Logo presentation: showing a mark so it is judged on the right thing

Decide the question before the format

Three routes asks which. One route asks whether. Both are legitimate, and the difference should be a decision rather than a habit.

Three routes works when the brief genuinely admits several defensible directions and the client is equipped to choose between them. It costs three times the work and it invites a fourth outcome: a composite of all three, which is almost always worse than any of them.

One route works when the brief is tight enough that the answer is close to determined, and it puts the discussion on whether the reasoning holds rather than on preference. It requires the reasoning to actually hold.

Show the mark before the reasoning

The instinct is to build up: brief, research, mood, process, and the mark at the end. This trains the room to look for the justification rather than at the drawing, and it means the first honest reaction happens after twenty minutes of framing that made it impossible.

Restate the brief in two sentences, show the mark, and stop talking. The first unguarded reaction is the most useful information available in the whole meeting, and it is only available once.

Show it small, second

Immediately after the mark at size, show it at sixteen pixels. This is not modesty; it is establishing the criterion in front of the people who will later ask for more detail. A room that has seen the mark at favicon size understands why it is drawn as it is, and does so before anybody has proposed adding a gradient.

Then one ink, positive and negative. Two slides, thirty seconds, and most of the later arguments have already been answered. The tests themselves are set out on the principles page.

What a mockup proves and what it hides

A mark photographed on a shopfront, a coffee cup and a tote bag is doing a job: it shows the mark in context and at realistic sizes. It is also doing a second job that nobody asked for, which is borrowing the credibility of a well-photographed shopfront.

Two rules keep mockups honest. Use contexts the organisation will actually be in: a national retail frontage for a business that will never have one is a lie with good lighting. And include at least one unglamorous context: an invoice, a spreadsheet header, a lanyard. A mark that only looks good on a letterpress business card has not been shown, it has been staged.

Presenting to a group

Two failure modes, both common. A committee reviewing a mark tends to converge on the least objectionable option rather than the strongest one, because agreement is easier to reach about what is inoffensive. And a room asked for opinions will give opinions; a room asked whether the mark meets a stated criterion will answer that instead.

The practical countermeasure is to state the criteria before showing anything and then to keep returning to them. "Does it hold at sixteen pixels" is a question a group can answer together. "Do you like it" is a question that produces as many answers as there are people.

What to leave out

The rejected thumbnails. They demonstrate effort, and effort is not a quality of the mark. Worse, they give the room forty additional things to have opinions about, several of which somebody will prefer for reasons the process already rejected.

The golden-ratio overlay. It is a construction aid, not an argument, and presenting it as one invites a reasonable person to ask what would have been different without it. Grid diagrams belong in the construction file rather than on the wall.

The origin story of the symbol, unless the audience will ever be told it. A meaning that has to be explained is a meaning the mark does not carry, and the explanation will not be present at any of the places the mark is.

The strongest single change to most logo presentations is to move the explanation from before the mark to after it, and to cut it in half when it moves.

After the decision

Write down what was chosen and on what grounds, in three lines, on the day. Six weeks later the question "why did we not go with the other one" will be asked by somebody who was not there, and the three lines are the difference between a settled decision and a reopened one.

Then deliver properly. Formats and files covers the folder, and the one-page usage note in it is what keeps the mark intact once it leaves the room.