An electrician, a wealth manager and a bakery: why their logos have nothing in common

Over the same period, I worked on the identity of three very different clients: an electrician, a wealth management firm, a bakery. At one point, I had all three logos sitting side by side on my screen, and they had nothing in common. Not the same colour, not the same shape, not the same typeface, not the same promise. That is normal, and it is the whole subject of this article.

Today, anyone can type three words into an AI tool and get forty logo proposals back in a handful of seconds. It is astonishing the first time. It is also exactly where the trap lies: the machine produces something pretty without knowing why. It does not know that the electrician has to reassure, that the wealth manager has to inspire solidity, that the bakery has to make you hungry. It lines up pleasant shapes. Meaning, on the other hand, cannot be generated.

The electrician: reassurance first

When you call an electrician, you let him into your home to handle things that could burn the house down. His logo has one job: to say "serious, clean, reliable". We went with blue, a colour that evokes calm and competence, straight clean lines, a solid typeface with no flourishes. We ruled out the black construction-site background and the yellow lightning bolt everyone slaps on these logos, because it has become invisible from overuse. What matters is the feeling of the customer torn between two names on their phone at 7pm with a power cut.

The wealth manager: solidity that lasts

Here, the client entrusts you with their money, sometimes their pension, over twenty years. The logo does not need to be liked, it needs to inspire lasting trust, discretion, a quiet form of prestige. Nothing flashy. We chose deep tones, a restrained touch, a serif typeface that evokes permanence rather than fashion, a symmetry that settles. The test I set myself: will this logo still stand, without having aged, in fifteen years' time? A graphic gimmick would have failed that test.

A generator produces something pretty without knowing why. Meaning, on the other hand, cannot be generated.

The bakery: making you hungry

The exact opposite of the previous two. Here, it needs warmth, indulgence, the trace of the craftsman's hand. We went for warm tones, wheat, crust, cream, rounded shapes, a line that breathes homemade. Nothing corporate, nothing cold. The logo has to smell good before you have even read the name. Put it next to the wealth manager's: two different planets. And yet each one is right for its trade. That is what an identity is: not "pretty in the absolute", right for them.

What AI did, and what it did not do

Let us be honest about its role, because it is real. AI helped me rough things out: producing early directions quickly, showing the client three options so they could react. And reacting to an image is far easier for a client than answering "what mood do you want". On that point, it saves days.

But an AI direction is a rough draft, not a deliverable. The result often falls apart as soon as you look closely: wonky proportions, details that bleed, something perfectly illegible the moment you shrink it. It has to be kept on a short leash and watched closely. Once the direction is approved, I redo everything by hand, in clean vector form, so the logo stays crisp everywhere, from the tiny 32-pixel profile picture to the two-metre sign over the shopfront. No generator does that in your place.

The way I settle on a design does not start from my own taste. It starts from the image each professional wanted to project to their own customers, and we iterated together until it truly looked like them. A full identity, revisions included, takes about a fortnight. The time is not in the drawing, it is in the questions asked before the drawing.

The stumble that taught me a rule

One of the three projects nearly drove me mad, and the fault was shared. Halfway through, the shop owner changed his trading name. But the whole logo had been built around the old name: its letters, its length, its sound. We scrapped it and started again, looking for new directions that fitted the new name. Since then, I apply a simple rule: lock the name down before drawing the first curve. And notice exactly where the problem was. AI could have regenerated forty logos in ten seconds, yes. But forty logos that still meant nothing for the new trading name. Speed of production solved nothing, because the block was upstream, in the meaning.

That is why I do not believe for a second in the "logo made by AI in ten seconds" sold as a finished result. It is a practical starting point, nothing more. The craft is knowing what the logo should trigger in the right person, then making it flawless at every size and on every medium. The rest is just production, and production, today, no longer costs much. If you want to dig into where AI helps and where it goes off the rails, I also cover it in the three levels of AI in a business. And when a solid identity and content become a real project, that is the heart of our brand and content studio.