The questions to ask before you draw anything

Most logo work goes wrong before any drawing

A client says “we need a logo, make it modern, make it pop”. If you start drawing from that, you will produce three concepts, they will reject all three, and neither of you will be able to say why. The failure is not in the drawing.

There is a list of questions, and asking them takes twenty minutes.

The surfaces list, which is the most useful question

Where will this appear, specifically? Name every place you can think of.

Write down the answers. The list decides most of the design.

• A shop board 3 m wide → the mark must hold at distance and probably be made in vinyl or acrylic letters, so no fine detail, no gradients.
• Embroidered shirt pockets → one to three thread colours, nothing below 1.2 mm.
• A rubber stamp → pure black, no tints, nothing thin.
• An app icon → square, works at 16 px, no wordmark.
• A vehicle → deforms over curves, gets dirty, seen at speed.
• Invoices from a thermal printer → black only, low resolution.
• A sponsor board with thirty other logos → must survive being 40 mm wide next to a competitor’s.

Clients who say “I don’t know, everywhere” have just told you to design for all of these, which means flat, simple and one-colour-capable. That is a design decision derived from a question, not from taste.

The rest of the list

About the organisation

• What do you actually do, in one sentence a stranger would understand?
• Who is the customer? Where do they see you first?
• What is the full legal name, and what do people actually call you? These differ more often than you would think, and the mark should usually carry what people say.
• Is the name fixed? If they are still arguing about it, stop until they have decided.

About the current situation

• Is there an existing mark? Who owns the artwork, and is the source file available?
• Which parts of it must survive: a colour, a symbol, a name? Sometimes there is an equity you must not throw away.
• Is this a refresh or a replacement? These are different jobs at different prices.

About constraints

• Is the colour count constrained by how you print? (A shop printing its own bags in one colour has a real constraint.)
• Any language other than English? A bilingual lockup is a different design problem and must be planned, not retrofitted.
• Is there a sector convention you want or want to avoid: green for organic, a caduceus for medical, a tick for sportswear?

About the process

• Who signs this off? Get the name. Work approved by a manager and then shown to the owner’s family is a project with two clients.
• How many revision rounds are we agreeing on?
• When do you need it, and what is the first thing it will be printed on?

The competitor look

Do this before sketching, not after. Collect ten competitors’ marks, print them at 30 mm on one sheet in black and white, and look.

You will learn two things immediately. First, the conventions of the sector, which you can follow deliberately or break deliberately, and either is a decision. Second, what is already taken: if six of the ten use a swoosh, the seventh swoosh is invisible.

Keep the sheet. It is also the most persuasive thing you can put in front of a client who wants a swoosh.

Turning “make it pop” into something workable

When you get an unusable direction, do not argue with it. Convert it into a choice.

“When you say modern, do you mean something like this, or like this?”, and show two real examples.

Adjectives are unreliable because they mean different things to different people. Examples are not. Ask the client to bring three marks they admire from any sector and three they dislike, and to say one sentence about each. Ten minutes of that is worth an hour of adjectives, and it gives you something to point at later when a decision is questioned.

Write it down and send it back

One page: what they do, where it appears, constraints, who approves, how many rounds, deadline. Send it and ask them to confirm.

This is the single cheapest piece of professional practice in the trade. It catches the misunderstandings while they cost nothing, and when somebody later says “I never said one colour”, the page says otherwise.