DesignMantic Review – Is This Logo Maker Any Good? [2024]

The One-Stop Shop

DesignMantic is more than a logo maker. It offers many other design services as well. You can design your logo (and several other things) in English, German, Spanish, Italian, Turkish, French, Chinese, Russian, and Danish, and the user interface is available in all of those languages, too.

The question now is whether you can make the logo you need with the software provided. To find the answer, I decided to test DesignMantic as part of a bigger project – my quest to find the best new logo for Website Planet. It was a rocky road, and you can read all about my journey here.

But for now – is DesignMantic the platform for you, or would you be better off with one of the competing online logo makers, like Wix Logo Maker or Tailor Brands? Watch the video or keep reading to find out.

It’s Functional, but Not Very Exciting

DesignMantic is not a bad bit of software, but it’s about as exciting as something that’s not very exciting. You see that? I couldn’t even come up with an analogy, simile, or metaphor. As I write this, I’m listening to an instrumental cover of some pop song just to get me through this sentence.

Now let’s be clear, a logo maker does not have to be exciting, but it does, at a bare minimum, have to deliver a decent logo. That is something I think DesignMantic can do, with a little work. There are some nice features. Just don’t expect to wake up every morning excited to play with logos some more.

Like DesignEvo and BrandCrowd, DesignMantic’s logo maker is a library-based logo maker with no Artificial Intelligence (AI). You type in your company name, choose your industry from a dropdown list, and start picking logos. You can filter them by keyword, too.

The number of logo options will depend – as it always does with a library-based logo maker – on what you search for. Searching for “internet” will get you a lot more options than “blog,” and that’s just how it goes.

The actual icons are… varied. There are an estimated 6432 logo icons. I found 402 pages of logos, with 16 logos each. I didn’t see any icons repeated, though I didn’t exactly look at every page. Some are good, some are pretty bad, and most are somewhere in between.  A lot of them are dated, though; they have that distinct clipart feel that is at once vaguely repulsive and strangely nostalgic to anyone born between ‘85 and ‘95.

Ah, the late ‘80s to early ‘90s. It was the best of times. It was the cringiest of times. I’d be okay with the hair coming back (except the mullets), but the fashion can stay in the past, thank you.

Thankfully, you can edit the icons with a significant degree of freedom, and you can pick different colors for specific elements of each icon. Even some of the mediocre icons can be improved drastically with careful use of color, and you can pick any color you want. No gradients, though.

The typographical options are limited, but decent enough. What I especially like is that you can add as many text “objects” as you want, and make them as long as you want. Sure, there are some practical limits on that, but there’s a lot of flexibility there.

All elements can be dragged and dropped into any layout you like, and there are tools for fine-tuning object size, position, and rotation on a pixel-by-pixel level. You can replace the main logo icon at any time, too.

When you’re all done and you’ve purchased your logo, you can download it in JPG, PNG, and PDF formats. I normally list the PDF format as “for printing,” but it should be noted that if you import a PDF from DesignMantic into an app like Adobe Illustrator, Affinity Designer, or Inkscape (which is free), you can edit the logo as much as you want, and export it in an infinitely scalable format, like SVG or EPS, if you like.

Your Logo Can Be Almost as Custom as You Want to Make It

In addition to everything else I’ve said about the logo editor, I should mention that you can also add basic shapes, shields, swooshes, and other simple icons to your logo to customize it, or build your logo more or less from scratch. It doesn’t have as many of these basic shapes and icons as DesignEvo, for example, but the makers of DesignMantic evidently put thought into allowing you to make your logo truly your own.

There Are “Makers” for All Sorts of Graphics

It should definitely be noted that DesignMantic does more than logos. There’s a business card designer, a letterhead designer, T-shirt designer, a flyer designer, wedding invitation designer… well, there are a lot of designer apps.

There Is a Website Builder

Beyond simple graphics, there’s what looks to be a template-based website builder. Obviously, this tool is integrated with the logo maker and all the other services. Like other websites, DesignMantic wants to be your one and only, your one-stop shop for your brand. DesignMantic might even hold your hand if you ask nicely.

There Are Printing Services and Custom Design Services

If you’ve had it with “Doing It Yourself,” you can get other people to do it for you, asking them to print business cards, clothing, wedding invitations, or marketing materials for you. And if you really, really want the human interaction, you can hire a designer to make something custom for you, such as a custom logo, stationery, a brochure, or a website.

My Experience with DesignMantic

Honestly, I learned pretty much everything I needed to know about this service in the 20 or so minutes it took me to make the video about it. I typed in a few words, looked through the icons, picked one that I liked, and fiddled around with it for a few minutes. There’s not much more to it.

The logo in question
Using the software is easy and quick, and I’ve got no real complaints about how this logo maker is built. The only real problem is that you’re going to find a lot of not-so-great logo templates amongst the decent ones, and you may not have too many good ones to choose from. You know, depending on what you’re searching for.

It’s a simple experience that is just about good enough, but after trying out loads of other logo design services, that’s not good enough for me.

This Is Probably the Best Part of the Service

Whatever DesignMantic’s logo maker’s faults are (try saying that five times fast), I can say that it is, at least, fairly intuitive. Oh, if you’ve never used a graphics editor before, you’ll need to do some clicking around to find out what all the buttons do, but there’s a handy Undo button, so feel free to experiment. The lack of complex features is a nice thing when you’re trying to learn how everything works.

The only thing in the UI that’s not self-explanatory (or marked with a helpful tooltip) is this little button in the screenshot below. It opens up the options for adjusting the size and positioning more precisely. It’s only available when you have an object on the canvas selected, so if you don’t see it, just click on something.

And hey, you don’t have to marry the service. Like just about every other logo maker out there, DesignMantic takes an “it’s free to make your logo, but you have to pay to download it” approach. If other logo editors aren’t doing it for you, there’s no harm in giving it a quick try.

You Can Save Your Logos Before You Buy Them

And here it is, the all-important feature that I mention every time it’s present. Because it matters just that much. The feature is here, it works, and there’s not a lot more to say about it.

The Icon Library Is Easy to Search

There are no advanced filters. All you do is type in a keyword and hope you spelled it right, because this search won’t fix your spelling like Google. But it will get you relevant logos. Well, unless you type in keywords like “animal” or “armadillo.” Then you won’t get anything.

There’s Lots of Cross-Service Integration

Well, if you are looking for that one-stop shop experience, DesignMantic has you covered. I can’t deny the convenience of being able to just pull existing logo designs into, say, a business card or brochure design without having to upload images from your PC or anything.

Be Prepared to Say “No” A Lot

DesignMantic’s support is decent enough, like the pop music you actually remember from your childhood. It’s more NSYNC quality than Backstreet Boys quality, but hey… at least NSYNC had Justin Timberlake. It’s functional and pretty quick, so long as you ask questions within their scheduled operating hours.

If you want to find your own answers, there’s no real knowledge base, but there is a pretty detailed and mostly helpful FAQ. If you want your help from a real, live person, you can contact them via live chat, phone support, and the ticket system. Just… don’t hope for detailed explanations in answer to your questions.

Live Chat

The live chat is all over the main website, and looks like this:

I forgot to screenshot my original question, and I asked my question outside of the operating hours. Not to worry, the support team will respond via email when that happens. I basically asked if there was a way to see your invoice online. Nope, you can only get one via email:

Phone

I called the support number to ask about the custom design services. Specifically, I wanted to know if I could hire a custom designer to make changes to a logo I made in the logo maker app.

Well, I reached a human being very quickly, and the short answer is, Yes, you can do that.

I have to say, the representative I talked to wasn’t all that good about just… answering my questions. Instead of explaining the next step, they proceeded to attempt to upsell me on services immediately. While these services would have solved my problem, I would have preferred to have a simple answer before getting into the sales pitch.

“Yes” and “No” are such simple words. Useful, too. If only the rep had listened when I kept saying, “No.”

Also, this is where I found out that to get the copyright to a logo you make in the app, you basically have to let one of DesignMantic’s designers alter it, as far as I can tell. Again, they didn’t actually stop to explain the process to me so much as sell services.

Tickets

The ticket system is relatively standard. Open your ticket, and wait for the reply via email, as its ticket and email systems are integrated, too. I asked for more information on its copyright rules, as the FAQ basically says you can’t get the copyright, and well, my phone call happened before I got the response to this ticket. The response uh… did not clarify things.

You can pay for any chosen package using PayPal, Visa, MasterCard, Discover, and American Express. Please note that a free version of your logo isn’t available for download, and there are no more affordable plans designed for non-commercial use.

If you edit your logo after you purchase it, you have to purchase the “new design.” Make sure you’ve got the logo you want before you click Buy.

Now you can technically get a refund, but only if there’s a technical problem with your logo, e.g., the software screwed up, and every time you download your logo, the text is broken; DesignMantic reserves the right to try to fix your logo first, though. This might mean trying to fix the issues with the app or having an in-house designer fix your logo manually.

Usage Rights

Now the FAQ page says that you don’t get the copyright, and you can’t file any trademarks. On the subject of copyrights, it specifically says, “All designs in our sample galleries are proprietary, and their ownership remains with DesignMantic.”

However, with other services, you usually get the copyright for a design after you’ve modified it substantially (depending on your definition of “substantially”). I’m no lawyer, and I’m not entirely sure how that all works.

As you can see above, I asked for clarification on this, and they said you can get the copyright if you pay them to customize the logo. I think. It wasn’t as clear as I’d like.