Logo
Design.

"Logo" is rarely the right question

If the brief is "we need a logo", the engagement is going to produce a graphic that the founder might love and that will almost certainly fail the first time it has to do work — sit next to a competitor's mark on a comparison table, scale to a favicon, survive a partnership announcement.

The right question is "we need a brand mark that encodes [strategic thing] and works across [surfaces]". That brief rules out 90% of the directions a designer would otherwise explore, which is the whole point — the constraint is what produces a defensible result.

If a strategic-thing brief is hard to write because the strategy is unclear, that is the actual blocker. Logo work that runs ahead of unclear strategy produces a logo that the team fights with quarterly until someone rebrands. Save the money; run the strategy work first.

If strategy is the actual blocker, the brand strategy framework is the prerequisite. If you already have positioning locked and just need the mark, keep reading.

The five-phase process

1. 01 Brief. Founder interviews + competitive scan + audit of any existing mark. Output: a written brief that captures what the logo has to do (not what it should look like) — the audience, the positioning, the visual languages already crowded in the category, and the one strategic decision the mark has to encode.
2. 02 Concept. Four to six concept directions in black-and-white, no colour, no application surfaces. The point of monochrome concept work is to force the form to do the work — a logo that only reads in its brand colour is a colour, not a mark. The team picks two directions to take forward.
3. 03 Direction. Two chosen directions refined with type pairings, lockups, and one application surface each (usually a marketing-site header). The decision narrows to one — the studio recommends, the founder decides. If both directions survive this phase, the brief was unclear and Phase 1 needs a revisit.
4. 04 Refine. Chosen direction polished to system-ready state. Curves smoothed, optical adjustments made, weight refined, kerning locked, monogram cut, favicon-scale variant tested. Lockups built for the contexts the mark will live in. This is the longest phase and the one founders skip when buying cheap.
5. 05 Deliver. Final file pack (SVG, PNG, EPS, PDF), brandbook logo section (usage rules, clear-space, minimum-size, do-not-do examples), favicon + app-icon set, and a 30-minute walkthrough video covering rationale and edge-case usage. After this, the founder can hand the mark to any team without re-pitching.

Total engagement length: 2–4 weeks for a standalone logo, 6–8 weeks when bundled into a full identity engagement. The variance is driven by how clean the brief was and how many rounds Phase 2 took to converge.

What you receive

A real logo engagement ships a file pack and a documentation pack. Anything less is concept work the team will struggle to deploy without re-engaging the designer for every new surface.

File pack

• Primary wordmark — SVG, PNG (transparent + on-light + on-dark), EPS, PDF.
• Secondary lockup (mark + name, or stacked, or single-line) — same formats.
• Monogram for tight surfaces — favicon, app icon, sidebar collapse states.
• Favicon + app icon set — 16, 32, 48, 64, 128, 256, 512.
• Engineering-handoff Figma file with components and variables.

Documentation pack

• Brandbook logo section — usage rules, clear-space, minimum-size, do-not-do examples.
• Type pairing (display + body) with fallback chain.
• Colour palette with semantic tokens (primary, accent, neutrals, semantic states).
• Application examples — marketing-site header, sales-deck title slide, social profile, OG card.
• 30-min walkthrough video covering rationale and edge-case usage. The video is the artefact that lets the next designer or agency pick up the system without re-pitching it.

What it costs

Funky Rabbit publishes pricing — same numbers every visitor sees. No discovery-call quote game.

• Standalone logo (2–4 weeks): $4k–$12k. Wordmark, secondary lockup, monogram, file pack, brandbook logo section, and a 30-min walkthrough video.
• Identity Sprint (2–3 weeks): from $9k. Logo + type pairing + colour + brandbook + one application surface. For founders who realise mid-conversation that they need the system, not just the mark.
• Brand Suite (6–8 weeks): from $18k. Full system — logo, applications, rollout pack, handoff video. For seed / Series-A teams who need the mark AND a complete operating manual.

Industry context: freelancer-marketplace logos run $300–1.5k and are time-bounded concept work. Boutique studios run $4–15k for standalone, $15–40k for full identity. Above $50k for standalone logo work, you are paying for an account-management layer that does not improve the deliverable.

Full breakdown on the pricing page.

Common mistakes (red flags)

• Designing in colour from Phase 2. Colour hides weak form. If the mark only reads in its brand colour, it is a colour, not a mark.
• Skipping the monochrome favicon test. A logo that does not survive a 32×32 black-on-white render will fail every co-marketing surface it ever encounters.
• Unlimited revision rounds. The founder converges on the safest version of the original idea instead of the most distinctive one. Cap revisions structurally, not by goodwill.
• "We want it to be timeless" as a brief. Timeless is the result of solving the strategic brief well; it is not a design instruction. Briefs that ask for timelessness produce generic.
• Buying a logo before locking positioning. The mark cannot encode strategy that has not been written down. If positioning is unclear, the mark will be the wrong one — and a rebrand inside 18 months is almost guaranteed.
• Voting on logos. Logos do not get better by committee. The founder decides, with the studio's recommendation. Stakeholder reviews exist to surface objections, not to score directions.

How to brief a logo designer

The brief is the deliverable that determines whether the engagement converges. A good logo brief covers, in order:

1. B1 What the company does. One sentence the founder uses in a sales call. Not the marketing-site headline. Not what you wish you did. What customers actually buy from you today.
2. B2 Who it is for. The audience the brand has to recognise as theirs. Names, roles, the surfaces they see you on first.
3. B3 What the mark has to encode. The one strategic thing the form has to carry. Not "modern, bold, clean" — those are adjectives the studio has heard ten times this week. Something concrete: "we move faster than the incumbent", "we are credible enough for enterprise procurement", "we are warmer than the category default".
4. B4 Where the mark has to live. Favicon, app icon, marketing site, sales deck, sticker, billboard, partner page. Surfaces drive constraints — a mark that has to scale from 16px to a billboard cannot afford intricate detail.
5. B5 What you have ruled out. Three to five things the founder does NOT want — typography styles, colour families, motifs that competitors over-use. Negative constraints accelerate convergence more than positive ones.