By Deroy Peraza, Partner at Hyperakt
Few elements in branding generate as much attention, or anxiety, as the logo. In fact, “logo” and “brand” are often used interchangeably, though they are far from the same.
A logo is not your brand. It is the most concise, recognizable visual shorthand for your brand. Think of it like a memory box. It distills and holds your brand associations for safekeeping, collecting meaning over time.
What you associate with a great logo is the brand behind it, not just the mark itself.
Illustration by Merit Myers
Your Logo Starts With Your Name
Need convincing? Take a famous wordmark—say, Google or Sony—and replace the name with a different word in the exact same typeface. Does it still feel powerful? Probably not. What we recognize isn’t just the logo, it’s the reputation behind the name.
Don’t underestimate the power of your name. Unless you’re Apple or Nike, who have invested in and earned the ability to omit their name in their logo, your name is the most important element in your logo. A strong typographic treatment that reflects your tone might be all you need. In fact, many of the most effective logos in the world rely on typography alone. Done right, type-only logos exude clarity and quiet confidence.
Strategy First
A great logo is like a perfect chess move. It is deceptively simple, but deeply strategic. It’s where clarity, craft, and intention converge. And it starts with aligning your logo with your brand strategy.
A logo must also be consistent with your branding goals, which means understanding the visual language of your sector and deciding how you want to relate to it. Do you want to blend in to build trust? Stand out and lead your field? Or disrupt and change it entirely? Do you want it to celebrate your heritage and convey continuity, or do you want it to signal a completely new direction?
There’s no universally correct answer. It depends on your history, your context, your mission, and your audiences.
Balancing Form and Function
Beyond strategy, and moving into execution, Paul Rand’s framework for great logos still serves as a north star. A successful logo must be:
- Distinctive: Instantly recognizable and differentiated from competitors.
- Visible: Clear and legible at any size, in any medium.
- Adaptable: Functional across a wide range of applications (digital, print, large format, or monochrome).
- Memorable: Sticky in people’s minds, leaving a lasting impression.
- Universal: Relevant across cultures, languages, and audiences.
- Timeless: Not tied to trends, but grounded in enduring design principles.
- Simple: Clarity over complexity. Simplicity isn’t the absence of detail—it’s the result of a strong, focused idea.
Like poems use rhyme, logos use repetition of shapes, angles, and curves to create rhythm and flow. This economy of form reduces cognitive load, and supports many of the characteristics in Rand’s framework. Ultimately, great logos are built with finesse, not flash. The craft lies in subtlety, in the quiet confidence of a well-considered curve, a perfect proportion, a typeface that doesn’t try too hard.
There are some tried and true tests to gauge whether a logo’s formal qualities perform well:
- It should read and communicate just as well in black and white as it does in color.
- Kids should be able to draw it easily.
- It should work as well on a website as on a billboard.
- It should be viable to embroider on a hat and look good on a t-shirt.
Achieving all these things requires broad brand and design awareness, experience, strategic thinking, and restraint. It’s no wonder great logo designers are among the hardest people to find in the design field.
Common Mistakes
Logos don’t need to try to explain everything you do and who you do it for. That’s the job of your entire brand. The logo just needs to signal the essence of your brand at a glance. It’s like a key that unlocks curiosity and invites people in to learn more.
Most logo missteps trace back to one root cause: a lack of brand clarity. Designing a logo without a strategic foundation leads to generic outcomes. Without a clear sense of identity, the logo ends up trying to do too much, or nothing at all.
Some of the most common pitfalls:
- Logos that try to say too much with overly long names or elaborate symbols. Great logos are intentional in choosing what to omit and communicate more through restraint than complexity. Overdesigned logos signal insecurity in brand strategy.
- Common nonprofit clichés like hands, hearts, globes, doves, or abstract people. These are overused tropes, so it’s challenging to use them in original ways. Not impossible, but hard.
- Overly literal pictorial logos that limit future growth. Imagine if the Apple logo included a computer or the Nike logo included a sneaker.
- Unfortunate associations are sometimes created accidentally when forms in logos recall distracting and unrelated ideas.
- Giving up well-regarded brand equity by straying too far from the characteristics of well-established existing logos, risking confusing your audience.
- Reliance on AI-generated logos. While tools like image generators have gotten better (they can actually spell now), their outputs are still predictable, cliché, limited, and lacking in craftsmanship. Results resemble the kind of generic crowdsourced logos that have flooded the internet for years.
Logo Last
At Hyperakt, we save designing and presenting logos for last. Not because it’s unimportant, but because it carries the most weight. It’s the distilled expression of every strategic and creative decision we’ve made together.
Designing a logo before defining your brand is like painting a detail before stepping back to see the whole canvas.
Logos aren’t stand-alone assets, they’re the tip of a much larger iceberg. Most people don’t look at logos through the eyes of designers, they look at them as artifacts of communication. It’s hard to judge a logo’s effectiveness without seeing how it fits into the brand’s broader voice and visual design.
That’s why we begin with strategy. We define the voice, tone, values, and personality. We explore typography, color, layout, and messaging. Only then do we turn to the logo, with a clear idea of what it needs to express, and the confidence to express it with precision.
The logo is the key that unlocks understanding of your brand.
Ironically, creating the logo last makes the process feel easier because by that point, we’ve already made the big decisions. The logo doesn’t need to say everything. It just needs to say the right thing clearly and confidently.
A logo isn’t the brand. But done well, it becomes the most immediate, most lasting symbol of who you are. It’s not the beginning of your brand story—it’s the key that helps people remember what matters most.
If your organization is thinking about a rebrand and considering redesigning your logo, get in touch and we'd be happy to advise.
