make sure to always keep your audience at the front of your mind and ask – would my target audience like this?

It’s also worth remembering that your audience won’t always be you, so do your best to put yourself in the mindset of the people you are trying to reach and wear their shoes for an afternoon!

Food Truck Logo Color & Font

The font and color you choose for you logo won’t just be displayed on your food truck – these design elements will be used across your website, social media accounts, menu, and more.

Having a cohesive brand identity can go a long way into giving your truck a sophisticated feel.

Color Theory 101

Colors can stir specific emotions in the human mind, and it’s important to at least consider some basic color psychology practices when choosing your truck’s color palette. When it comes to colors and emotions, keep in mind this color and emotion guide from Creative Bloq:

• Red: Passionate, Aggressive, Important
• Orange: Playful, Energetic, Cheap
• Yellow: Happy, Friendly, Warning
• Green: Nature, Stable, Wealth
• Blue: Calmness, Trustworthy, Inviting
• Purple: Luxury, Mystery, Romance
• Pink: Feminine, Young, Innocent
• Brown: Earth, Sturdy, Rustic
• Black: Powerful, Sophisticated, Edgy
• White: Clean, Virtuous, Healthy
• Grey: Neutral, Gloomy, Formal

As a bonus – beige isn’t a major primary color, but it’s worth that beige is often great at accentuating other colors. It’s often used as a secondary color to accentuate more powerful colors.

Most of these color emotions won’t be too surprising. One of the more interesting color emotions is yellow – it’s often associated with a happy, friendly vibe. However, yellow is also often used in warning signs, which is quite the opposite feeling of fun! What this really mean is you’ll have to be careful what you pair yellow with – black and yellow together will certainly relay a sense of danger. Shade and intensity also go a long way in fine-tuning a color’s emotional appeal.

A bright, saturated yellow can convey a very different feeling than a pastel shade.

Selecting a Palette

Color palettes can range from just one color with varying shades (monochromatic) to a variety of complimenting and accenting colors.

I’ve dabbled in design theory as a personal interest, but I’m no pro, so I won’t go into further detail about palette selections and what makes one series of colors work well vs. others. That’s probably more than you want to know anyway.

Thankfully, you don’t need to go to RISD to find yourself a great color palette. There are some awesome tools that can help you out with this endeavor. A few of my favorite include:

• Coolors. Coolors is a fun little tool that allows you to instantly generate custom color schemes by just tapping your spacebar. Definitely great if you just want to browse various palettes and see what strikes you!

• Paletton. Paletton is another awesome color palette tool that lets you fiddle around with various shades and hue values with monochromatic (single color) and complementary color palettes.

Most experts say you should stick to 3-4 colors max for your color palette.

In some cases, your logo itself will simply be black, with the color palette playing more of a role in larger branding materials and your truck’s wrap design. However, plenty of logos incorporate color as well!

Font

Your truck’s font is another visual identifier than can say a lot about your brand.
A flowing, cursive font portrays a feeling of whimsy and light-hearted fun. Fonts like these are often found with desserts, salads, or high-end foods.

Fonts featuring blocky, thick, and bold lettering come off as hefty and strong. Fonts like these might be found on burger and pizza trucks.

Make sure to consider your key audience when selecting your colors and font choices. Light, flowing font tends to appeal more to women, while blocky and heavy fonts come off as more masculine.

Of course this doesn’t mean that a food truck specializing in bacon burgers needs to have a masculine font – rules are made to be broken after all!

However, it’s important to keep concepts like this in mind for the design process and consider how various stylistic choices will affect your brand’s persona.

Imagery & Visuals: The Bigger Picture

Some food trucks have a logo that relies entirely on text, while other trucks choose to incorporate a visual icon, character, or symbol to associate with their food.

Remember, when it comes to logos, keep it simple and clean. Logos are meant to be quickly identifiable and should be understand almost instantly, and from a distance. If an individual can’t look at your logo and grasp the concept within seconds, than your logo is too complicated, and your truck will get lost in the clutter.

We also happen to be in the midst of minimalist design trend, so you’ll find that the vast majority of icons and imagery these days focuses on minimalism.

Some food truck logos incorporate a mascot or simple visual, such as these incredible examples.

Others choose to make their logo primarily text-based. These trucks will likely combined their simple logo with a more aggressive visual on their food truck wrap.

For example, the restaurant The Girl And The Bull has a very active font – it’s strong enough to hold its own without any other graphic.

 

In fact, a mascot-style logo might be distracting and too busy.

Instead, The Girl and the Bull finds other ways to incorporate their visual imagery, on their menu…

and on their website and other brand assets.

Another example comes from Pit Stop. Their main logo features a thick, bulky font that doesn’t need much in the way of visual additions – just a pig snout poking out from the corner.

However on the food truck, the pig plays the staring role. The design of a food truck won’t be a simple copy of your logo. Logos are usually clean, simple, and need to be morphed across a variety of mediums, both in print and online.

However, your truck is a much larger canvas, so your food truck design will be inherently a different beast. Your truck’s wrap offers much more room to experiment and have some fun!

Some trucks choose to display large photo images on their trucks. That may work for some, but I personally feel that using photos on a truck rarely works. Blown up images are often hard to distinguish on a truck, as windows, doors, vents, and other car parts obstruct the full image. Illustrations (like the one above) often tend to fare better as food truck skins!

Sourcing Inspiration

In the (supposed) words of Picasso – “good artists borrow, great artists steal.” All right, so you don’t want to actually take another truck’s design – not only is that wrong, it’d be quite confusing to have two trucks cruising around town with the same logos but different offerings!

What we really mean is don’t be afraid to take a concept you like and make it your own. Look at competitors, both locally and nationally. What are they doing with their logos that looks good to you, and how can you recreate some of those visual concepts in your own logo?

There are a number of awesome sites on the internet that specialize in showing off awesome logo work.

• LogoPond offers a great gallery of eye-catching logos to peruse for inspiration.

• Behance is a site that allows artists to post online portfolios. We recommend checking our their “branding” section for a mix of powerful brand styles and logos. While hiring talent through Behance can get quite pricey, it at least can provide some great ideas.

• Pinterest is also packed with epic logo work (just search “logos” and you’ll find tons). You can start with our Food Truck Logo Inspiration Pinterest board!

Finding A Food Truck Logo Master: Who Will Make It?

So you are starting to get an idea of what you’re looking for in a logo, and you have some basic concept ideas you know you like and what to show to a designer. What now?

Hire A Private Pro Designer

Hiring a professional is one option – you can find someone local, or an expert online who can help you out. Make sure to browse portfolios to get a sense of the designer’s style.

This option is likely the priciest, as talented, experienced designers can fetch anywhere from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars. Cost will vary based on how complex your logo will be and the level of talent you’re using (designers just out of school will certainly cost less).

The major advantage of using a private designer is that they can do a lot more hand-holding and guidance with the logo process, and can brainstorm ideas with you.

Get Logos From Online Design Services

There are many online food truck logo design services that allows you to hire a visual specialist on the cheap. These design services can vary from just $5 to a couple thousand dollars.

Cheaper services will require you to do more leg work. Be sure to have examples of other logos you like and be able to offer a considerable amount of direction.

Less expensive services may also not result in the same kind of quality that a higher end design service or private designer might provide, but cheaper options mean you can get logo designs from a variety of designers and just see what you like.

Fiverr: Cheap, Quick & Easy

On Fiverr, you can get semi-decent logo designs for just $5 (although usually you’ll end up paying a bit more to get access to the original design file and for additional edits).

While the quality in Fiverr isn’t super reliable, I’ve actually had some decent luck getting some logos there. If nothing else, they can give you some ideas to throw around.

I’d suggest hiring 5-10 Fiverr designers and seeing what they come up with. At such a cheap price, you’ve got nothing to lose! Check out Fiverr’s logo design services and see what speaks to you!

99Designs: Crowdsourcing To Get The Best

99Designs is a service that lets you crowdsource your food truck’s logo.

First, you create a brief with the help of 99Designs – they’ll have you pick and choose logos that appeal to you, to get a better sense of what you’re looking for.

Next, you choose a pricing tier (ranging from to $300 – $1,300). The more you offer to pay, the more designers you’ll get interested in your gig.

Then, you launch your “contest.” 99Design’s network of over 1 million designers can access your brief and can choose to submit a logo design for your consideration.

You choose your favorite designs from the collection of submitted proposals and give feedback on anything you’d like changed. Then you choose a winner, who gives you the full design copyright and design file in exchange for the prize money you fronted at the beginning.

It’s a pretty sweet system that’s gotten a lot of great businesses some killer logos!

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That just about covers all we have to say on the topic of food truck logos. If you currently have a food truck, how did you come up with your logo? Was it a slog to perfection or an instant moment of inspiration? Share your logo legend in the comments!