Your logo is a fuzzy JPEG somebody emailed you in 2011
Here is a thing I run into a lot, and particularly with trades.
I ask for the logo. What arrives is a JPEG, about 400 pixels wide, with a white box around it that shows up whenever it sits on anything other than a white background. Nobody has the original file. The lad who made it has long since disappeared, or it came free with something, or somebody’s nephew did it on a laptop fourteen years ago.
It is the single most visible thing on the entire website, and it is a photograph of a logo rather than the logo itself.
I should say straight away that this is not a dig, and it is certainly not true of every trade. Some of the sharpest brands I have seen belong to builders, joiners and electricians who understood early that looking the part wins work, and who have invested in it properly. You can usually spot them by the van.
But for a lot of trades, the logo happened once, quickly, years ago, and has never been thought about since. There was always something more urgent. That is completely understandable, and it is also worth fixing, because it is a smaller job than most people assume.
Why it matters more than it used to
For a long time, a slightly rough logo was survivable. It sat at the top of a page on a desktop monitor at a decent size, and a bit of fuzziness was hardly the end of the world.
Then everybody moved to phones.
Now your logo is being viewed at about a centimetre and a half across, on a screen with several times the pixel density of the monitor it was designed for, by somebody in a car park deciding in three seconds whether you look like a real business.
A logo that was fine in 2011 does not survive that. It goes soft, the detail turns to mush, the thin bits vanish, and the whole thing looks slightly wrong in a way the viewer cannot articulate but definitely registers.
And they do not conclude “that is an old logo file.” They conclude something vaguer and worse about the business behind it.
The three things that break on small screens
If you want to know whether yours is in trouble, look for these.
Too much detail. Logos designed for a shop sign or a letterhead often have fine linework, small text, or an illustration with real detail in it. At thumbnail size that collapses into a smudge. This is the most common problem by a distance.
A tagline nobody can read. “Quality Plumbing Since 1998” underneath the name, in text that was legible on a van and is four pixels tall on a phone. It is not adding anything at that size, it is just making the whole lockup muddier.
No version that works small. Your logo probably needs to appear as a favicon, a social media avatar, an app icon and a WhatsApp profile picture, all of which are essentially a tiny square. A wide horizontal logo squeezed into a circle looks like a mistake, because it is one.
That last one catches nearly everybody. The businesses that look sharp online almost always have a simplified mark, just the symbol or the initials, that they use when there is no room for the full thing.
What a redraw actually is
Here is the important distinction, because people hear “logo” and think expensive rebrand.
A redraw is not a new logo. It is your existing logo, rebuilt properly.
That means tracing it back into vector artwork, so it is mathematically defined rather than made of pixels. Then it is infinitely scalable: crisp on a phone, crisp on a van, crisp on a three metre exhibition banner, same file.
While that is happening, the obvious problems get quietly sorted. Curves that had gone lumpy through years of resaving get redrawn cleanly. Spacing gets sorted out. Colours get pinned to actual values rather than whatever the JPEG compression left behind. You get a version that works on a dark background, a version that works in one colour, and a simplified mark for tiny spaces.
Your customers should not notice. That is the measure of a good redraw. It should look like the logo they already know, only somehow better, without anyone being able to say why.
And you end up owning the files, which is often the bigger win. Vector artwork you can hand to a signwriter, a printer, or the next web designer, forever.
When it is worth going further
Sometimes the redraw exposes that the logo was never quite right in the first place. That is a different conversation and I will say so if I think it.
But most of the time it is not needed. Most small business logos are perfectly decent ideas that have been degraded by fifteen years of being emailed around. The equity is in the thing people already recognise, and throwing that away to make a designer feel creative is usually bad advice.
Restore first. Rebrand only if you genuinely have to.
What about just getting AI to do it?
Worth addressing, because a lot of people have already tried, and I am hardly going to be sniffy about using AI.
The honest answer: it will get you about eighty percent of the way there, and for a fair number of businesses that is genuinely enough. If you need something clean to put on a van and a Facebook page tomorrow and you have no budget, you will do considerably better than you would have done ten years ago. I am not going to tell you otherwise.
The trouble is the last twenty percent, and it is not where people expect.
It struggles with the boring technical stuff. Optical spacing that looks even rather than being mathematically even. Curves that flow properly when you zoom in. A version that still reads at fifteen millimetres. Text that is actually set in a licensed typeface rather than approximated into a shape. That is the unglamorous craft that separates something that looks fine in a thumbnail from something that works everywhere.
It gives you a picture, not a system. What you usually get is one nice image. What you need is a family: full version, stacked version, one-colour version, a square mark for avatars, and knowing which to use where. The image is the easy part.
And it tends towards the middle. These tools are trained on everything, so they produce the average of everything. Competent, familiar, and quietly similar to a hundred other businesses in your trade. Which is fine, until you are sat next to a competitor in a search result trying to look like the better choice.
That last point is the real one. Eighty percent gets you looking professional. The extra twenty is what makes somebody remember you rather than just approve of you, and in a competitive local market that is the whole game.
So my honest advice: if you are starting out, skint, and need something decent quickly, use the tools and get on with it. There are worse ways to spend an evening. But do not confuse having a logo with having a brand, and know that the gap between eighty and a hundred percent is where the standing out happens.
The bit where I admit something
I should be honest about my own position here, because it connects to something I have written about before.
Taking a tired old logo and polishing it is my favourite part of this job. Always has been. There is something deeply satisfying about the moment it snaps into focus, when the curves go right and the spacing settles and the thing suddenly looks like it was always meant to look.
I think it comes from starting out above a printers. That is where I learned this, back when artwork went out on Zip drives, got output to reprographic film and burned onto printing plates. A logo had to work on a letterhead, a compliment slip and a business card, at actual size, on real paper. You noticed the spacing because a mistake did not turn up until it was already on the press, and by then it was a thousand of them. To this day I cannot walk past a print works without wanting to go in for the smell of it.
My old boss had a phrase for it. Whenever something came in looking tired, he would slide it across the desk and say “can you give this some Stez love?” Fifteen years later I still know exactly what he meant, and I still enjoy it as much as I did then.
Which is exactly why I have spent most of my career undercharging for it.
That is not modesty, it is a genuine commercial mistake and I know I am not alone in it. The work you enjoy is the work you underprice, because it does not feel like work. It takes me a couple of hours, I enjoy every minute, and some instinct says I cannot charge properly for something that felt like that.
But the client is not buying two hours. They are buying thirty years of knowing which bits to keep and which bits to lose, which is precisely the judgement that stops a redraw turning into a rebrand nobody asked for.
I wrote a whole post recently about businesses undercharging and attracting the wrong work, and it is worth noting that writing something and having taken your own advice are two different things.
What I would do about yours
If you are wondering whether yours needs attention, three checks, no expertise required.
Find the original file. Look for something ending in .ai, .eps or .svg. If all you have is a JPEG or a PNG, you do not really own your logo in any useful sense, you own a picture of it.
Look at it on your phone. Actually look. Is the text legible? Is the detail holding together, or has it gone soft?
Find your WhatsApp or social avatar. If your logo has been squashed into a circle and cropped badly, that is what a decent number of people see first.
If all three are fine, ignore all of this. If they are not, it is a smaller job than you think.
For what it is worth, I generally end up redrawing logos as part of building a site, because I cannot help myself and because a fuzzy logo undermines everything else on the page.
And if you do want to go further, that is genuinely my favourite work. Proper brand identity, a logo built from scratch rather than restored, the whole system around it: colours, typefaces, how it all holds together across a van and a website and a business card. I have been doing that since I was laying out brochures by hand at fifteen, and thirty years later it is still the part of the job I would do for nothing.
I just will not push you into it. Most businesses need their existing logo working properly far more than they need a new one, and I would rather tell you that than sell you a rebrand you did not need.
Not sure whether your logo is letting you down? Get your free audit, or email hello@inkon.co.uk. Send me the file and I will tell you honestly.