DesignEvo Logo Maker Review: FREE, But What’s the Catch?

DesignEvo Is All About Focus and Flexibility

What do DesignEvo, banknotes, and gunpowder have in common? We can thank the Chinese for all three… and now I want Kung Pao chicken. Why do I do these things to myself? Getting hungry at 4 a.m. is a terrible thing.

This logo maker is available in English, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese, and Chinese, and you can design logos in all of these languages, too. And that’s it, really. DesignEvo offers logos and only logos.

DesignEvo was launched not so long ago by a company called PearlMountain, which also has a general-purpose online graphic design app (FotoJet) and an online video editor (FlexClip).

Although the company has a bit of a history with online graphics tools, DesignEvo is the new kid on the block. Does this logo maker have what it takes to compete with its more established competition, like Wix Logo Maker or Tailor Brands?

Since I’m on a mission to see which logo design platform can give me the best new logo for Website Planet, I decided to give DesignEvo a try. Click here to read all about our logo contest and find out who won – and why.

1

Does DesignEvo Offer a Good Logo Editor? Well, I Love It…

And you should love it, too! At the very least, you should be polite to the logo editor, and keep your mind open about a potential friendship. You can never have enough friends… is what more social people keep telling me.

I should mention that this logo maker has no AI (Artificial Intelligence). Yep, it’s another logo maker with a template library, like BrandCrowd. So there’s no step-by-step editor or wizard to speak of.

You browse for a logo design, choose the one you want, type in your company name (can you believe this step is actually optional?), and then you get down to the real work. That is, you click around for way longer than DesignEvo’s developers probably intended until you’re happy with your logo. The process is simple but effective.

You can customize the icon, including colors for individual shapes, and you can move, rotate, and resize different parts of some more complex icons. You can add as much text as you want and as many shapes as you want.

The text editing is more advanced than I’ve seen in many other logo editors. You can pick your own custom colors, create custom gradients, add background shapes, change the background color, and pretty much anything else you can imagine. There is no character limit for text objects.

And that’s why I love it. If you put the time in, you can build something truly unique. Oh, and you get unlimited edits for all time. This is the first service of this kind that I’ve come across which offers unlimited editing.

Your logo will come in a wide variety of formats if you’re willing to pay for them (more on that below). Those formats include JPG, PNG, PNG with a transparent background, SVG (infinitely scalable), and PDF (infinitely scalable).

DesignEvo Has over 10,000 Logo Designs

Here’s where we talk about the library of logo templates. Like LogoMaker before it, DesignEvo has over 10,000 designs. However, DesignEvo has the edge in that a vast number of its logos are just so much better.

Now, let’s be clear – not all of them are better. Some of DesignEvo’s logos have that dated 90’s feel, and some even look downright amateurish. But the good ones are quite good, and there are more than a few of them. Look around enough, and I bet you’ll find something that suits you just fine.

You Can Use Any Logo You Make for Free*

DesignEvo comes with an actual, real free plan, as opposed to those “free previews,” and all those fake free plans, where the logo file you get isn’t really usable. Of course, this free plan does have its limits: you get a JPG file and a PNG file, and that’s it. They’re a relatively small size (300px by 300px), and if you want to use it on your website, you have to promote DesignEvo a bit.

Specifically, the company asks that you leave a link on your website where people will see it, and share a link to its service on your social media network of choice. All in all, I feel like this is a fair trade.

You Can Build a Logo from Scratch

There is literally a Start from Scratch button. Aside from the pre-designed logos, it has a massive library of shapes, icons, badge templates, and more that you can play around with. What’s more, you can add as many elements as you like, and so create fairly complex designs, if you put in the time.

Now, this isn’t a full graphics editing suite, so you won’t get any of the more advanced vector drawing tools. But with a little patience, you could absolutely make something cool, and almost entirely unique.

It Has Desktop and Mobile Apps

Are you sick of opening your browser to make logos? Is that something you’ve ever even thought about, like, at all? Well regardless, DesignEvo has both desktop and mobile apps so you can skip the whole browser thing if you want to. Do keep in mind that for desktops, there’s only a Mac client at the moment. The Windows app is “coming soon.”

The apps apparently work offline for editing logos, so that’s useful.

My Experience with DesignEvo

Did I mention that I love the editor? My experience was simple enough: I picked logos I liked, narrowed them down to one, and customized it until I was happy. Check the video if you want to watch me be inordinately happy to see a function that should be standard in the logo maker space, but isn’t. (Video coming soon!)

Really, I feel the need to reiterate how much I like this logo editor. Mind you, its flexibility means that it’s a little bit more complicated than other logo editors, but I genuinely feel that the UI is self-explanatory enough that this shouldn’t be a problem.

DesignEvo’s focus on flexibility is its primary strength. And if the premade logo library doesn’t have exactly what you want, you might very well be able to make what you want. The tradeoff, of course, is that it takes longer, and it helps if you have an eye for design.

The presence of some fairly bad premade logos is the reason why this section isn’t getting a five-star rating. Otherwise, I was quite happy with my experience with this product.

Oh, and here’s the final logo:

How Easy Is It to Use DesignEvo? Just Dive In, You’ll Be Fine

On the one hand, DesignEvo doesn’t have as many features as some of the other logo editing services out there. Okay, that’s a bit like saying the Sahara desert doesn’t have as many trees as say… Canada. But then, that means there aren’t that many ways to get lost, aside from all the sandstorms.

On the other hand, even with fewer features, DesignEvo is easy-to-understand, intuitive, and still very useful. Things are self-explanatory, there are pop-up tooltips, and there’s minimal risk of heatstroke.

You Can Save Your Projects Before You Buy

DesignEvo advertises this as a “cloud storage” feature, but the actual feature is well-implemented, so I’ll forgive how it’s marketed. Remember, kids: the cloud is just someone else’s computer. Keep in mind that your logos don’t seem to auto-save, though. Remember to click the Save button just to be safe.

The Logo Browser Is Easy to Use

We maintain the “so simple it just works” theme in the actual logo browser, providing you with categories and keywords. By checking your spelling, you can easily narrow down your logo options to quite specific themes.

DesignEvo has Good Tutorials

While DesignEvo is very simple to use, it also has some very basic tutorials to get you started. The writing is clear, concise, and offers a very good foundation of knowledge. If you want to get into more detailed customization of your logo, and you’re not used to working with graphics programs, I highly recommend giving these a look.

DesignEvo’s Support Keeps Things Simple

The Support section of this website is comprised of three things:

1. A FAQ page
2. A short tutorial section
3. An email contact form

I’ve already mentioned how much I like the tutorials, so I won’t go on about that.

The FAQ page is short and sweet, but very informative for the most part. It answered enough of my questions that I initially had trouble thinking of questions to ask the support team, so I ended up asking mostly about plans for future features. It’s also one of the most clearly-written FAQs I’ve ever seen. My compliments to the copywriter. (Just imagine that I’m tipping my hat to them in respect… or something. I almost never wear hats.)

DesignEvo Email Support

In the first email, I asked if there were any plans for a feature that would let you know when new logo designs are added. The support team replied, “We’ll consider it.”

Then I asked if there were any plans for AI, or at least some randomization and abstract shapes. They said, “We’ll consider it.” I know it was bold of me to assume that they liked my earlier suggestion, but hey, sometimes I just like to think positively.

Finally, I had some real questions. I inquired about the difference between the Pricing and FAQ pages regarding copyright, and also about the offline functionality of the desktop and mobile apps. They got back to me in approximately 12 hours, confirming that you do get the copyright regardless of the plan you choose. Sneaky sneaky.

As for the apps, they do appear to work offline, including for “downloading logos,” which I assume means that logos get stored locally on your device. Otherwise, that just wouldn’t work at all.

How Affordable is DesignEvo?

I’d say the pricing plans are more than fair. If the aforementioned Free plan isn’t doing it for you, the Basic plan offers higher-resolution JPG and PNG files, the unlimited editing I mentioned earlier, and lifetime support. The Plus plan offers the infinitely scalable SVG and PDF formats, and it will include the font files for every typeface you use in your logo.

All of this can be paid for via most major credit cards.

There’s a seven-day money-back guarantee, no questions asked. When you combine all of that with its unlimited edits policy, few competitors can actually beat these prices for the value offered.

Usage Rights

Sure! As you might have observed in the Support section, there is conflicting information regarding the copyright for your logo. The FAQ states that if you have customized (emphasizing this point) and paid for your logo, you have full ownership. However, according to the Pricing page, the complete copyright is granted only with the Plus plan.

According to the support team, you get the full copyright, every time. So the Pricing page basically has some sneaky marketing, something I am not a fan of at all. Oh well, there goes the perfect score.