Why Your Logo Isn’t the Problem

A client once came back for the fourth round of logo revisions on a project that should have wrapped in round two. Every version got the same note: “it’s just not quite right yet.” The mark itself was fine. What wasn’t fine was that nobody on the client’s side had agreed on what the company actually stood for, so every design decision was being asked to carry weight it was never built for.

This happens more often than most designers admit. A logo is small and cheap to keep tweaking, so it becomes the place where unresolved strategy questions get dumped. “Make it feel more premium” is often code for “we haven’t decided if we’re competing on price or on quality.” No amount of kerning fixes that.

The fix isn’t a better logo — it’s a five-minute conversation before the first sketch: who is this for, what do we want them to believe, and what are we not going to be. Once that’s written down in one sentence, the logo revisions usually stop being about the logo at all.