Your logo is not the reason someone buys. But it is often the reason someone leaves. These are the errors that quietly cost conversions.
Website headline in one font, logo in another, menu in a third, Instagram posts in a fourth. Nothing is technically wrong with each piece; together they read as "made by different people on different days".
Fix: two typefaces, maximum. One for display, one for text. Everything else is that pair, in different weights.
The icon you found has been used by 40,000 other sites, some of them in your city. Customers may not be able to name it, but they register the familiarity as "I have seen this before" — which for a new business reads as "this is not really a brand".
Fix: if you use an icon library, modify it (stroke weight, container, rotation, combined custom detail) so it does not match the source exactly.
A logo squashed to fit a header is instantly recognizable as carelessness. Its height-to-width ratio was designed; changing it is like photographing a face through a warped lens.
Fix: always scale proportionally, and prepare a separate stacked (vertical) version for square and narrow spaces.
Tagline text baked into a logo at 4px reads as noise. Anything below roughly 10% of the mark's height is decoration, not information.
Fix: keep the tagline out of the logo entirely. Put it in the page next to it, where you control the size.
White logo on a light gray photo. Mid-tone accent on cream. It looks fine on the designer's calibrated monitor and disappears on a phone at 40% brightness.
Fix: always test on a phone, outdoors if possible. When in doubt, add a solid container shape behind the mark.
Website, Instagram, business card and invoice all show slightly different versions — different colors, different fonts, sometimes a different name spelling. Each inconsistency spends a little of your credibility.
Fix: keep one master file. Export everything from it. Never recreate the logo in Canva "just for this one post".
Using a desktop font you did not license, embedded in a printed product, is a real legal exposure — some foundries actively audit small businesses.
Fix: use open-licensed typefaces (SIL Open Font License, Google Fonts) or a font explicitly licensed for commercial embedding.
You do not need a $3,000 identity project to avoid all seven. You need a constrained system:
That is the entire checklist, and it is enough to look like a real company rather than a weekend project.
Tools like Logofast exist to produce exactly that baseline in a minute: the constraints above are enforced by the generator, and the $29 kit gives you the vector master, transparent PNGs and a commercial license — the three things that separate "a picture of a logo" from an actual brand asset.
Free to generate — 21 concepts in 30 seconds, pay once only when you download the files.
Create a free logo →