Designing a logo without brand research

Should you hire a designer to design a logo without doing brand research?

Let me first state that I’m neither a professional graphic designer nor a professional branding executive. But I’ve designed logos for some organizations and businesses and have been learning branding and designing brand identity.

For the past few days, I have been seeing people who are eager to design a logo for their organization without doing a brand research. If I were me a year ago, I would just design a logo, but is it that simple?

Simply put, people are trying to get a logo without really knowing what their organization stands for and how their logo will present it. Organizations sometimes buy a logo first and only after that they start to think why they chose this logo which is a terrible process for designing a logo.

A gap between brand strategy and creative design process. When our value are not clearly defined, the result is brand inconsistency in marketing.

Despite being a designer, my personal opinion is that logos are easy to craft and what you really need is to tell a story. A story about your organization. A story about your brand. And when your logo really represents your story and people love your story, they will love your logo too. (Well it is needless to say that the logo should be well illustrated too.)

These days, you can just google “Logo Generator” and you will find tools that allow you create beautiful logos in a matter of seconds. And they are cheap too. But what does your organization stands for? What is your soul? And does your logo really reprent it? How are you going to allign your brand’s voice and your brand design identity? These are the questions you need to ask before designing a logo.