In the race to ‘fit in’ on app icons, favicons and social feeds, brands are playing a dangerous game of identity shrinkage. Logos are being flattened, stripped back, and neutered in the name of digital optimisation. Serif? Gone. Symbol? Optional. Personality? Who needs it when you've got a single letter in a circle.
But in trying to adapt to a digital world, brands are falling into a trap. They're confusing clarity with blandness. They're mistaking reduction for relevance.
We believe the problem isn’t the logo. It’s the thinking behind it.
The diagnosis is wrong
When a logo struggles to scale down into a 40-pixel square, the knee-jerk solution is to simplify it - to remove detail, abbreviate, or worse, create a second logo altogether. But this misses the point.
The issue isn't that your logo can't shrink. The issue is that your brand lacks a system to support it across every scale and screen. Logos were never meant to carry the full weight of brand recognition on their own. When they’re forced to, they break.
The real challenge is distinctiveness
Look around the App Store or your phone’s home screen. What do you see? A sea of sanitised sans-serifs. Single-letter monograms. Flat icons in neat little boxes. In trying to meet the demands of digital, brands have started to erase the very elements that once made them memorable.
When everything is simplified, nothing stands out.
Don’t shrink - expand
Instead of asking, "How small can my logo go?", ask: "How big is my brand identity system?"
Strong brands don't rely on a single static mark to do all the heavy lifting. They build identity systems, a constellation of assets that work together flexibly and consistently across every touchpoint. Think motion. Think sound. Think colour, shape, type, texture, language, behaviour.
Take Netflix. Their full wordmark rarely appears on-screen. Instead, the iconic ‘N’ monogram animates, pulses, glows red against black. It’s not just recognisable - it’s magnetic. Or Airbnb, whose Bélo symbol does double duty as an icon and a storytelling device. These brands aren’t shrinking their identity. They’re extending it across platforms, emotionally and functionally.
Logos aren’t stamps, they’re signals
We design identities to thrive in ecosystems. That means thinking beyond the logo and asking how a brand can show up distinctively in any context, from a 3-second TikTok to the side of a lorry.
A logo should be designed with motion in mind. With responsiveness built in. With room to flex without losing the thread. Because ultimately, the best logos aren’t just technically scalable, they’re strategically magnetic.
Own your pixels, don’t apologise for them
If your brand mark isn’t working on a mobile screen, don’t panic and simplify. Get smarter. Build a system. Craft assets. Think bigger, not smaller. Because the strongest brands aren’t the ones that shrink to fit, they're the ones that scale with purpose.
