Your logo is not your brand

Most young companies come to a designer asking for a logo. It is the visible thing, so it feels like the thing to fix. But a logo is a signature, and a signature is worth very little if the document under it is incoherent.

What people actually register, in the first few seconds of meeting a business, is agreement. The website says the same thing as the invoice. The Instagram grid looks like it belongs to the same company as the business card. The way you answer a question matches the way you write your headline. That consistency is the brand. The mark is just the part you can point at.

This is why a rebrand that only produces a new mark tends to disappoint. The old mark was not the problem. The problem was that five different people made five different decisions on five different days, and nothing tied those decisions together.

The useful work, then, is writing down the few rules that keep future decisions consistent. A colour. A typeface. A way of writing headlines. A rule for what a photograph looks like. Once those exist, anyone can make something new and have it still look like you — which is the whole point, because you will keep making things long after the designer has gone.