Why your logo doesn’t need to explain everything

Merit’s rebrand brief had a list on its first page: the new logo should show payroll, speed, trust and the small companies that use it. That’s four ideas for a shape that spends most of its life at 16 pixels in a browser tab.

Nearly every identity brief we receive has a list like this one. The instinct makes sense, since the logo is the one thing everybody sees, and it’s also why so many logos end up looking like diagrams.

The logo Merit had outgrown

Merit began as a spreadsheet plug-in and grew into payroll software for 3,000 small companies. Its old logo still looked like the plug-in: a tiny grid with a coin and an arrow packed inside, which printed as a grey smudge at the top of every payslip.

Merit’s first instinct was to add to it. Sales wanted something that looked like proper software on a demo call, and more symbols felt like more proof.

What a mark can actually hold

People look at a logo for well under a second, usually while doing something else. In that time it can deliver one idea, and only a simple one.

The idea we kept

For Merit, the idea was already in every customer’s inbox. Each payslip ends on the same mark, a full stop after the total, so we drew the new M around one. Nobody needs it explained; people notice it on the third payslip and it sticks.

We also kept the yellow customers already knew. Changing the shape and the colour in one go throws away years of recognition the client has paid for.

The ideas we let go

The coin, the arrow and the grid all went. So did a clock for speed and a handshake for trust, both sketched in week one and dropped once we saw them printed small on a real payslip.

A test we use

Describe the mark to someone over the phone. If it takes more than one sentence, it holds more than one idea, and one of them should leave.

Where the rest of the story went

Nothing on Merit’s list was thrown away. Each idea moved somewhere with room to explain it, and the guidelines, a deck template and the stationery all shipped in week six so sales could use them straight away.

This is usually the moment a brief gets shorter. The mark says one thing, and the deck, the letter and the colour say the rest at whatever length they need.

Before you brief your next logo

Try this before your first meeting with any designer, us included:

1. Write down everything you want the logo to say.

2. Circle the one idea customers already link to you.

3. Give every other idea a home outside the mark.

Bring that page to the first call and the half-day workshop becomes a conversation about where things go, which is a far better use of a morning. If your list looks like Merit’s did, tell us what you’re launching.