A logo has one job: be recognised.

A good logo isn't the prettiest option in the deck. It's the one you'd recognise from across a room, at a glance, a year later.

Four things decide that. It has to be distinctive, different enough from your category that no one confuses you for a competitor. It has to be simple, recognisable in the half-second most people actually give it. It has to be durable, still right in ten years, not tied to a trend that dates in two. And it has to be appropriate, a bank and a children's brand shouldn't feel the same, and a logo that ignores the business is decoration.

Distinctive beats decorative. A mark that's merely beautiful competes with every other beautiful mark. A mark that's ownably yours competes with nothing.

Two tests tell you most of what you need to know. Does it still read at 16 pixels, a browser tab, an app icon, a WhatsApp avatar? And does it hold up blown up on a building, a billboard, the side of a truck?

A logo lives at both extremes and everywhere between. Design only for the pitch deck and it fails in the wild. We design for the range from the start.

There's no single right form. There's a right form for your name, your category and where you'll appear.

Your name, set in distinctive type. Best when the name is short, ownable and worth building recognition around. Simple, direct, hard to get wrong, and hard to get remarkable, which is where the craft lives.

A standalone mark with no words. Powerful once it's established, because it becomes instant shorthand, but it takes reach and time to earn recognition on its own. Right for brands with the budget and patience to build it.

A symbol and a wordmark together, usable as a lockup or split apart as they earn recognition. The most flexible choice for most businesses, and the one we recommend when you're not sure, it grows with you instead of locking you in.

We don't start with software. We start with the brief, what the business is, who it's for, and what the mark has to do. A logo designed without that is a guess with good taste.

We get clear on the business, the audience and the category before we sketch. What are we competing against visually? What must this mark never look like? The constraints are where the good ideas come from.

We develop a small set of distinct directions, different ideas, not the same idea in different colours. Each is a real proposal for how the brand should be recognised. We bring you the strongest, with the reasoning, not a wall of options to average out.

We take the chosen direction and get it right at the millimetre level, proportion, spacing, weight, the details that separate a professional mark from a competent one. Then we test it small, large, one-colour, reversed, in motion.

You receive the final logo in every format and variant you'll need, full colour, single colour, reversed, horizontal and compact lockups, favicon, plus the basic rules for using it well.

Here's the part most agencies won't say plainly.

A logo alone is enough when you're testing an idea, moving fast, and not yet ready to invest in a full brand. It gives you a credible mark to launch with. Nothing wrong with that.

But a logo is only the signature. The moment you're building a website, decks, packaging and ads, the logo runs out of instructions, and without a system around it, your brand drifts into a dozen inconsistent versions. If that's where you're headed, a full brand identity is the better spend, and a logo bought in isolation often gets redone within a year.

We'll tell you which you actually need. Sometimes it's just the logo. We'd rather you spend right than spend twice.