Logo Design

A logo is judged by the smallest place it has to work

Logo design is the creation of a mark that stays recognizable at every size, in one color, and on backgrounds nobody has chosen yet.

Most logos are approved as a large image on a white slide. They are then used as a favicon, an app icon, a social avatar and an embroidered shirt, and that is where the weak ones fail.

Wink combines creativity, strategy and market research to create logos that communicate a brand's personality and values.

What Wink designs

Wink produces logos across the forms a brand may need.

• Custom and corporate logos
• Startup and business logos
• Minimalist and modern logos
• Mascot logos
• Emblem logos
• Icon based logos
• Typography logos
• Responsive logo systems

The type is a decision, not a preference. A mascot suits a brand that talks to consumers, while an emblem suits an institution that needs to look established.

A responsive logo system is several marks, not one

A responsive logo system provides variations of the same mark for different sizes and spaces, which is what keeps a brand legible everywhere.

The full lockup with name and tagline works on a website header. A stacked version works on a square avatar. A single symbol works at favicon size where any text would be unreadable.

Designing all of them together is what stops somebody in your team squashing the main logo to fit and publishing it that way.

Research before concepts

Every Wink logo begins with research into the business and its market, because a logo cannot differentiate a brand from competitors it has never looked at.

Categories develop visual conventions. Knowing them tells you which are worth following, because they signal the category, and which are worth breaking, because everyone else is following them.

A logo designed without that context is a nice shape that happens to look like three competitors.

Built to survive real conditions

Every logo is developed with scalability, versatility and brand consistency in mind, and tested against the conditions it will actually meet.

That means one color versions, reversed versions for dark backgrounds, minimum size rules, and clear space so nothing crowds it.

It has to hold up on websites, mobile apps, social media, packaging, print materials, business cards, signage and advertising campaigns, which is a wider range than most logos are ever tested against.

What is delivered

Wink delivers research, concept development, the final custom logo, logo variations, scalable vector files and usage recommendations.

Vector files matter because they scale without loss, from a business card to a building. A logo supplied only as an image file is a logo that degrades every time it is used somewhere new.

Usage recommendations are what keep it consistent once it leaves the designers, since most damage to a logo is done by people trying to help.

Redesigning a logo without losing what it has earned

Wink offers logo redesign and refresh, modernizing an existing logo while preserving recognition where that recognition is worth keeping.

An established mark carries equity. Replacing it entirely discards that, which is sometimes right and frequently expensive.

The judgment is whether customers recognize the current logo. If they do, the work is evolution rather than replacement.

Who logo design is for

• New businesses establishing an identity from the start
• Startups whose logo was made quickly and is now on everything
• Established companies whose mark is dated or unusable at small sizes
• Businesses expanding into markets where their current logo does not read
• Organizations with a logo that exists only as an image file

What logo design connects to

A logo is the first element of brand identity, and it is the anchor for the visual identity system built around it.

It is then applied by brand collateral design and across physical space through brand applications.

Where to start

Send us your current logo at the smallest size you actually use it. That single test tells us most of what needs to happen.