The logo that took ten minutes

A client once told me her logo took ten minutes to design. She said it like a compliment.

She'd hired a guy off a freelance site. Paid him 20 dollars. He'd opened the brief, opened Illustrator, typed her business name in a font he liked, dropped a small icon next to it, changed the colour twice, and sent her three versions. Ten minutes, start to finish. She picked one that evening. He sent the files. Done.

"Ten minutes, can you believe it," she said, laughing. "And it's fine. It's a logo. It works."

I asked her what her business did. She told me. I asked her who her customers were. She told me. I asked her what she wanted them to feel when they saw her brand for the first time. She paused for a long time.

"I don't know," she said. "I never really thought about it."

That was the ten minutes. Not the design. The thinking she skipped.

The logo was fine, technically. Clean enough. Legible. It would print on a business card without falling apart. But it could have belonged to a dental clinic, or a crypto startup, or a yoga studio in Lisbon. It said nothing about her, because nobody had asked her anything worth answering.

Six months later she messaged me. The business was doing well, but she felt invisible. Every time she posted something, it looked like everyone else's. People scrolled past her without stopping. She didn't know why. She asked if I could "fix the logo."

I told her the logo wasn't the problem. The logo was a symptom. The problem was that nobody, including her, knew what her brand was actually supposed to mean.

We started over. Not with sketches, with questions. Who is this for? What do they care about? What do you want to be the first thing they think of when your name comes up. What do you want them to never think? It took us almost 1-2 hours before either of us drew a single line.

When we finally did sit down to design, the final mark came together in 1 hour. If I'm being honest, by then we knew exactly what it had to be. The shape, the weight, the spacing, the colour. None of it was a guess anymore.

That's the part nobody on the freelance sites is selling.

She still uses the new one. She doesn't laugh about how long it took anymore.