Here are a few other hard truths about designing a logo, whether you’re starting from scratch or updating your brand.

Most logo projects start the same way. Someone points to a competitor’s logo and says, “We want something like that, but make it ours.” Then, the questions about time and cost follow.

We’re always patient with clients. What really tests us is the idea that a logo is something you can just order, like a coffee. It’s not. A logo is only the visible part of something much bigger. If what’s underneath isn’t real, no clever design can fix it.

So before we get into colours, spacing, or fancy details, let’s talk about what a logo really is, what it isn’t, and what most people don’t tell you before you pay for one.

A logo is not your brand. It’s time to stop pretending it is.

This is the most expensive myth in the industry. Your brand is really how people feel about you, shaped by your product, your service, a random email from your team, your CEO’s podcast answers, and yes, your visual identity. The logo is just one part of that system. It’s like a signature on a letter, not the letter itself.

When clients confuse the logo with the brand, two things usually happen. First, the project starts to focus only on looks, like “make it feel premium,” instead of real questions like “who do we serve, what do we promise, why should anyone care?” Second, after launch, people expect the logo to do too much—explain the company, show values, or signal the industry. A logo can’t do all that. It’s just a visual cue, the mask, not the brand itself.

The good news is that once you accept this, the design process improves significantly because you stop expecting the logo to do everything.I belong to a social group whose members include business owners who count their success based on how many exits they’ve had and how many figures and zeros have accumulated as a result of their exits. While from a purely business perspective, this is valid, I rarely hear them talk about the lives they have affected, the mortgages they have helped their employees pay down, the careers they have inspired. Each and every person that has been part of Initiate (past and present) has brought a unique characteristic and memory that I hold close to me. While ensuring that the financial numbers are indeed positive, it’s these figures that I count dearly as ones that truly matter.

The fundamentals nobody skips, but most do poorly

Client research and audience work are the foundation, but they’re often rushed. Usually, people create a few demographic personas and call it research. That’s not real research; it’s just a stock photo with a story.

Real research looks at what your audience thinks and the context they’re in. What do they believe about their industry? What do they not trust? Where will they see your logo—on a small browser tab, a trade-show banner, or on a shirt at an event? A logo’s job changes a lot depending on where it shows up. If you don’t know the context, you can’t design for it.

Competitive research is just as important, but it’s often done poorly. Most agencies play it safe and just try not to copy anyone. We take a different approach. Put every competitor’s logo on a wall or moodboard, and you’ll quickly see the patterns: cybersecurity companies use shields, fintechs use gradients, and B2B SaaS companies use blue sans-serif fonts. Blending in makes you invisible. If you want people to remember you, you need to stand out.

Colour matters. But truly owning a colour is much harder than most people think.

Colour is the boldest choice in a visual identity, and it’s where founders and designers often disagree the most. Usually, both sides are wrong about why.

The usual advice that blue means trust, red means urgency, and green means growth is mostly just a myth. Real research is messy, culture-dependent, and often doesn’t hold up in real situations. Blue doesn’t always mean trust; it means whatever your competitors have taught people to expect. If everyone uses blue, it just becomes generic.

Here’s the real secret: truly owning a colour is rare and expensive. Tiffany owns blue. UPS owns brown. Cadbury fought for purple. For everyone else, owning a colour comes from being consistent, not just bold. Pick a palette that works in tough situations, like single-colour print, low-contrast screens, behind plastic, or on a bright phone screen, and use it the same way for years. That’s how a colour becomes yours.

Things almost no one mentions in the kickoff

Here are a few perspectives we believe deserve the spotlight:

• Design for the worst-case scenario, not just the perfect presentation. Logos are often shown to clients on clean slides, but in real life, they end up as tiny icons, embossed on USB sticks, faxed (yes, still), or printed on delivery trucks. If your logo only looks good in the perfect setting, it doesn’t work.
  
• Checking trademarks and online availability is part of design, not just a legal step. A great idea that can’t be registered, clashes with something online, or whose .com is already taken by a Belgian dental clinic is an idea you can’t use. We check these things early and often. Designers who skip this later cause problems for clients.
  
• Watch out for the moodboard trap. Pinterest and Dribbble have made many designs look the same. If your process is just “send us references you like,” your logo will end up looking like everyone else’s. We use moodboards to see what a client likes, not to create ideas. Real originality comes from your company’s real story, a unique detail, a local touch, or something the founder cares about. That’s what makes a logo feel truly yours.
  
• Being simple, on second look, is a strength. The Nike swoosh was mocked. The Apple logo is a piece of fruit. The best logos look obvious in hindsight, and obvious is much harder to achieve than clever. Aim for a mark a child could draw from memory and an adult won’t get tired of in fifteen years. (Note: This is much easier said than done)

And then there’s the AI trap.

And then there’s the AI trap. Generative tools are very good at producing logos that are competent, polished, and completely interchangeable. That isn’t a flaw in the tools; it’s the point of them. An AI model is a probability engine trained on every mark that came before. By definition, it returns the average of what it has seen. Average is the opposite of memorable. What it cannot give you is a point of view, a piece of lived context, or a choice that even surprises the designer. Brands made this way feel hollow because they are: there’s no human thought underneath, no argument being made, no editorial restraint choosing one thing over another. Use AI as a sketchpad if it helps you think. But if your final mark is something a model produced and a human approved, you don’t have a brand. You have a placeholder that looks like one. Choose to be distinctive, or accept that your audience will group you with the next ten companies that took the same shortcut.

Brand and creative are different jobs.

If you look at everything above, one idea connects it all: brand and creative are different disciplines, and most costly mistakes in logo work happen when people treat them as the same thing. The brand is what the company stands for, who it serves, what it promises, and the position it has earned in someone’s mind. The creative is how that becomes visible, through the mark, the typography, the colour, and the way the whole identity presents itself to the world. Both are essential. Neither does the other’s job, and neither can fix the other if it’s done badly.

When clients mix up the two, the kickoff turns into a Pinterest contest, the strategy work gets skipped because “we kind of already know who we are,” and the mark gets judged on whether it’s pretty instead of whether it’s right. When designers mix them up, they spend too much time on craft for a brand they never took time to understand, and deliver work that’s beautiful but lacks strategy. Both mistakes lead to the same result: a logo that needs to be replaced sooner than it should have been, often at significant cost.

So here’s the summary. A logo is not your brand; it’s the visible signature on a much larger body of work. The basics matter, but only when they’re real: research that is psychographic rather than just demographic, competitive analysis that looks for category clichés to break instead of copy, colour decisions made as a system instead of a single swatch, and the discipline to avoid moodboards and AI shortcuts that make everything look the same. None of that is creative work. It’s brand work. The creative comes after, builds on it, and gets simpler when the foundation is honest.

If you’re starting a new logo or a refresh, do the brand work first, using plain language, even if it feels uncomfortable. Let the creative work respond to that. A mark that comes from this process is usually small, durable, distinctive, and quieter than the client expected, but it tends to last. A mark that skips this step is loud, fragile, and already on its way to the next refresh. Decide what your company is before you decide what it should look like. The rest is just drawing.