Logo design you’ll still be proud of in ten years
AI will hand you a logo in thirty seconds. It has never met your customers, and it can’t give you files a sign shop can use. Every mark we deliver is drawn by a designer, tested everywhere it will actually live, and handed over in files you own outright.
Three concepts · two rounds of refinement · about two to three weeks
A logo is the shortest sentence your business ever writes.
Your logo has to work in rooms you won’t be standing in. On a truck door doing forty. Embroidered on a polo. Cut into vinyl on a window. Sixteen pixels wide in a browser tab. Printed in one flat color on an invoice nobody looks at twice. It has to still read as you in every one of them.
That isn’t a picture problem, it’s a design problem — and the right answer changes depending on who your customers are, what your competitors already look like, and where the mark has to live. So that’s where we start. Not in a text box.
We’ve been building brands for Delaware businesses since 2012, and for plenty more across the country. Some clients are starting from nothing. Some have a logo that’s served them twenty years and just needs to stop falling apart at small sizes. Both are jobs we do, and we’ll tell you honestly which one you need.
AI is a great place to start. It’s a terrible place to stop.
We’re not going to pretend AI isn’t useful. We use it ourselves — for mood boards, for shaking a direction loose, for putting fifty shapes in front of a client in a minute so they can point at the two that feel right. As an inspiration engine it’s genuinely great.
Then it hits a wall, and it is always the same handful of places.
It has never met your customers
A generator works from your prompt. A designer works from your answers — who actually buys from you, who you’re up against on the same street, what you want someone to feel in the second before they read a single word. That conversation is where the idea comes from. There’s no prompt that replaces it.
The files don’t hold up
Most generators hand you a flat image. A logo needs true vector artwork — the kind a sign shop, an embroiderer, a vinyl cutter and a commercial printer can scale to any size without it going soft. Auto-tracing a PNG isn’t the same thing: the curves come out lumpy and the letterforms are approximations. You find that out at the sign shop, on a deadline.
It averages. You need the opposite
A model produces the middle of everything it has been shown. So does the model your competitor two towns over is typing into. The entire job of a logo is to not look like the other five in your category — and “most likely next shape” is a machine built to do exactly that.
Regenerating isn’t revising
“Keep this mark, tighten the spacing in the wordmark, make it survive at sixteen pixels, and give me a one-color version for the stamp.” That’s refinement, and it’s the part that turns a decent shape into a finished logo. Ask a generator for it and you get a different logo.
Ownership gets murky
The U.S. Copyright Office has said that material generated purely by AI isn’t protected by copyright on its own — human authorship is what earns protection. Trademark is a separate question and we’re not attorneys. But when a person draws your mark, there is a clean answer to who made it and who owns it, and the answer is you.
Nobody’s accountable
When the mark doesn’t embroider cleanly, or the printer says the file is unusable, or you need the horizontal version by Friday — a generator has no phone number. Ours rings. Robots don’t draw our logos; Goobers do.
Use an AI generator when
You need something fast and cheap — a placeholder, a side project, a one-night event flyer, a shape to argue about before you commit. Go do it. We’d rather tell you that than take money for a job you didn’t need.
Hire a designer when
This is the mark going on your building, your trucks, your uniforms and your business cards — the one you’ll still be handing people in a decade. That’s an heirloom. Heirlooms don’t come out of prompts.
Every one of these was drawn, not generated.
Three of the marks we’ve drawn — a voting-rights coalition, an insurance agency, a home-improvement contractor. Different industries, different problems, the same six steps below.
Delaware Voting Rights Coalition
Non-profit coalition
Mid-State Insurance
Insurance agency
Southerly Home Improvements
Home services
How a logo actually gets made.
Six steps, and about two to three weeks from the day your questionnaire lands. No black box — you’ll see the thinking, not just the reveal.
The questionnaire
A dozen questions we’ve sharpened over years of these: your industry, who you serve, brands you love, brands you can’t stand, your competitors and their websites, anything you’re carrying over. The “logos you don’t like” answer is often the most useful thing on the form.
Start the questionnaire →The discovery call
Caitlyn walks through your answers with you and asks what a form can’t: where the logo has to live, what’s worked before, who has to sign off, and what “professional” means in your particular world. It rarely takes more than half an hour.
Research and sketching
We look hard at every competitor you named and the rest of your category, so we know what to avoid as much as what to aim for. Then rough concepts — a lot of them, most of which get thrown away. That part is the job, not waste.
Three concepts, in context
You see three genuinely different directions, and you see them where they’ll live: on a sign, a shirt, a vehicle, a browser tab, a one-color stamp. Not three logos floating in the middle of a white slide, which is how bad choices get made.
Two rounds of refinement
You pick a direction and we sharpen it: spacing, weight, proportion, the small-size version, the one-color version, the version that has to sit on a dark background. This is the unglamorous stretch where a good shape becomes a finished logo.
Files and a brand kit
Every format you’ll ever be asked for, plus a one-page guide so the next person who touches your brand doesn’t wreck it. Delivered to you, owned by you. Here’s the full list.
Every file you’ll ever be asked for.
The most common reason a business comes to us to redo a logo isn’t that they hate it. It’s that they only ever got a JPG, and whoever made it is long gone. That doesn’t happen here.
Vector masters
AI, EPS, SVG and PDF — the real originals, scalable from a lapel pin to a billboard with no loss.
Web and social files
PNG and JPG at the sizes you actually need, including transparent backgrounds.
Every lockup
Horizontal, stacked and icon-only, so the mark fits a wide sign and a square avatar equally well.
One-color versions
Solid black and reversed white, for embroidery, engraving, stamps, and anything printed cheaply.
Favicon and avatar crops
Cropped and tested at browser-tab size and at every social profile dimension.
Color specifications
HEX, RGB, CMYK and Pantone, so what the printer produces matches what you approved on screen.
Type details
The exact fonts used, where to get them, and what the license does and doesn’t allow you to do.
A one-page usage guide
Clear space, minimum size, and the short list of things nobody should ever do to your logo.
Full ownership
You own the mark and the source files outright. We don’t license it back to you and we don’t sit on the originals.
Meet the person drawing it.
Caitlyn York is our designer and UI specialist, and she’s the one at the pencil. She’s on your discovery call. She presents the concepts herself. She’s who you talk to when round two needs the wordmark a hair tighter.
The drawing isn’t the part no tool can replace — the judgment is. Knowing that the concept you love will vanish on a truck door at distance. Knowing which of the three you should actually pick, and saying so out loud, even when it isn’t the one you were leaning toward. A generator will never tell you that you’re about to make a mistake.
We quote it once we know what it’s for.
There’s no price list here, for the same reason there isn’t one for a paint job. A single mark for a brand-new one-person business and a full rebrand for a company with trucks, uniforms and twenty years of goodwill are not the same piece of work. These are the things that move the number:
Scope
A logo on its own, or a logo plus the colors, type and templates that turn it into a brand.
Rebrand or blank sheet
Carrying twenty years of recognition forward is careful, patient work. Starting clean is faster.
Where it has to live
Signage, vehicle wraps, embroidery and packaging each carry real constraints that shape the design.
How many applications
The more lockups, sizes and variants your business needs, the more drawing there is to do.
Who approves it
One owner deciding moves quickly. A board, a committee and a family vote take longer.
Timeline
Two to three weeks is the normal pace. Faster is usually possible, and it gets priced accordingly.
Tell us what you’re building and we’ll give you a real number — not a range that doubles once the work starts.
Questions? We’ve got answers.
Still curious? Give us a call — we don’t bite.
Yes, and we’ll tell you exactly where. We use it the way we’d use a mood board or a stack of magazines — to explore directions quickly and to put a lot of options in front of you early. It never produces the thing we hand you. Every mark we deliver is drawn from scratch, in vector, by a designer. Here’s the longer answer on why.
Three distinct directions, presented in the places the logo will actually be used, then two rounds of refinement on the one you choose. Plenty of projects never need the second round. If yours needs a third, we’ll have that conversation with you rather than quietly stopping.
About two to three weeks from the day we have a complete questionnaire. What slows a logo project down is almost never the drawing — it’s waiting on answers or on someone to approve a round. Fill the form out properly and you’ll be at the fast end of that.
You get vector masters (AI, EPS, SVG, PDF), web and social files, every lockup, one-color and reversed versions, favicon and avatar crops, your color codes in HEX, RGB, CMYK and Pantone, your font details, and a one-page usage guide. You own the mark and the source files outright — we don’t license it back to you and we don’t hold the originals. Full list above.
It depends on scope, and we quote it after we understand yours. A single mark for a new business is a different job from a rebrand that has to carry existing recognition across signage, vehicles and uniforms. The things that move the number are listed above — tell us which apply to you and we’ll give you a real figure.
Often, and sometimes that’s the right call. If the idea is sound and only the execution has aged — loose spacing, no vector file, a version that dies below an inch — a refresh keeps the recognition you’ve spent years building and costs less than starting over. If the idea itself is the problem, we’ll say that too.
No. We’re based in Lewes and we know Delmarva inside out, but a logo is one of the easiest projects to run at a distance — the questionnaire, a video call, concepts in your inbox. We design brands for businesses all over the country.
Two ways to start.
Fill out the questionnaire and we’ll come to the first call already knowing your business — or just pick up the phone and talk it through first. Either works, and neither costs you anything.