A name, a genre, and nothing else.
CliTech arrived with an artist name and no visual language at all. The brief was an identity that survives being a forty-pixel avatar, a printed sleeve and a poster on a wall — without changing shape between them.
A mark that has to survive being small.
An artist name is a harder identity problem than a company logo, because it has to work in places a company logo never goes.
It has to be legible as a circular avatar at forty pixels on a phone. It has to hold at A1 on a wall. It has to sit on a release cover, in a grid next to other artists, and not disappear. And it has to survive being screenshotted, cropped, reposted and re-uploaded until compression has had its way with it.
Almost every decision came out of the first of those. Work out what still reads at forty pixels and you have narrowed the field before you have drawn anything — which is why the mark got simpler at every stage rather than more decorated.
Strip it, split it, then build the system.
What survives at forty pixels? That single question settles proportion, weight and counter-shape before any styling happens.
Two directions taken far enough to be judged properly. A wall of thumbnails looks generous and helps nobody choose.
Monogram, palette with defined roles, type scale, spacing rules. The logo is the smallest part of what actually holds a brand together.
Source files, both colour profiles, and a document so the rules outlive the handover and survive the next designer.
The mark is the smallest part.
You get everything, on final payment.
There is a habit in this industry of keeping the source files as leverage. A studio delivers PNGs, and when the client wants a variation two years later there is only one place to get it. I do not work that way and I would not recommend hiring anybody who does.
Full copyright and every editable source file transfer on final payment. No licence renewals, no annual fee to keep using your own logo.
What I do not sell. A logo on its own, presented as a brand. A mark by itself is worth very little — what makes an identity hold is the system around it and the discipline to apply it the same way twice. If the budget only covers a mark, that is a legitimate place to start and the Mark tier exists for exactly that, but I will tell you plainly that it is a first step rather than a finished identity.