A logo is a mark, not a picture. Its job is not to explain but to be distinguishable. So the measure of a good logo is not whether it is liked at first glance, but whether it stays recognisable everywhere for years.
Draw it in one colour first
A logo drawn in colour often falls apart when printed in black and white on an invoice or stitched onto fabric in a single colour. The right order is the reverse. Build the solid black version first, and add colour only once it stands on its own.
Small sizes are the real test
The place a logo appears most is not a shopfront sign, it is a sixteen pixel square in a browser tab and an app icon on a phone. At that scale thin lines vanish, inner details merge and any text becomes unreadable.
- Shrink it to sixteen pixels on screen and check whether the shape is still distinguishable
- Look at it from eight metres away, usually only the outer silhouette remains
- Thin lines fill in when printed, so no stroke should fall below five percent of the mark's width
- The wordmark beside the symbol should be a separate file, since tight spaces take the symbol alone
Do not follow the trend
Every era has a logo fashion. Gradients, long shadows, script lettering, extreme simplification. A fashionable form dates itself within five years and makes the brand look old. A logo is not a campaign, it is a ten year investment.
What gets delivered is not one file
Delivering a logo means the vector source, the single colour and reversed variants, the minimum size and the clear space rule. Hand over only an image file and the brand is stuck at the first real need, and someone redraws the logo from scratch.
Without those rules in writing, within six months the logo gets stretched, recoloured and given a shadow. A brand book exists to prevent exactly that.
