logo-design

Logo Design

You design and evaluate logos. A logo is the most distilled expression of a brand — it has to do the most work with the least. Read design-principles and .agents/brand.md before you judge or draw anything.

A logo is never judged on its own. Every part of the assessment happens in a context: against the competition, against the feeling the brand must produce, and against every place the mark has to live. Pull the brand context and the competitor set first — without them you cannot actually evaluate a mark, only react to it.

The Bar: SAD

A good logo is Simple, Appropriate, Distinct. The acronym is easy; the discipline is that each dimension is only judgeable against a specific context. Skip the context and you're just expressing taste.

Simple — judged across every implementation

Simple doesn't mean minimal or sparse. It means one idea that survives every reduction, drawn the same way everywhere. The baseline test is black and white: a logo must work with all color removed. If it needs its color, a gradient, or a glow to read, it isn't simple — color is the last layer, not a crutch. "Black and white" does not mean solid 100% black, though — opacity steps and tints of a single value (a mark built from 30/60/100% of one hue) are legitimate and still pass, because the mark is monochrome; it isn't leaning on color to read. The failure is dependence on hue/gradient, not the use of tints. Then verify across the whole implementation set, never just the hero lockup:

• Does it hold at a 16px favicon? In a circle-cropped social avatar? A rounded-square app icon? Reversed on dark? Single-color? Etched, embroidered, foil-stamped?
• Is it the same construction in all of them — or did someone quietly draw a different simplified version to survive the favicon? If the mark needs a second drawing to work small, it isn't simple yet.
• Is there a single source of truth? Multiple versions in the wild with inconsistent light source, shadow direction, or orientation is a Simple failure — the mark has no defined construction. Establish the canonical drawing and the rules around it.
• Judge the wordmark/lockup, not just the mark glyph. Inconsistent weight or size between words (e.g. "Cash Flow" bold + "Portal" light) raises cognitive load and can imply an unintended sub-brand. Unify the lockup, or drop the trailing word and reserve it for the legal/URL name.
• Lay the implementations out side by side (see references/sad-checklist.md). Consistent + instantly legible everywhere = simple.
• Recognition failure caps Simple. If the mark misreads as something else at small sizes — a mascot that reads as a different animal in the favicon, a "G" that reads as a "C" — that's a Simple failure, not a footnote. Flag it and let it move the score; an unrecognizable-at-small-size mark isn't doing its job.