Logo - testing to destruction

Whenever we start designing logos, we make sure to keep saving and moving on to a fresh page rather than editing and evolving one design until we find “the one”. Coming back after a cooling off period, or sharing the process with someone else, it’s often much easier to see where a false trail may have led away from the best treatment.

Design legend Paula Scher  has been quoted as claiming that her first idea is always her best idea, but for ordinary mortals, the process of logo design is usually more convoluted.
There are times when we immediately "see" it and start designing exactly what's in our head, and others when we start somewhere and end up in a completely different place.

One design will lead to another, experimenting with shapes and fonts is what pushes you forward, and eventually you just "know" you've nailed it. In between... some good ideas, a lot of rubbish, but it's important to keep it all: an uninhibited graphic brainstorm will bring the right one out. 

For our rebrand of photographer Maura Cesolini, early iterations with lowercase serifs gave little hint of what was to come. And once we did catch sight of the radically simplified rectangles that would make her final logo, we continued trying different variations to make sure we’d hit the right idea.
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Far from imagining the design straight away, the process of investigation helped us find our way to a simple yet endlessly flexible solution: the logo rectangles becoming frames that held Maura’s dynamic photographs.
You may hit upon a great idea immediately, but you won’t know for sure unless you design past it and test it to destruction.

And then, you can do some cool and very satisfactory little things like this: