What I've Learned From Designing 500 Logos

Volume teaches you things theory doesn't

I've designed a lot of logos. Marks for restaurants and law firms and tech startups and nonprofits and bands and coffee shops and one very memorable taxidermy studio. Across those projects, certain patterns have become clear — things that seemed like individual project quirks the first few times I encountered them, and that I eventually recognized as structural features of the problem.

These are the things I know now that I didn't know when I started.

Simple is almost always right, and almost always harder to achieve

Every designer knows that simplicity is a virtue in logo design. What took me years of practice to understand is that genuine simplicity — the simplicity of the Chanel interlocked C's, the Apple logo, the CBS eye — is not the starting point of the design process. It's the destination.

Simplicity is achieved through the relentless elimination of everything that doesn't need to be there. First you get to something that works, then you get to something that works simply. The second step is harder and takes longer.

The client's first instinct is usually wrong and usually informative

When clients describe what they want visually, their initial descriptions — "like Nike but for law firms" or "clean and modern but also warm" — are almost never useful as literal direction. But they're enormously informative as data about how the client perceives their own brand and what they hope it will communicate.

I've learned to listen past the literal content of initial visual descriptions toward what they reveal about the client's aspirations and anxieties. Those aspirations and anxieties are what the logo needs to address.

You cannot force a concept

Some mark concepts arrive quickly — in the first hour of sketching, the solution appears, and everything after that is refinement. Other marks resist for days. I've learned to trust the resistance. When a mark isn't coming, it's usually because I haven't understood the problem deeply enough yet. The solution to creative resistance is more research and better questions, not more iterations of the same approach.

The mark that works in the presentation doesn't always work in the world

I've had marks that killed in presentations and then looked wrong on the first application mock-up I did after approval. And I've had marks that I was uncertain about in presentation that turned out to be exactly right once they were out in the world.

The presentation is a controlled environment. The real test is application. I mock up every mark extensively before presenting it, precisely because I've been surprised too many times.

It's always worth the extra hour

In logo work, there's almost always an extra hour of refinement available — an optical correction that needs attention, a spacing relationship that could be tightened, a stroke terminal that could be more considered. That extra hour is always worth taking.

Permanent marks deserve permanent effort.