What to send your logo designer

Here is an uncomfortable pattern: a logo gets designed, everyone approves it, and six months later it turns out not to work. It’s illegible as an app icon. It disappears on a white background. Nobody can find the editable file. The printer asks for something you don’t have.

Almost none of that is the designer’s fault. A designer builds what the brief describes. If the brief never mentioned that the logo would need to live in a 16-pixel browser tab, no designer on earth would have designed for one.

So this is the list. It’s written from the client side, because that’s where these decisions actually get made.

The question nobody asks

Where will this logo actually appear?

Write the list out. Be boring and literal:

• browser tab (16 × 16 pixels)
• phone home screen icon
• WhatsApp / Instagram / LinkedIn profile picture — these get cropped to a circle
• website header
• email signature
• business card, letterhead
• a flyer, a brochure
• embroidered on a polo shirt
• laser-engraved on a metal pen or bottle
• a signboard
• gold foil on a card

That list decides almost everything about the design. And the two ends of it pull in opposite directions.

A logo that’s wide and detailed looks magnificent on a signboard. In a 16-pixel square it becomes a smear. A logo simple enough to survive 16 pixels can look plain at signboard size. A designer who knows both ends are needed will design a family — a full lockup and a simplified icon — rather than one mark and hope.

If you skip this question, you will get one beautiful mark that works in about half the places you need it, and you’ll be paying someone to fix it later.

The rest of the brief

Keep it short. Specific beats long.

One sentence on what the business does. Not the mission statement. What you sell, to whom.

Who buys from you. A logo aimed at corporate procurement looks different from one aimed at teenagers. Say which.

Three competitors, with a line on each. Not to copy — so the designer can make you not look like them. “This one feels cheap”, “this one looks like a bank” is genuinely useful.

Anything that must be kept. An existing colour, a shape customers recognise, the exact spelling of your name. Say it up front, or you’ll be asking for it back after two rounds.

How your name is written. One word or two? Any capitals in the middle? This sounds trivial and it is not — a logotype that splits the name differently to your domain and your social handles creates a small inconsistency that follows you everywhere.

A few examples you like — and why. The why is the whole value. “I like this one” tells a designer nothing. “I like that it’s simple enough to read on a van” tells them everything. Three or four examples with a reason each beats a folder of forty.

Then stop. Don’t design it in the brief. Describing the constraints and letting a designer solve them is the entire reason you hired one.

The deliverables to specify before work starts

This is where money gets saved. Ask for these in writing at the start, not at the end.

A minimum size for every version

One number per version: this logo stops working below X pixels / X mm. It is the single most useful line in any brand guideline, and it’s the one most often missing.

An icon-only version that survives 16 pixels

Separate from the full logo. Usually one letter, or a simplified symbol. Test it the honest way: export it at 16 × 16 and look at it at normal zoom, not blown up. If you can’t tell what it is, it isn’t done.

A square version

Because favicon, app icon and every social avatar are square, and most logos are wider than tall. A wide logo in a square wastes roughly half the height. Usually this means the mark stacked above the wordmark, spaced for a square frame — and kept inside a circle, because avatars get cropped round.

SVG, with the text outlined

SVG stays sharp at any size, which is what a website needs. “Outlined” means the text has been converted to shapes, so it renders correctly on machines that don’t have the font. Ask for this explicitly — an SVG with live text looks fine on the designer’s machine and breaks everywhere else.

The editable source files

.ai, or .fig, layered and named. This is the one people forget, and the one that costs most later: without sources, every future change means redrawing. If you take one thing from this list, take this.

A one-colour version

Flat, no gradients, no shading. You need it for embroidery, engraving and foil — none of those processes can reproduce a gradient. If your logo is gradient-based, someone has to decide how it simplifies. Better the designer who made it than a print shop guessing at 5pm.

Exact colour values — including print

HEX and RGB for screen, CMYK and Pantone for print. If a colour is a gradient, get the gradient and a flat fallback. Screens emit light and paper reflects it, so “match the website” is not a printable instruction.

A version for light backgrounds

Test it: put the logo on plain white. Anything near-white in it will vanish. This is extremely common with logos designed on a dark background and it’s invisible until the day someone needs a letterhead.

Which colour pairings are safe to read

Ask the designer to state them. Accessibility standards want at least 3:1 contrast between adjacent non-text colours, and pairs that look fine to a designer often measure below that. Getting it written down once stops everyone guessing forever.

Cheap tests before you approve anything

Five minutes, and they catch most of it:

1. Export at 16 × 16 and look at it at 100% zoom.
2. Put it on white, then on black. Does it survive both?
3. Print one page in black and white. Does it still read?
4. Open every SVG in a browser — drag the file into Chrome. Blank or wrong means something’s off.
5. Crop it to a circle. Does anything important get cut?
6. Ask for the source files before you make the final payment.

What this costs you if you skip it

The design isn’t the expensive part. Rework is.

Missing files means redrawing. No icon version means someone crops the full logo and ships an incomplete letterform. No print values means a run comes back the wrong colour. No minimum size means a logo goes on a pen at a size where it’s a smudge — and you paid for the whole batch.

None of that is a design failure. It’s a specification gap, and specifying is the client’s job.

Get the brief right and a good designer will give you something that works everywhere you need it — because you finally told them where that is.

We build brand systems this way, and print and produce from them too — see commercial graphic designing and print media. And if you already have a logo but no brand kit, that gap is worth closing before it costs you a reprint.