Logos and brand identity take about a week. That is not a promise to be quick — it is what the work actually needs once the brief is straight. Here is the week, day by day, using the same four steps the process band on this site describes: understand, create, refine, deliver.
Day one: understand
Nothing is drawn. The first conversation is questions, and the useful ones are almost never about what you like. Who is the customer, what do they already believe about a business like yours, what does the logo have to survive — a shopfront, a WhatsApp display picture, a stamp, an embroidery thread, a screen at 32 pixels?
A logo that only works on a white background is a wallpaper, not a mark. The constraints come out here, and they decide everything later.
Day two: the brief comes back written down
You get the brief reflected back in one paragraph plus a list of what is fixed and what is open. This is the cheapest day of the week. A wrong assumption costs an hour to fix now and three days to fix after concepts exist.
Anything you were vague about is still free to change today. After today it starts costing rounds.
Days three and four: create
Concepts, drawn properly — not a template with your initials dropped into it. The working set is small on purpose: a mark that goes the direction the brief points, one that goes the other way to prove the first one was right, and a version stripped to its minimum so you can see whether the idea survives being cut.
Each one is shown where it has to live. A logo on a clean white artboard means nothing; the same logo on your actual shop board, on a receipt, on a phone screen next to a competitor's — that is a decision you can make.
Day five: refine
Pick a direction, then make it difficult for itself. Weight, spacing, the point where a curve stops being a circle, whether the wordmark can stand alone without the symbol. Colour comes last, because a mark that only works in full colour does not work.
The test set: one colour, reversed out of black, embroidered, stamped, scaled to a favicon, printed at 6mm. If it survives all six, it is a logo. If it survives three, it is a picture of one.
Day six: the identity, if you asked for one
A logo is one file. An identity is the rules around it — clear space, minimum sizes, the two or three typefaces that carry it, what happens beside a sponsor's mark, what the palette is allowed to do, and the versions nobody should ever stretch. This is the part that keeps a brand looking like itself after the designer has left the room.
Day seven: deliver
You get the source file and every export you can foresee needing: vector, transparent PNG, dark and light versions, favicon sizes, and a short guide written for whoever prints or posts next — not for you. Nothing is locked into the studio's account. The files are yours, and the work can be reprinted or edited with any printer or any designer, including none.
What makes the week slip
The same three things, every time: the brief arrives as a preference ("make it pop"), the feedback arrives in pieces over four days instead of once, or the person who decides is not in the conversation. None of them are character flaws. They are all fixable by naming them on day one, which is what day one is for.