A logo is not an opinion

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 deliverable everyone feels qualified to judge. You do not need vocabulary to say you do not like it. So the conversation collapses into preference, and preference is unanswerable.

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.

Decoration versus meaning

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 none of it is achieved by a mark on its own. The mark is the smallest part. What does the work is the system around it: the type, the space, the tone, the thousand decisions that repeat until they become a texture people recognize without naming 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.