How to brief a logo designer
A logo project that goes badly usually failed before any design was made. The brief was a sentence, the designer guessed, the client reacted to the guess, and the project turned into rounds of revision with no way to tell whether it was getting better.
A brief does not need to be long. It needs to contain the handful of things that a designer otherwise has to invent.
What a designer actually needs from you
What the business does, in one sentence a stranger would understand. Not the positioning statement, the plain description. "We sell modular kitchen fittings to builders" tells a designer more than "we deliver premium living solutions".
Where it will be used most. A mark that works on a shopfront is not the same as one that works as a 32-pixel favicon or embroidered on a shirt. If it is going on a vehicle, say so. If it will mostly appear as an Instagram profile picture, say that, because it changes the design completely, because at that size detail disappears.
Who has to like it. One founder deciding is a different project from four partners agreeing. Say so at the start. It is not a problem; it is a schedule.
Three competitors, and what you think of their marks. Not to copy them, but to locate yourself. If every competitor uses a blue circular emblem, the useful information is whether you want to belong to that group or stand outside it.
Anything that is off the table. A colour associated with a rival. A shape that means something wrong in your market. A previous logo people are attached to. Constraints are helpful; discovering one in round four is not.
What you do not need to provide
You do not need to describe the logo. If you already know it should be a blue hexagon with a leaf, you do not want a designer, you want someone to draw a thing you have designed, which is a legitimate purchase, but a different one and it should cost less.
You also do not need to supply adjectives. "Modern, professional, trustworthy" appears in almost every brief ever written and narrows nothing. Every business wants those. What differentiates is specifics: what you sell, to whom, next to whom.
The thing most briefs are missing
A logo is not a brand. It is one mark inside a system that also includes type, colour, spacing, and templates for the things you publish week to week.
What costs businesses money is not a weak logo. It is having a logo and nothing else, so the deck looks unlike the website, the festival post uses a font nobody chose, and the invoice appears to come from a different company.
When briefing, say whether you need the mark alone or the system around it. They are different budgets and different timelines, and the second is usually what a growing business actually needs.
How to give feedback that helps
This is where most projects stall. "I don't like it" cannot be acted on. Three patterns that can:
- Say what it makes you think of. "It feels like a hospital" is precise and useful, even though it sounds vague.
- Point at the element, not the whole. The mark may be right and the typeface wrong. Separating them saves a round.
- Check it against the brief, not your taste. The right question is not "do I like this" but "does this do the job we wrote down". Those come apart more often than people expect.
And one thing to avoid: showing it to a wide group and collecting votes. A logo shown alone, out of context, at desk size, will always attract opinions that would not survive seeing it on the actual shopfront.
A brief that works
You can write a usable one in ten minutes. Something like:
We sell modular kitchen fittings to builders and interior contractors in and around Kolkata. The mark will mostly appear on quotations, a shopfront board, and WhatsApp. Two partners decide. Our three main competitors all use blue wordmarks and we would rather not look like them. Avoid anything that reads as "home décor": our buyers are trade, not homeowners. We need the mark plus basic templates for quotations and social posts.
That is enough. A designer reading it knows what to make, where it has to work, who to convince, and what to avoid.
If you are about to start one
We do logo and identity work from ₹6,000. See the services page for what that covers. But the brief above is worth writing whoever you hire, and it is worth writing before you ask for prices, because it is the thing that makes two quotes comparable.
Tell us what you are building if you would like us to look at it.
Questions people also ask
A mark alone can be a few thousand rupees; an identity with type, colour, spacing rules and templates costs several times that and is usually the better purchase. What makes the difference is not the drawing, it is everything that tells your team how to use it afterwards.
Two to four weeks for an identity, assuming the brief is written and feedback comes back promptly. Most of the calendar goes on decisions rather than drawing, which is why a vague brief is the thing most likely to double it.
Vector source files first, because they scale to anything without losing quality, plus exports for web and print in light and dark versions. Ask for the fonts used, or their licences, and a one-page note on minimum sizes and clear space.
For a side project, possibly. The output is a mark with no rules around it, no ownership you can defend, and often a shape a hundred other businesses are also using. If the logo has to sit next to a competitor's and be remembered, that is exactly what you are paying a designer to solve.