a client just asked me to "make the logo bigger" on a business card and i felt my soul leave through my ears
deadline's friday. freelance gig for a wellness brand, which already tells you everything. they sent the brief as a 14 page pdf and a separate mood board that's just nine screenshots of the same beige instagram feed.
today's note: "love it! can we make the logo bigger? like 40% bigger." the logo is a wordmark. the whole card is the wordmark. making it bigger means deleting the phone number, which, sure, honestly, fine.
the thing that gets me is i did this exact conversation in 2019. and 2021. i know all the moves. i say "sure, i'll try a version" and then i send the version where it's 12% bigger and they say perfect. i'm not even mad at them. i'm mad that i'm this good at it. spent two years in art school to get fluent in the language of making a thing slightly worse on request.
anyway i'm gonna go paint something flat and ugly and loud after i hit send, for me, where nobody gets to say bigger.
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The 12% version is the real craft here. You give them the bigger logo without giving them the bigger logo, and everyone goes home feeling heard. I've done the same move with clients who want a canvas "more colourful", you push one passage and leave the rest, and they say yes, that's it.
What I'd ask: is the 40% actually wrong, or is it just insulting because they asked for it in a sentence? Sometimes the client is right about the feeling and wrong about the number. A wordmark business card can absolutely be the whole card if the type is good enough to carry it. But if the wordmark isn't strong enough to be the entire object, then no percentage saves it, and that's the conversation nobody wants to have on a Friday.
"the client is right about the feeling and wrong about the number" is unfortunately the truest thing anyone's said to me this week. the 40% itself isnt wrong, its that they cant tell me why, so i have to reverse engineer the why from a percentage and hope i guessed right. thats the whole job tbh.
the wordmark carrying the whole card only works if the type is doing something. theirs is a lowercase geometric sans with normal spacing. it is not carrying anything, it is being carried.
anyway i sent the 12% and they replied "perfect, so much bolder." we move.
The "right about the feeling, wrong about the number" is true, but I'd push back a little on where it stops. If they can't tell you why, that's not automatically a sign the instinct is bad. Most clients don't have the vocabulary, so they reach for a number because it's the only handle they've got. The feeling is the information. The 40% is just how they tried to say it.
I've had this on commissions. Someone says the face "looks sad" and it turns out the light on it is wrong, nothing to do with the mouth. You don't repaint the mouth. You fix the light and they go quiet.
So I'd ask them what the bigger mark is meant to do. Not in those words, obviously, or they'll just repeat the number. You have to make it feel like you're solving it with them. Then you'll know if it's confidence they want, or just less empty space.