Start with these five questions

Before you pay a deposit to anyone offering to design your logo, ask them: what research do you do before you start designing, how many concepts will I see, what file formats do I get at the end, who owns the final design, and what happens if I don't like any of the first round? If a designer can't answer all five clearly, in writing, keep looking. A logo is one of the few things a business pays for once and then lives with for years, and most of the disappointment people report afterwards traces back to one of these five being skipped at the start.

Lahore and Karachi have no shortage of people who will design a logo for PKR 3,000 on Fiverr-style platforms, and some of them are genuinely good. The problem is rarely talent. It's process. A logo made in an afternoon, with no real brief and no revision structure, tends to look fine in isolation and fall apart the moment you put it on a shop sign, a Facebook page, an invoice and a WhatsApp Business profile picture all in the same week.

What research do you do before you start designing?

A designer who starts sketching the moment you say "I need a logo" is guessing. Someone worth hiring will ask about your competitors, your actual customers, where the logo will be used most (a storefront sign behaves very differently to a small app icon), and what you want people to feel when they see it. This doesn't need to be a formal process with a 20-page document. Even a short call where they ask good questions and take notes is a sign they're thinking about your business rather than producing a generic mark and hoping it fits.

How many concepts will I see, and how many revisions are included?

This should be agreed before any work starts, not discovered halfway through. A reasonable structure for a small business logo is two to four initial directions, followed by two or three rounds of revision on the one you choose. Ask specifically:

  • How many initial concepts are included in the price
  • How many rounds of revisions follow
  • What counts as a revision versus a new concept (changing a colour is not the same request as starting over)
  • What it costs if you need more rounds than agreed

Without this written down, "revisions" becomes a negotiation every single time you ask for a change, and that's where relationships with designers usually turn sour.

What file formats will I actually receive?

This is the question business owners skip most often, and it's the one that causes the most pain later. A logo delivered only as a JPG or PNG is a logo you cannot properly use. You need, at minimum:

  • A vector file (AI or EPS, or at least an SVG) that can be resized to any dimension without going blurry
  • A high-resolution PNG with a transparent background, for use on coloured backgrounds and in presentations
  • A simplified version for small sizes — a favicon, a WhatsApp profile picture, a social media avatar — because detailed logos often turn to mud at 32 pixels

If a designer can't produce a vector file, be cautious. It usually means they built the logo in Canva or a similar tool rather than proper design software, which limits what you can do with it later — printing it large on a shop sign or banner, for instance.

Who owns the design when it's finished?

Ask this directly and get the answer in writing, even if it's just a line in a WhatsApp message or an email: once you've paid in full, the logo and its files are yours, to use and modify as you see fit, with no ongoing licence fee and no requirement to credit the designer. Most freelance designers in Pakistan are reasonable about this once you've paid, but verbal agreements are easy to forget six months later when you want to tweak the colour for a new product line and the original designer is no longer reachable.

What happens if you don't like the first concepts?

This is less about logistics and more about how the designer handles disagreement. A good answer sounds like "we go back to the brief and figure out what's missing" rather than defensiveness or a flat refusal to try again within the agreed scope. If you can, look at a few of their past projects and ask what the client's original brief was versus what they ended up with — a designer willing to show that journey is usually one who collaborates well.

A few things that are reasonable to ask for, and one that isn't

It's fair to ask for a brand colour palette alongside the logo, a basic usage guide (what not to do with the logo — stretching it, changing its colours arbitrarily, placing it on a clashing background), and the source files rather than just exports. It is not reasonable to expect unlimited revisions for a fixed low price, or a full brand identity system — fonts, patterns, business card layout — bundled into a PKR 5,000 logo job. If you need more than a mark, that's a bigger project and should be priced as one.

The takeaway

A logo is a small purchase with a long shelf life, and the questions above cost nothing to ask but save real money and frustration later — especially the one about file formats, which is the single most common regret business owners raise after the fact. Get the scope, the deliverables and the ownership in writing before any work starts, however informal the agreement. This is the kind of thing we put in writing before we touch a design file, so there's no ambiguity for either side once the work is done.