A good logo is simple, distinctive from competitors, legible at icon size and workable in a single colour. It is a set of versions for different media rather than one picture, and before launch the mark is checked against trademarks that are already registered.
Key takeaways
A mark is judged not on whether people like it but on whether it survives real conditions: small sizes, single-colour printing, busy backgrounds, the company of other logos. There are six working criteria.
A layer of meaning strengthens a mark but does not replace those six requirements. In our own logo the horse refers to a Sami bread figurine from the Kola Peninsula: the symbol carries a story rather than simply decorating the name.
The logo is one element; the brand identity is the whole visual system around it: palette, typography, graphic devices and the rules for laying out each medium. The mark sets the core, but recognition is built by the system: a brand with a strong identity is recognised even where the logo is out of frame.
That is why commissioning a logo alone makes sense only at the very start. As soon as a website, decks and social accounts appear, a mark without a system gets used however people see fit: colours drift, typefaces are swapped, proportions are stretched. What the system contains is covered in our piece on brand identity, and the rulebook for a team and its contractors in the piece on brand books and design systems.
The type follows where the mark will live and how well the name is known. Each type has a strength of its own and a difficulty of its own at registration.
| Type | What it is | When it fits | What to watch |
|---|---|---|---|
| Wordmark | The name set or drawn as lettering | A short name that has to be remembered in itself | A word set in a standard typeface is easy to copy |
| Symbol | A graphic symbol with no lettering | The name is already known, or the mark lives in icons and apps | A symbol without a name takes time and advertising money |
| Combination | A symbol plus the name | The universal option for most companies | It needs separate versions: the full lockup and the symbol alone |
| Emblem | Lettering inside an enclosed shape | Signage, packaging, a craft character of the brand | It scales down badly: details disappear in an icon |
| Monogram | Initials or a single letter | A long name that will not fit on the media | A high chance of clashing with somebody else's mark |
A descriptor — a short line about the field of business — is added when the name does not convey it. It lives as a separate version: needed on a sign, in the way inside an app icon. How a name is chosen, and why descriptive names lose out, is covered in our piece on naming.
One version of a logo does not cover every job, so the result of the work is a set of files and rules rather than a single picture. Check the handover against this list.
If all you hold is a raster picture with no source file, you do not yet have a full logo: it cannot be enlarged without loss, recoloured cleanly or prepared for print.
The order barely depends on the size of the company: constraints first, then form, and only then files. Below are the steps and what the client keeps after each one.
Steps two and five are the ones most often skipped. Without the category review the mark risks failing examination; without testing on media the logo looks fine in a deck and falls apart on a letterhead.
Copyright in a mark arises the moment it is created: under article 10 of the Law of the Republic of Uzbekistan on Copyright and Related Rights no registration is required for that. But it arises with the author, and a company takes its rights from the contract.
Copyright protects a particular image from copying. A monopoly on a sign for your own goods and services comes from a different right: a trademark.
Registration is handled by the Ministry of Justice: it accepts applications, keeps the registers and issues certificates, while the state examination of applications is carried out by the Intellectual Property Centre — as set out in article 7 of the Law on Trademarks, Service Marks and Appellations of Origin of Goods. We do not run this procedure: lawyers and patent attorneys do. What we do is prepare a mark that can be filed.
Refusal can come on several grounds. Signs that lack distinctive character are not registered, nor are signs used for the characteristics of goods — kind, quality, quantity, property — nor signs confusingly similar to marks registered earlier (article 10). For protection beyond the country there is an international route: the Madrid Protocol has been in force for Uzbekistan since 27 December 2006.
Important Run the register search before the mark goes into production: onto signage, packaging and staff uniforms. Redrawing a layout costs less than changing a sign after a claim from the owner of a similar mark.
A neural network produces directions quickly and helps rule out the obvious, but it closes none of the tasks a mark exists for: distinctiveness in its category, technical soundness of the versions, and the legal side. The final mark is still drawn in vector, tested on media and checked against the registers.
Rights are a separate question. In its report Copyright and Artificial Intelligence, Part 2 of 29 January 2025 the U.S. Copyright Office concluded that prompts alone do not give a person enough control over the expressive elements of the output, so an image produced by prompting alone receives no protection. How the question will be settled in a given jurisdiction cannot be known in advance, so the origin of the mark and the transfer of rights are worth spelling out in the contract with the contractor.
The practical conclusion is straightforward: a neural network belongs at the sketching stage as a designer's tool, not as a way to obtain a finished logo in one evening.
We design a mark for the media and the system it will live in. In the QADAM project the mark is the letter Q with a trolley for a tail: a logo that moves. The palette is lime, vanilla and black, and the form then runs out into a pattern, icons, packaging, merchandise, vehicles and courier uniforms, all of it described in the project brand book.
In the KruchuVerchu project the mark grew out of the name: an inverted wordmark, a brand yellow and a rotation that repeats in the interface gestures, from building a dish to the ring around the order status.
We hand a mark over as a set of versions with rules of use and source files. If the logo is needed for a digital launch, look at what website development includes: prototype, design and build run as one project, so the mark is tested on real screens straight away.
Let’s discuss your project
Tell us what you need, and we will estimate the timeline and cost and suggest a solution.
Check the mark against working criteria: does it read clearly in a messenger icon and on a banner, does it work in a single colour and over a photo, and does it get confused with competitors in your category? If it fails these checks, it's worth reworking; if you've simply fallen out of love with it, that's a matter of taste, not a reason to redesign.
We don't have a fixed price list for a logo: the cost depends on the number of versions, media and languages, so we quote it after a short conversation about the task. More often we design the mark as part of a full identity — as with QADAM, where we built the name, tagline, mark, palette and app screens from scratch.
It is protection rather than an obligation. Without registration you may find that someone else registers a similar sign, and then you are the one who has to change. Priority is set by the filing date, so delay carries risk, particularly before a move into retail.
Yes, use is not restricted by registration. But until the certificate is issued you hold no exclusive right to the sign in your classes of goods and services, so heavy spending on signage, packaging and advertising before the examination result carries risk.
Sign a contract now transferring the exclusive rights: specify the mark itself, the permitted uses, the territory and the fee (Article 39 of the Copyright Law), and collect the vector source files. Without a contract the rights stay with the author, and that will surface when you register the trademark or sell the business.
For draft directions, yes; as a finished mark, it's risky — it still has to be redrawn in vector form and checked on applied media and against registries. The US Copyright Office concluded in January 2025 that an image produced from a text prompt alone gets no protection, so the mark's origin should be spelled out in the contract.
