Translation of the article “How Many Logo Concepts Do You Present Your Clients?” from graphic designer Kevin Mark Rabida on how many logos should be provided to a client and if this choice is needed at all.

As a designer, you know what it’s like to work with customers. They ask for a logo design. You are doing a logo design. They want to add a wow effect. You are trying to figure out what the wow effect means. You are fixing. They want to make it brighter. You use bright colors to the point where it looks like HTML style. They like it.

I, of course, exaggerate a little, but there is some truth in this situation. Designing for a client, especially someone unfamiliar with the rules, can become a chore. For example, they want to get a few concepts so they can pick the best one. They may require a few tweaks to be made according to their whim. The question is: how many logo options should you provide to the customer?

I think the correct answer is, and many professionals would agree with me that you only need to provide one option.

Problem of choice

It may sound counterintuitive, but the more options you provide to the client, the more difficult it is for you and your client. Consider the following example.

Imagine your customer as someone who wants to order a drink from a vending machine. The machine provides options to choose from. If a person does not have a particular preference for taste, he may get lost in the number of options offered. The queue behind the machine grows. The vending machine is selling less and less. The client’s thirst is growing.

Likewise, the client will be overwhelmed by the number of ideas you provide. Especially if you have too many great ideas in different directions, you unwittingly create a difficult situation both for yourself and for the customer. Dead end case.

As a result, the client is unable to choose. He wants an item from one option and a color from another. You end up with a jumble of logos that doesn’t fit the client’s target audience.

Client’s thoughts

The fact is that customers themselves may require multiple logo options, and we cannot blame them for that. They expect this. For a long time, their thoughts were driven by the actions of non-professional designers and their habit of waiting for these options. Sites that offer a logo for $ 5 give the impression that this is normal practice in the design industry.

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Graphic designer Sean McCabe summed it up in his article “The One Concept Approach: How a Professional Designs A Logo”:

Non-professional designers are not competent enough to set up a process that offers the single most effective solution, and instead, they mistakenly leave the client to make the design decision and cater to his subjective taste.

All this negatively affects the efficiency of the project and the industry as a whole. Despite the fact that these designers may consider themselves professionals, that many of them have been in the design industry for many years, in fact they remain only performers who offer not solutions, but “options”.

To summarize, we are responsible for the changes that we want to see in our clients.

Original: ucreative.com
Translation: Katerina Sorokina