Writing
A logo is not a brand. What comes before it.
A new logo settles less than people expect. What makes a business recognisable are the decisions taken before anyone draws anything.
Published Revised One Other
So what is the brand?
It is the set of decisions you repeat. How you speak, what you decline, what always looks the same and what is allowed to change.
The logo is one of those decisions, and not the first one. It is the signature at the end of a letter that had to be written first.
Why did the new logo change nothing?
Because a mark only earns meaning through repetition. On its own it is a shape. After a year in the same place, in the same tone, with the same work behind it, it becomes shorthand for all of that.
When everything else keeps shifting month to month, the mark has nothing to hold on to. Redrawing it a second time is usually the symptom, not the cure.
Before commissioning another one, look at what has stayed the same for a year. If the honest answer is nothing, that is the piece of work.
What gets decided before the drawing starts?
Not much, but in writing. Written down, these stop being re-decided on every job, and that is where the time comes back.
This is where I start on an identity: read what is already there before proposing any shape at all.
- One sentence saying what you do, with no adjectives in it.
- The work you take and the work you turn away.
- How you speak: length of sentences, words you never use.
- What someone should recognise from across a room: a colour, a typeface, or the work itself.
Do you need a brand manual?
Only if more than one person applies it. For someone working alone, two pages carrying the rules above get read. Forty pages do not.
The test is the same everywhere: write down what someone else has to repeat. What only you decide can stay in your head, where it is faster.
Send me an email and I will tell you what I would write down first.