Branding questionnaire: the answers that judge the logo.

A branding questionnaire should collect what the business does and why it's changing its look, the words customers should use about it and the one look it must never be mistaken for, every place the logo has to work with the smallest size it has to read at, who picks the route, which files the client needs afterward, the deadline and the budget. Written that way, the answers become the test each logo idea is checked against before the client sees it. The one below is filled in by Pemberton Street Flowers, a florist opening a second shop in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, whose answers set a $13,230 quote, and you can copy it or take it as a Word file or PDF.

What should a branding questionnaire ask?

It should ask for the facts that decide whether a logo works, which are where it has to appear, how small and how far away it has to read, and who gets to say yes, alongside the taste questions about words, colors and the brands the client admires.

The three versions we read lean almost entirely on taste. Fierce Creative's brand and logo questionnaire is a web form of 26 questions, one of them an 11-row grid of opposites such as modern and classic, and it doesn't ask about budget, dates, who decides or what files the client needs. ManyRequests' branding questionnaire for clients has 35 questions in six sections and is the only one of the three to ask for a timeline and a list of what the client wants made, but it never asks the budget or who approves. HTML Burger's article runs to 44 questions across ten sections while its downloadable PDF is listed at 25, and its usage questions ask where the visuals will appear and about scalability in general, without asking for the smallest size the logo will be printed at.

None of the three says what happens to the answers once they come back, and that's where the version below is different. Sections 2 and 3 are written as a test: two words the logo should earn, one look it must never be mistaken for, the smallest size it has to read at and the farthest distance. Every route gets checked against those answers on a printed proof before the client sees it, and the client judges the routes against their own words at the review.

Why write the answers as a test for the logo?

Because a concept review with nothing to measure against turns into a vote on taste, and taste is the one thing nobody settles by the second round. When the client has written that the logo has to read on a 1.5-inch sticker, a route that turns into a smudge at that size fails on the client's own terms, and nobody has to argue about whether it's pretty.

Most of these checks cost almost nothing to run. The sticker check means printing a route at actual size on plain paper, and the distance check means taping a proof to a wall and walking 60 feet back from it. The one-color check is the logo in black only, which is what a rubber stamp, an embroidered apron or a cheap newspaper ad will show anyway.

The feeling questions need the same treatment. Two words beat a list of ten, because a route can actually be checked against two, and the question about which business the client would hate to resemble is the most useful one on the form. Pemberton Street's answer, the green and white of a grocery store floral counter, is specific enough that a designer can hold a swatch next to it. It's the same instinct that makes a creative brief template with the client's answers in it worth having, applied a step earlier, before there's a brief to write.

Where does the logo have to work, and why price each place?

Every place on the client's list is a piece of artwork somebody has to set up, so each one belongs on the quote as its own line with its own price, and a place that turns up later is priced the same way.

Pemberton Street listed seven places in question 3.1. The storefront signs take 5 hours of artwork, $675 at the illustrative $135 rate used here, because two shopfronts of different widths need two layouts. The delivery van takes 9 hours, $1,215, since a van has doors, handles and a curved back to work around. The sticker and the ribbon together come to 3 hours and $405, and the gift card insert and the website header with the social profile pictures are each another 3 hours and $405. None of them is free, and listing them is what stops a client from assuming the logo file is the whole job.

Question 6.1 does the same job at the other end of the project. Knowing that a sign shop, an online sticker printer and the owner working in Canva will use the files tells you to export vector files, the kind a sign shop can enlarge to any size without blurring, plus plain image files for Canva, and nothing more exotic. That export is 3 hours at $405, and a one-page sheet on using the logo and colors is 4 hours at $540, which the owner chose in 6.2 over a full guidelines book. If a client does want the book, price it as its own piece, the way a scope of work for a brand style guide sets one out with its own page count.

Who chooses the route, and how many routes does the price include?

One named person chooses, and the price includes two routes and two rounds of changes on the chosen one, with the cost of a third route and an extra round written into the questionnaire so the client reads them before the first concept rather than after it.

Branding collects opinions faster than any other kind of project, because everybody in a small business has a view about the logo. Pemberton Street's owner named herself as the approver in 5.1 and added that her sister, who runs the wedding side, should see both routes. That's a perfectly good answer as long as 5.2 is answered too, and it was, since the owner gathers both sets of comments and sends one reply within three working days.

Question 5.3 is unusual for a questionnaire, and it earns its place. It says that a third route costs $2,160, which is 16 hours, and an extra round costs $675, which is 5 hours, and it asks the client to confirm they've read that. The same figures end up in a graphic design contract with a rate for each extra route, but a client who first meets them in a contract has already pictured unlimited ideas, and the questionnaire puts the number in front of them a week earlier.

What happened at Pemberton Street's concept review?

The owner's sister asked for a third route, and the answers in Sections 2 and 4 turned that request into a color change inside the first round, so the $2,160 was never spent.

The quote built from the answers came to 98 hours, $13,230 in total: reading the questionnaire and the discovery call $810, two logo routes $4,320, two rounds of changes $1,350, colors and type $810, four versions of the logo (the full one, one with the name under the mark, a round mark for the sticker and one in a single color) $1,080, the seven places from 3.1 at $3,105, the one-page usage sheet $540, the file export $405 and project management $810. That sat inside the $11,000 to $14,000 range from 7.2.

In week three the agency showed two routes. Route A was a hand-drawn wordmark with a sprig of eucalyptus, and route B was a round monogram with the full name set underneath. Before the meeting both had been printed at 1.5 inches, read from 60 feet down a hallway and stamped in one ink, and route A's sprig filled in at sticker size, so it was shown with a note saying it failed 3.2 and what fixing it would take. The sister looked at route B, said she didn't love either of them, and asked whether they could see a third.

Instead of quoting the $2,160 on the spot, the designer asked what she didn't love, with the questionnaire open on the table, and what she didn't love turned out to be the green. Route B had been drawn in a leafy green that sat close to the grocery store counter the owner had named in 2.3, which the agency's own check should have caught and didn't. The fix was already in the owner's answer to 4.1, so route B was redrawn in the plum of the first shop's awning, the color customers already give directions by. That went into the first round, the sister signed off through the owner's single reply two days later, and nobody bought a third route.

The only addition came in week five, when the owner asked for the logo on the tent banner she uses at the Saturday farmers market. It wasn't on the 3.1 list, so it was priced the way the list said a new place would be, 3 hours at $405, and approved the same day, taking the total to $13,635. That's scope creep handled with a price before it could turn into a favor.

When should the questionnaire go out, and should it ask the budget?

Send it after the first call and before the quote, and yes, ask the budget as a range and say why, because it decides whether you quote every place on the list or a first phase.

Pemberton Street took six days to send it back, which is about right for 21 questions a busy owner answers between deliveries. Anything that doesn't feed the test, the quote or the schedule can wait for the kickoff conversation, where questions about the founding story get better answers out loud anyway. If the client also needs a website, send the website design questionnaire as a second form rather than merging the two, because its questions are about pages, text and logins, and the person answering them is often not the one choosing a logo.

The budget answer did one specific job here. With $14,000 at the top of the range and $13,230 quoted, the owner could see at the review that a third route would have taken the project to $15,390, past what she'd set aside, which is part of why the question about the green got asked before anyone reached for a new sketch.

The concept review starts the day the questionnaire comes back

Read the client's answers to Sections 2 and 3 to the designer before a single sketch, print every route at the size in 3.2 and walk it back to the distance in 3.3, and put the answer to 2.3 on the table at the review. If you change only one thing in the questionnaire you send now, add the question asking which business the client would hate to be mistaken for, because at Pemberton Street that single answer did the work a $2,160 third route was about to be bought for.

Frequently asked questions