What Clients Actually Commission After the Logo

Most people commissioning a logo believe they are buying one thing. The portfolio of any studio that has been trading a while tells a different story, and the shape of it is worth understanding before you set a budget — because the sequence people actually follow is fairly consistent, and budgeting for only the first step is what makes the later ones expensive.

The composition

Our published work sits at 47 logo projects, 7 logotype boards, 11 full brand guideline documents and 6 social kits. Roughly one project in four eventually produced a guidelines document, and those documents run from 7 to 40 pages.

That ratio is the interesting number. Nobody commissions a 40-page standards document as a first purchase. They commission it eighteen months later, when the brand has started drifting and somebody has to write down what it is supposed to look like before it drifts further.

The sequence

First, the mark. Almost always where it starts, usually driven by a specific trigger — a website being built, a rebrand, a first funding round, or a founder finally admitting the Word logo is costing them credibility.

Then, quite quickly, the file problem. Within weeks someone needs the logo in a format nobody thought to ask for. A printer wants vector and CMYK. A supplier wants it on a dark background. Somebody needs a version small enough for a favicon that is still legible. This is predictable enough that it should be part of the original handover rather than a later request, which is why every project here ships one-colour, reversed and raster versions as standard. We wrote about the specific formats in logo file formats explained.

Then the drift. Six to eighteen months in, the brand stops being consistent. Not through carelessness — through volume. Three people are making things, none of them was in the original conversation, and each is making reasonable decisions from a slightly different starting point. The social posts do not match the deck, which does not match the packaging.

This is the point at which guidelines get commissioned, and it is why we describe them as the thing that stops a brand drifting rather than as a document. A guidelines document is not a nicety; it is the mechanism by which a brand survives contact with people who were not there at the start.

Then the applications. Packaging, social templates, an animated version, print. These come last because they are the point of the exercise — and because by then the client knows what they want, which makes them the fastest projects to run.

What this should do to your budget

The practical consequence is that the logo is rarely the expensive part, and treating it as the whole spend is what makes the rest cost more than it needed to.

Two things are worth deciding at the start even if you only buy the logo now. Whether the mark needs to work in a second language — retrofitting a bilingual lockup after the English version is signed off almost always means compromising one of the two, which we go into on the Canada page. And whether it will ever need to animate, because a mark drawn without that in mind can be genuinely difficult to move.

Neither costs anything extra to account for while the mark is still being drawn. Both are expensive to fix afterwards.

The honest exception

Not everyone needs the full sequence, and it would be self-serving to imply otherwise.

A sole trader with no employees, no packaging and no plans to hire does not need a 40-page standards document. They need a good mark, the file formats, and the ownership paperwork. The drift problem is a problem of scale, and if you are not scaling, you do not have it.

The test is simple: how many people who were not part of the original conversation will make something carrying your brand in the next two years? If the answer is nobody, buy the logo and stop. If it is three or more, the guidelines will pay for themselves in the arguments they prevent.