Complete practical guide
The logo design book about the fourteenth concept
37 chapters and 68 worksheets on designing identities - why a ten-hour quote became forty-one hours, why an elegant mark read as a blob on an apron, and why saying a name 'seemed fine' cost a designer a client.
Look inside — read the first chapter freeOne payment, USD. Yours permanently — no subscription.
What this guide is
Tam quoted a cafe identity at about ten hours. It took forty-one. Nine concepts in the first presentation, because Tam did not know what the client would like. Twelve more in the second, assembled from the bits the client had liked. All twenty-one shown to the family over dinner, where a fourteenth mark - drawn late one night as a throwaway - was chosen because somebody's brother-in-law preferred it. Then twenty-six rounds of small tweaks, none long individually, all arriving on separate evenings. Nobody behaved badly. An untrained person had simply been handed twenty-one options and no reason to prefer any of them, which turns a professional decision into a matter of taste - and taste has no stopping point. Then, in month six, the chosen mark met an embroidery machine. Fine linework, delicate gaps, a small detail inside a letter: elegant at eight centimetres on a screen, and at four centimetres on an apron the gaps filled and it read as a dark blob. The cafe paid somebody else to redraw it and told people the designer had made a logo that did not work. And in month nine a client's mark turned out to be very close to a registered mark in the same category - nobody had checked, and Tam, trying to be helpful, had said early on that the name 'seemed fine'. A sentence that meant nothing, was heard as reassurance, and was remembered as advice after the signage had been paid for.
What you get out of it
Specifics, not promises.
- Why presenting three options guarantees the project will not close
- The direction gate that took one designer from fourteen concepts to three
- Concepts per approved mark - the number this trade turns on, and nobody keeps
- The six free tests that would have saved the mark on the apron
- Why the reduced mark is designed rather than shrunk
- What to say when a client asks whether a name is available - and what never to say
- The five-page guideline document that gets used, against the forty-page one that gets filed
- How to name a file folder so a client stops emailing you for the logo
- Why unused concepts are neither the client's nor free stock for you
- 148 AI prompts - and a large share exist to stop you delivering something whose origin you cannot account for
Ideal for
People designing logos and brand identities for small businesses, organisations, creators and agencies as a side hustle - first identities, refreshes and redraws, guideline documents, asset extensions and retained brand support. Particularly three groups: somebody whose projects take three or four times what they quoted; somebody who has never counted how many marks they drew; and anybody who has presented nine concepts because they were not sure what the client wanted.
- Anybody designing logos and identities for small businesses, organisations or agencies
- Somebody whose projects take three or four times what they quoted
- Somebody who has never counted how many marks they drew
- Anybody who has presented nine concepts because they were not sure what the client wanted
What's inside
Format
- Digital download, delivered instantly after payment
- Formatted for letter paper — read on screen or print it
- Yours permanently, re-downloadable from your library any time
- Licensed for use in your own business
By the end you can
A reader finishes with a category chosen on decision structure rather than on interest; a twelve-question discovery set producing checkable criteria a mark can be judged against by somebody with no design training; a brief written back and signed, carrying the criteria, the reproduction requirements, the named decider, the concept and round counts, and the clearance paragraph; two or three territories presented as positions rather than styles, with one approved in writing before any mark is drawn; a single recommendation presented with rationale and reproduction evidence rather than a menu; a stated reproduction floor expressed as a proportion of mark height, and six free tests - solid black, twenty-four pixels, one colour, reversed, thickened, printed small - run on every candidate before it is presented, with failures discarded rather than shown; a full variant set including a reduced mark that is designed rather than scaled and a reversed variant that is optically adjusted; a file package named by task with a plain-text read-me, so a stranger can choose correctly; a five-page guideline document plus a one-page version that actually circulates; ownership terms stating transfer on payment, unused concepts retained, working files excluded and the client's own font-licence obligation; an element provenance log recorded as the work is made; and concepts per approved mark counted from the first project, which costs one tally mark and is the only leading indicator the trade offers.
A complete working system for designing logos and brand identities - built on four rules covering the fact that the mark will be embroidered, engraved, cut in vinyl, stamped in one colour and shrunk to a favicon while the presentation is the one place it will never appear, the fact that the client is buying a decision they can stop making rather than a picture so that presenting options converts a professional judgement into a taste problem with no stopping point, the fact that ownership transfers on payment while trademark availability is a legal question the designer must raise and must never answer, and the fact that nothing in the work itself says stop so the project ends only because the process ends it - with revenue per design hour as the economic unit, concepts drawn per approved mark as the leading indicator, and four gates the trade cannot be run profitably or safely without: the brief written back and signed with checkable criteria, the clearance paragraph sent before any drawing, a direction approved in writing before any mark exists, and six reproduction tests run on every candidate before it is presented.
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