Logo and Brand Identity: Process, Deliverables, Mistakes

Discovery is not really about who the business thinks it is; it is about how the business actually looks to its customer. Competitor logos in the sector, the target audience's age and expectations, and which surfaces the brand will mostly live on, digital or physical, all get settled here.

At concept stage, more than one direction gets produced, usually deliberately different from each other so the decision-maker has a real choice. Presenting three near-identical variations is not much more than showing the same concept in different colours.

Liking a design is not, on its own, enough of a test. Readability at small size, whether it still reads clearly in black and white, and whether it holds up on different backgrounds, dark, light, coloured, are the three technical checks that matter.

If a workwear manufacturer's logo needs to appear small on an invoice header and large on the side of a lorry, both extremes should be tested at selection stage; a logo that only looks good on screen can run into real problems on a printed surface.

If a spa chain's logo needs to sit small on a massage oil label and large on an entrance sign, both scales should be printed out and placed side by side at the selection meeting; a detail that looks perfect on screen can disappear entirely in small print.

Delivering a logo is not a single file. Vector formats, scalable, no loss of quality, are needed for print and large-format use; raster formats, PNG, JPG, cover digital use; a transparent-background version is its own separate deliverable.

• A vector file, the scalable, editable source file
• A transparent-background PNG, at several resolutions
• Black-and-white and single-colour versions
• Horizontal, vertical and icon-only, mark alone, variants
• A short brand guideline covering colour codes and typography

A brand guideline is a written document setting out the clear space around the logo, colour combinations to avoid, and which variant to use in which situation. Without it, a logo drifts into different shapes over time, in different people's hands.

If a spa chain's individual branches manage their own social media accounts separately, without a guideline each branch can end up tweaking the logo to its own taste; a few years on, the same brand ends up with five different looks.

The most frequent mistake is having no single decision-maker; when several people give separate opinions, the designer gets caught between conflicting requests and the process drags on. The second common mistake is planning only for digital use and never testing a print scenario.

The third is keeping only the final image on file with no editable source file; if a small change is needed to the logo a year later and there is no source file, the project effectively starts over from scratch.

Not every logo problem calls for a brand identity project from scratch. If a workwear manufacturer's logo has started to look dated but the company's name, sector and audience have not changed, the fix is usually not a full redesign, it is simplifying the existing form and updating the typography.

A full redesign is worth doing when the business's name, service area or audience has fundamentally changed, or when the current logo has come to look too close to a business in an unrelated sector. A spa chain refreshing its colour palette without changing its name keeps its place in customers' memory while still looking current.

The decision comes down to one question: does the current logo still describe the business accurately but just look tired, or does the business now describe something different? The first calls for an update, the second for a redesign.

A business that has just launched or is growing fast can end up treating every problem as a logo problem, when the real issue is inconsistency across where the logo appears. If a production facility has three different logo versions circulating across its invoices, website and lorries, what is needed is not a new logo, it is pulling the existing one into a single file set.

Similarly, a drop in sales can make a logo change look like a fix, but a logo rarely decides a customer's purchase on its own. In that situation the priority is usually elsewhere, pricing, service quality, how fast the business responds; none of these gets replaced by a new logo.

The decision comes down to this: is the problem a logo that looks different everywhere it appears, or is something else getting in the way of the customer's decision? The first is fixed by tidying up files, the second needs looking for somewhere other than the logo.