Services / Logo design
A logo cannot mean anything on the day it is drawn.
A mark does not carry meaning, it accumulates it. What you can control on day one is whether it is capable of holding meaning later: whether it survives being small, being one colour, being embroidered, and being seen a thousand times without becoming tiring.
The canon
The principles this rests on, named.
Each with who established it, so the claim can be checked rather than taken on our word.
A logo derives meaning from the quality of the thing it symbolises, not the other way around.
Paul Rand, Design, Form and Chaos (1993)
It kills the entire category of brief that asks a mark to communicate trust, innovation and warmth. It cannot. It can only become the sign for whatever the company turns out to be.
Appropriate, distinctive, simple, memorable. In that order.
Sagi Haviv, Chermayeff & Geismar & Haviv
Distinctiveness is worth more than beauty. A pretty mark that resembles four competitors has failed at the only job that has a measurable cost.
The reduction test: it must hold at 16 pixels and as a single flat colour.
Standard identity practice; formalised in most brand manuals
A favicon is the most-seen instance of most marks. If the detail dies there, the detail was decoration.
Optical overshoot: round forms must exceed the cap line to appear the same height as flat ones.
Type design convention, documented in Bringhurst's Elements of Typographic Style
Mathematical alignment looks wrong. A circle aligned exactly to a square's height reads as smaller. Every mark with a curve needs this correction and most amateur marks skip it.
Trapped white space is a defect, not a texture.
Classical logo critique; see also Gestalt figure/ground
Small enclosed counters fill in at small sizes and in print. They are the most common reason a mark that looked fine on screen prints as a blob.
The squint test and the silhouette test.
Studio practice, traceable to Saul Bass's poster work
Blur the mark until detail is gone. If the remaining shape is not recognisable, the mark is relying on detail it will rarely be seen at.
Method
What actually happens, in order.
We do not start from adjectives. We look for a thing that already exists in the client's world with rules of its own, because a mark borrowed from something real arrives with meaning attached rather than needing meaning assigned.
Not four variations on one idea. Four genuinely different arguments, each drawn far enough to be judged fairly, because a comparison between one finished idea and three sketches is not a comparison.
Each rejection is written down with a reason specific enough to argue with. 'It already belongs to every logistics firm' is a reason. 'I don't like it' is not.
The surviving direction is rebuilt from construction, not traced. Radii, tangents and spacing all become numbers, so the mark can be redrawn identically by anyone, forever.
Overshoot, sidebearing, and weight compensation between horizontals and verticals. This is the step that separates a drawn mark from a placed shape.
16px favicon, one colour, reversed out, embroidered, stamped, at a distance, upside down, and beside four competitors' marks.
What goes wrong
The failure modes nobody advertises.
A hidden meaning that requires explanation. If you have to tell someone the arrow in the negative space means progress, the mark is doing nothing for the people who never get told.
Anything that dates itself to a specific eighteen months. Gradient meshes, the 2015 flat rebrand, the 2021 variable-width wordmark. Trend is borrowed distinctiveness and it gets repossessed.
Fine in the presentation deck, impossible on a bottle cap, a tax invoice, or a garment tag. Applications are not an afterthought; they are the actual environment.
No construction, no clear space rule, no minimum size. Within a year it exists in six slightly different versions and nobody knows which is correct.
What we refuse
A studio is defined as much by this list.
- We do not run logo contests or present twenty options. Twenty options means no point of view.
- We do not use stock icon libraries as a starting point.
- We do not deliver a mark without its construction geometry and reduction tests.
- We do not design a mark before the name is trademark-checked.
Measured, not felt
How anyone can tell whether it worked.
Reads correctly at 16px, in one colour, and reversed.
Recognisable in silhouette with all detail removed.
Distinct from the four nearest competitors when placed beside them.
Reproducible from the documented construction by someone who has never seen the original file.