Picture credit: Photo by pixmike on Unsplash
The hermit crab doesn't have a shell of its own. It finds an abandoned one, moves in and lives there until it grows too big for it. Then it looks for a new shell and leaves the old one behind.
Your visual identity works in much the same way. It's the shell your business wears, the outward form you present to the world.
And like a hermit crab's shell, the brand you started with fitted you perfectly, for a while. But when your business grows and changes, it's worth asking whether your brand, and your logo, still fit.
What your logo does for you
A logo is more than a graphic for your website. Wherever it appears, it tells people something about your business: your professionalism, your personality and whether you're the right company for them. All of that lands in a fraction of a second, before anyone realises it's happened.
When a logo does this well, it earns you trust before you've said a word. But when it doesn't, it sets off subconscious alarm bells.
Is your logo still telling the right story?
Your first logo captures where you were at the start: the clients you were targeting, the market you were entering and the version of your offer you had then. For many businesses, that story has changed considerably, but their logo hasn't.
A logo that falls behind is a natural consequence of building something that grows. The only mistake is keeping it longer than you should.
When your logo starts to work against you
An estate agent I worked with had been trading for 15 years. When she started out she'd had a cheap logo designed, built around a diamond motif that was a personal choice. The colours were bold, red and black, and they helped her stand out as a new face in a competitive local market.
As she became more established, the estate agent realised the logo was typecasting her. She was coming across as cheap and cheerful, which meant she was missing out on higher-value properties. She wanted to reposition, to compete with larger, more established agencies and win those better-priced sales.
My redesign kept everything that had made her distinctive: the colours, the bold name. I adapted the diamond motif into a roof that, with more refined typography beneath it, became a subtle house icon. The result looked the part and made her far easier to say yes to.
A good logo is harder than it looks
When it feels like time for a refresh, there's a temptation to sort it cheaply yourself. Tools like Canva can produce something that looks reasonable on screen. The question is whether it holds up everywhere else.
A logo needs to work at different sizes and in different contexts: legible on a business card, clean on a van, consistent in black and white as well as colour, in print and on screen. The file formats alone for print, embroidery, merchandise and signage all have different technical requirements. Handling that takes practical experience, not just a decent eye or a template.
You might think you'll never need a logo that works on a van, a wall or a shirt, until the day you do. A logo that doesn't scale, or looks patchy across different uses, undermines the credibility it's meant to be building. And the rework costs more than doing it properly the first time.
There's a legal catch too. You can't copyright a logo built from Canva templates and stock elements, because those same shapes and icons are available to every other Canva user. Your logo is a legal asset, and without intellectual property protection there's nothing to stop a competitor building something near-identical to yours.
The shell did its job. But it might be time for a new one
Deciding you need a brand refresh is a sign of a business that's grown. And a logo update will almost certainly cost you less than the work you're missing out on because your brand no longer fits who you are.
If you've changed direction, found a clearer niche or moved upmarket, the most useful thing you can do is make sure that when people look you up, what they find reflects the business you are today.
The hermit crab doesn't wait until it's uncomfortable. It moves when the time is right. If you suspect your logo has drifted out of step with where your business is today, get in touch – we can talk through what a refresh might look like, and whether you need a full redesign or just an update.