/ Blog / / Blog /Deep down, I believe that what makes a logo good is being confident in it and sticking by it.
I’m not talking about what makes it a well-designed logo. The job of a logo is to be recognizable and the longer it is given the chance to last, I think the stronger it is.
That’s not to say that logos can’t or shouldn’t change. Sometimes a new logo can build off of what once was.
But all too often, people inside a company blame their logo for the company’s failure, jumping from one logo to the next, hoping it will solve the product’s problems.
Everyone has been sold this idea that good logos come from some kind of “brand exercise” that requires weeks of ideation, with hundreds of sketches posted up on the wall in some kind of war room at an office. We see these photos when a company announces their new logo.
That process is absurd to me. It’s not how I work. I’ve never arrived at something good that way. Every time I sketch a dozen or more ideas, the first one is almost always my favorite. Everything that comes after is a dilution or deviation of that idea.
But that process appeals to people who want to put on a show. Maybe agencies want to be able to justify charging tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of dollars. Maybe companies want to pay that amount of money to prove that they did it the “right” way.
I believe this method works only when the decision-maker doesn’t have a clear idea of what they want. If they see options, they can react to them. I understand that.
That process can be useful for people who don’t know what they want. So when I see a logo wall, I see the indecision.
If a decision-maker instead spends just a little time writing up more clearly what they want to see as their logo, they could save a lot of time (and a ton of money) by trusting that first idea developed from that brief is the right one.
And then stick by it.