Logo Redesigns: What to Keep and What to Lose

Logo redesigns are politically charged in a way new logo projects aren't. There's existing equity — colors, shapes, forms the audience already associates with the brand. Changing too much destroys that equity. Changing too little fails to solve the underlying problems. The challenge is surgical: know what's worth keeping and what needs to go.

Start With an Equity Audit

Before I touch any design tools, I research the existing mark extensively. I look at how it's been applied over time, what contexts it lives in, how audiences describe it. I'm looking for the elements that have become genuinely associated with the brand in the public mind.

Typically, the things with high equity are: the primary color (if the brand has owned it consistently), the general form or category of mark (lettermark, icon, wordmark), and sometimes a specific geometric element that's been present for a long time.

These are the things I'm conservative about changing. Everything else is negotiable.

Common Problems That Prompt Redesigns

The problems that bring clients to a redesign project usually fall into a few categories: the mark doesn't work at digital scales (too complex for apps and favicons), the aesthetic has dated badly, the business has changed and the identity no longer reflects it, or the mark has technical problems (poor legibility, bad at small sizes, limited colorway flexibility).

Knowing which problem I'm solving keeps me from over-designing. If the only problem is digital scalability, I simplify the mark and adjust proportions. I don't also redesign the wordmark and change the color because those weren't broken.

Evolutionary vs. Revolutionary Redesigns

Most brand redesigns should be evolutionary — closer to refinement than reinvention. The company still exists, the audience still exists, the business context still exists. A revolutionary redesign that abandons equity for novelty is usually a mistake.

Revolutionary redesigns make sense in specific situations: a brand recovering from a scandal, a company that has fundamentally changed its business model, a merger that creates a genuinely new entity. In those cases, breaking from the past is the message.

The Rollout Is Part of the Design

A logo redesign lives or dies by how it's introduced. A gradual transition confuses audiences. A big launch moment, with clear communication about what changed and why, helps audiences update their mental model.

I advise clients to plan the communication of the redesign as part of the project, not as an afterthought. The announcement is an opportunity to tell the brand's story. Treating it as a routine update wastes that opportunity.