So you’ve started a company, congratulations! You want to give people a great first impression, so you start designing your logo. You find that you’re not quite able to get it right, so you hire a designer to design your logo for you. You figure that you’ve got some ideas of what you want it to look like, so it should go pretty quickly. If you’ve met with a designer (or design team) that is familiar with branding, they’ll start asking you all sorts of questions that you may not have answers to…

What gives? You just need a logo. You didn’t need to define your entire company, right? Well, not quite…

A logo is a flag, a signature, an escutcheon.
A logo doesn’t sell, it identifies.
A logo derives its meaning from the quality of the thing it symbolizes, not the other way around.
A logo is less important than the product it signifies; what it means is more important than what it looks like.

Paul Rand, Designer

Your logo doesn’t sell your services or products, your company does that. The people and processes in your company do that. The people and processes in your company all work according to your company’s mission, vision, principles, and values. Your company has a personality. Your company has processes and standards. All of these things make up your brand. Your BRAND is how your customers and potential customers interact with you. You can read more about branding in a previous blog post. Your brand is what customers think of when they think of your company.

Your logo is what people see when they think of or interact with your brand. It’s what sticks in their mind when they’ve interacted with your company. Your logo should be a reflection of your company’s brand. This means that your logo should reflect your company’s personality. From experience, it’s very difficult to design for a company that hasn’t taken the time to identify and document their personality, purpose, standards, mission, vision, principles, and values.

Design Predicament

Here’s a quick and common scenario…

Let’s say that a business owner decides that their company’s name is “Orange Widgets”, and they sell tools. Their tools are high quality and have orange handles. They start to design a logo on their own by designing with the fruit, the orange. They can’t quite get it right, so they go to a designer, who can design a great orange fruit for their logo. They love it. They make signs, business cards, and build a website. The problem is that everybody associates the fruit with widgets, and the public thinks that they make widgets for oranges, based purely on their logo. Because of this confusion, they don’t get the business that they had planned for.

So what do they do? They go back to the drawing board, and start designing a new logo. This is expensive and time-consuming. The leadership and employees at Orange Widgets are upset too, because they don’t have the business that they had projected. All of this confusion is caused by starting their “branding” by designing their logo before documenting their company’s personality, purpose, standards, mission, vision, principles, and values.

Had this scenario started with understanding the company’s personality, purpose, standards, mission, vision, principles, and values – not only would the design process have been more cohesive, but the entire company would have had these things documented for them. Not only would a logo more reflective of the company been designed, but when a visual identity would have been properly designed with typography, color themes, and imagery that are more aligned with the company. This would make future designs easier to complete. Customers would be less confused, the entire visual identity would be in alignment, everybody in the company would be aware of the company’s brand, and the company would be much better represented.

Another Common Predicament

Another common scenario is one in which you decide you want to hire a designer to design a logo without doing the “branding” work first. The designer designs a logo, only for you to find that the logo doesn’t match with your “vision”. What that really means is that as you looked at the logo, you discovered pieces and parts of your actual brand, because you found things that didn’t quite match what you felt like your company was about.

This causes many redesigns and iterations. Sometimes multiple designers or design studios. It becomes less a matter of finding the “right designer” but just a matter of you discovering your brand as designers are trying to find what you really want and need.

What Do You Do?

Don’t start with your logo. Start with your branding first by going through the Brand Design Sprint process. Understand your company’s brand, and make sure that everybody is on board before you start designing your visual identity. Once you’ve identified and documented your brand, then begin the work of designing your visual identity, which includes your logo.

Starting with your organization’s brand first, and then getting to visual identity helps to ensure alignment.

How Do You Start?

You can start by working with somebody that understands branding and visual design. I can help you to identify and understand your company’s brand and then design your visual identity around that. Taking the time up front to identify, understand, and document your company’s brand will save a lot of work and time in the long run.