A logo shouldn’t bedecided by taste

The worst meeting in this profession is the one where a brand gets decided by whoever has the strongest feelings about the color green.

It happens constantly, and it is nobody's fault in particular. A logo is the one piece of work everyone feels qualified to judge. You don’t need any design vocabulary to say you don’t like it. So the conversation turns into personal taste, and you can’t argue with someone’s taste.

The question that changes the meeting

The fix is not to defend the work harder. It is to change what the room is being asked.

"Do you like it" has no useful answer. "Does this say what we agreed we need to say, to the people we need to reach" has one, and it can be argued with evidence. If the strategy was written down and signed off before anything was drawn, the review stops being a vote and becomes a check.

If you cannot say what the brand has to mean, you cannot say whether the logo is wrong.

Most brand projects that go badly went badly at that earlier step. The identity was commissioned before anyone decided what it was for.

A brand has a job to do

A brand is what people expect from you before they read a single word. It sets the terms: how serious this is, who it is for, whether it will waste your time. That is a functional job, not a decorative one.

And the logo alone can’t do that. It is the smallest part. What does the work is everything around it: the type, the spacing, the tone, the many small decisions repeated until people recognize the brand without thinking about it.

Where taste belongs

I am not arguing that craft does not matter. But taste is how you execute the decision, not how you make it. A designer with excellent taste and no strategy produces something beautiful that solves nothing, and it gets replaced in three years by the next beautiful thing.

Decide what it has to mean. Then argue about the green.