Most of life, if we’re honest, goes into quietly feeling our way toward solid ground and shoring up the boundaries inside. That’s true for big life choices and just as true for something as “small” as a logo. You have to walk through a whole bunch of internal “are you sure?” moments before you finally get to a simple realisation: the “law of energy conservation” in creativity isn’t physics at all — it’s everyday alchemy. It’s when you take wobbly stuff — assumptions, ideas, half-formed theories — and turn it into something definite, visible, touchable. Like sketching in a café in Wellington and suddenly realising, “ah, that’s the mark.”
When you design graphic symbols, you’re nearly always working with opposites. The invisible needs to become visible. An empty shape needs to get some meaning. Inner borders need to slide a bit. And when enough of those tiny transformations pile up, you get a little evolutionary jump: yesterday it was “yeah, it’s kind of a brand shape”, today it’s a mark you’d happily show to a client in Auckland, Hamilton, or Christchurch.
There’s one moment from my own work that proves this to me. When I was creating the “Look” mark for an online photo gallery, I had a very down-to-earth wish: to make something interesting and unexpected, not just another familiar shape. I wanted a personal win over dullness and autopilot — the stuff that sometimes creeps in when you’ve done “just one more logo” too many times. And that’s when I found a little trick that, I reckon, any designer from Northland to Otago will get: to get the result, you first have to actually let go of the result. Drop the expectations. Stop making a drama out of how “important” this future logo is. And walk like a samurai (or, more locally, like a chilled Kiwi after a surf): not with a fixed goal in your head, but with intent in your chest.
This is where the local “no drama, just do it” vibe helps a lot. When you stop pushing the idea — it stops running away. When you’re not trying to make “the most innovative logo in Waikato” — the form suddenly feels alive. When instead of “I must deliver genius” you tell yourself “I’m exploring” — suddenly you start seeing how yesterday’s little sketch in Devonport connects with that curve you were drawing today in Rotorua.
Leaning on your own sensitivity is what switches this on. Not on trends, not on “how they do it in Sydney”, but on your own experience. That’s a big resource, honestly. It helps you understand the role of intuition in your work and in life. Intuition is like an internal art director who knows when to stop circling the idea and just draw it clean. It whispers, “that oval is already an eye”, “that line is extra”, “this is how it will look on a billboard in Auckland, and this is how it will feel on a shopfront somewhere in Nelson.”
From the outside, the story of making a logo always looks simple: sat down, drew it, sent the file. But on the inside it’s the story of a person who learned to turn unstable states into clear forms. Somewhere between Ponsonby and Hokitika, between “I’m not sure” and “that’s it”, a mark shows up — and then everyone acts like it was obvious from day one. But really it’s the result of quiet alchemy: you take something invisible, add experience, season it with intuition and a bit of New Zealand humour — and you get a symbol that can outlive the brief.
So the takeaway is simple: trust your sensitivity, work with opposites, don’t cling to the outcome, and don’t panic if the first version looks a bit like the emblem of a local yacht club. That’s not failure — that’s just one of the iterations on the way to the mark that will actually say what it needs to say.