Good logos are boring up close. You remember them not because they are beautiful but because you have seen them often enough in the same form. This is about getting to one that survives the next five years.
A logo is not artwork but a working tool. A good one is recognisable at thumbnail size, works in a single colour, and needs no explanation.
What you must receive at the end
This is the list worth settling before you order. A half-finished logo project usually fails not because the mark is ugly but because three months later there is no file you can hand a printer.
A vector source file. SVG, AI or EPS. Everything else derives from it, and it is what a printer asks for. If you only get a PNG, you did not get a logo — you got a picture of one.
Variants. Horizontal, vertical and mark-only versions, for light and dark grounds. Most surfaces are not the shape of the primary version: a profile picture is square, a header is wide, a stamp is round.
A single-colour version. If the mark only works as a gradient, it does not work on embroidery, engraving or black-and-white print.
A minimum size. One number: below how many millimetres it must not be used. Without it somebody will drop it into a 12-pixel slot, where it is just a smudge.
A usage guide. No fifty-page manual needed. One page will do: how much clear space it needs, which grounds it works on, and what must not be done to it.
What does it cost?
The spread is enormous, and it comes mostly not from the quality of the drawing but from how much work surrounds it.
A few thousand forints buys a template from a generator. Sometimes that is enough for a hobby project, but somebody else uses the same mark, and the source file often is not yours.
A freelance logo designer typically works from tens to a few hundred thousand forints, depending on experience and depth. That usually covers a few directions and one round of revisions.
At an agency the logo is rarely a standalone item: it is part of an identity that also covers colour, typography, image style and tone. That costs more, but you are not left working out afterwards which typeface goes with it.
Three mistakes that leave most logos unusable
1. Too much detail. What is gorgeous on A4 is a grey dot on a browser tab. Shrink every sketch to 16 pixels before you decide.
2. The mark explains the trade. A tooth for a dentist, a loaf for a bakery, a calculator for an accountant. There are ten thousand of each, and the very thing meant to identify you makes you indistinguishable. The best logos usually do not say what the company does — the name does.
3. A fashionable solution. Whatever is on trend this year — a gradient, a geometric grid, one particular typeface — will next year be recognised precisely by its date. A logo lives five years; a trend lives eighteen months.
How to choose between the sketches
Not by which you like. By which you can still see on your invoices in five years. Three questions help:
Is it recognisable at one centimetre? Does it work in a single colour? Can you describe what it shows in one sentence over the phone? If all three are yes, the designer probably got it right.
And one practical note: do not put the decision to a vote. Logos become average by committee — everyone trims the one thing that bothers them, and in the end nothing is left.
A logo is not good because you like it. It is good because it works in three hundred small places where you will not be there to explain it.
Where to next
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