A logo is not a brand

Sooner or later most business owners arrive at the same thought: something ought to be done about the branding. And almost every time, that thought turns into one specific errand: let us get a new logo made.

It is a reasonable instinct and we are not going to make fun of it. The logo is the only part of a brand that is a single object. You can order one, you get an invoice for it, it is finished in a week or three, and then it exists. Everything else is vague, endless and hard to explain to anybody. The logo is also the part that is easiest to feel slightly embarrassed about: you look at it every day, you know exactly where it came from, and you remember that somebody drew it in half an hour back in 2011.

Six months later the new logo is fine. It looks good, it exists in every file format anyone could ask for, it is on the business cards and in the corner of the website. And nothing else has changed at all. The same number of enquiries arrive, just as vague as before, from the same sort of people. That happens because the logo was never the part that was missing.

We sell logo design. And we are saying here that the logo is not where to start.

What a brand actually is

There are hundreds of definitions of a brand and most of them were written for other marketers. Ours fits into one sentence and can be checked against reality: your brand is what somebody is able to say about you after they have already left.

Not what is on your website. Not what is framed on your wall. What stays in a person's head when they walk out of your door and describe you to somebody else the following week. If they say "they got it done in a week and the price was exactly what we agreed", that is your brand. If they say "I cannot remember what they do", that is also your brand, just an empty one.

Everything else serves that one sentence. The logo included, and last of all.

Five parts, and the mark comes last

A brand has parts, and those parts decide each other. They are listed here in the order in which they actually decide things, not the order in which they usually get bought.

1. What you sell, and who you sell it to. The dullest decision and the most important one.
2. The sentence that says it. The one you say on the phone when somebody asks what your company does.
3. How you sound in writing. Quotes, emails, the text on your site, the reminder about an unpaid invoice.
4. How you look. Colour, type, photography.
5. The mark. The logo.

The first two decide the other three

If you sell roofs to people who own their houses, you are a different company from the one that sells roofs to apartment associations. The crew can be the same and so can the material. But a different person signs it off, that person is worried about different things, and their questions arrive in a different order. Everything further down this list depends on which of those two your customer is.

The second part is the sentence. Not a motto and not a slogan: the sentence you actually say out loud. Most owners can deliver it perfectly calmly on the phone, and almost none of them has ever written it down. Written down, it turns official and starts to sound like "we offer comprehensive solutions in the construction sector". If you catch yourself writing a sentence like that, read it aloud. If you would not say it on the phone, it does not belong on the site either.

How you sound in writing

Your customers read this part word by word and only glance at your logo, and almost nobody ever commissions it.

Your quote is text. The first line of your email is text. The reminder you send to a customer who has not paid is text as well, and it is one of the most memorable things you will ever put in front of them. If the quote is warm and the website reads like a government form, that is not a style. That is two companies operating under one name.

The check is easy: put your most recent quote and the first paragraph of your website side by side. Were those two written by the same person?

Why the mark comes last

The logo is the only part that means nothing on its own. An apple tells you nothing about computers, about price or about reliability. It means what it means today because it has spent decades standing on top of the four parts above it.

Your mark works the same way, on a smaller scale and over a shorter stretch of time. It collects meaning from whatever stands behind it, and it produces none by itself. A new logo for a company nobody can say anything specific about is a smart new sign on the door of an empty shop.

Three phone calls that tell you more than a strategy document

Before you write to a single designer, run this test. It takes a day and costs nothing.

Call three customers who have actually bought from you. Ask them one thing: how would you describe what we do, if a friend asked you? Do not offer them options, do not help them along, and do not correct the answer. Write down exactly what comes back, including when it is wrong.

Those three answers are your brand. Not the sentence on your website.

• If the three answers are essentially the same sentence, you already have a brand. The rest of the work is making that sentence visible, and that is usually cheap work.
• If the three answers describe three different companies, the problem is not the design. You are selling three different things to three different people and nobody can hold all of it in their head. No designer can fix that, because it sits above them.
• If somebody says something you did not want to hear, such as "they are the cheap ones" or "they were the ones who answered first", that is the most useful piece of information you will get all year. You do have a brand. It is just not the one you ordered.

Then hold those three answers up against the first paragraph of your own website. In our experience the two texts describe different companies surprisingly often.

Colour and type, practically

This part usually turns into an argument about taste. It is more useful to argue about legibility, because legibility can be checked.

Two typefaces are enough. One for headings, one for body text. A third is never needed. A page with three typefaces does not look richer, it looks like a page three people worked on without speaking to each other.

There is one rule about colour that outweighs all the others put together: a colour that does not read on a white background will not read on an invoice, on a form, or on a screen in the sun. A pale yellow logo looks superb on a dark photograph and disappears completely on a white sheet of A4. And white is where your customer meets your colour most often: on the quote, on the invoice, in the email, in the header of the contract.

The check takes five minutes. Print your logo and one of your quotes in black and white. If something vanishes or turns into grey mush, that is not the printer's fault.

We have written about contrast separately in the accessibility article, so only this much here: when your text colour and your background colour sit too close together, that is not a style choice, it is a share of your customers who simply do not read your price list.

And whether you personally like the colour settles nothing. We like yellow. We would not put it on anybody's price list.

Photography makes the biggest difference

If you have one sum of money set aside for branding and your logo is not broken, spend it on photography.

Photographs are the only visual part you cannot get out of a template. Anybody can have the typeface and the colour within a couple of hours. Your workshop, your machines, your people and your finished work belong to you alone. A site with real photographs of a real place does not look like a website. It looks like that business.

The honest part: we use stock photography ourselves. When a company sells software or advice and there is nothing to photograph beyond somebody's laptop, a well-chosen bought photograph beats a grey box. But we can nearly always tell which is which. So can your customer. They will not put it into words, they simply do not quite believe the page.

If the budget is small, photograph four things: yourself, your people, your place and one finished job. A single morning covers it. How to make those look decent without a photographer, and what to do about the photos already on your site, is in the article about website photos.

Consistency is worth more than quality

This part costs nothing, and it is the one almost nobody gets round to.

An average colour, two ordinary typefaces and one way of writing, used everywhere without exception, will beat a more beautiful system applied in three different ways. Memory does not store beauty. Memory stores repetition.

The website is usually fine, because somebody thought about it. Consistency breaks in the tedious places:

• The quote and invoice templates. Same typeface, same colour, same logo in the same corner.
• Email signatures. One shared version, rather than a personal variation each.
• The profile picture on Facebook and Instagram. The same image, cropped the same way, in both.
• The side of the van, the sign on the door, the work clothes.
• The way you write your company's name. Capitals, abbreviation, OÜ before or after the name. Pick one form and stay with it.

That last point looks trivial and is not. If your name appears in three places in three different forms, it is hard for a person to put together, and hard for a machine too.

We see this almost every time a new client sends us their materials: the logo arrives in five different files, three of them are different colours, and nobody knows which one is currently the right one. That is not a design problem. That is a decision nobody ever made.

When a logo really is the next step

Now for the other side of it, because sometimes the logo genuinely is the thing that needs doing. Four situations where we say so ourselves:

• It is not legible small. Thin lettering and three separate elements look good on A4 and turn into a grey smudge on a phone screen.
• It does not exist as a proper file. There is one JPG that somebody once emailed to somebody else, the edges are fuzzy, and nobody has the original any more.
• It has a phone number or a year inside it. Both of those age, and both force you to redo the logo at exactly the moment you have other things to do.
• It talks about work you no longer do. If there is a computer mouse in the mark and you sell consulting today, the mark is older than the company.

One test covers all four at once. Put the logo at two sizes: as small as an app icon, and as large as the door of a van. If it is readable at both, it is fine and you can cross that line off your list. If it smudges together when small or falls apart into pieces when large, then you have a genuine reason for a new mark.

What has to come with it

This is where money disappears most quietly, because the mistake only surfaces two years later, when you need the logo on the side of a van and all you have is one small PNG.

Ask for three things alongside the design. The source files rather than a PNG: a vector file that scales up and whose colours can be changed. The colour values written down as numbers, separately for screen and for print. The names of the typefaces, together with where they come from and whether using them costs anything.

The fourth question is ownership: who owns the finished work, and what you are allowed to do with it. We are not going to argue that one through again here, because we have a separate article on ownership. It also covers what to ask before you sign anything.

One sentence is worth repeating, though. "Do I get the source files" is a free question before the work and an expensive one afterwards.

Where to start

Almost everything in this article costs nothing. Three phone calls to customers. One decision about how your name gets written. One morning spent on photographs. Two typefaces and one colour that will actually be used.

The part we send an invoice for comes after all of that. When the sentence is settled and the photographs exist, designing a logo is straightforward, honest work, because the designer has something to build on. When it is not, the designer has far less to build on, and what usually comes back is a good-looking mark that does not yet say anything.

If the mark already exists and the next step is putting it somewhere, business cards are usually the first place consistency breaks. Design work more broadly, and our ready-made website designs, are there when you want to look at them, and not before.

But if you are reading this and thinking that your logo is actually rather good, it is just that nobody knows anything about you, then this article has done its job. Do not buy a logo. Call three customers.