A logo rarely fails on the day a leadership team decides it looks dated. It fails slowly, and then a meeting happens, and someone says the mark needs work. The expensive question is what "work" means. A refresh and a redraw look adjacent on a moodboard and cost wildly different amounts — in money, in equity, and in the months of disruption that follow. Most teams choose between them on instinct. The decision deserves a test.

The two interventions, and why they get confused

A refresh keeps the mark and improves its execution. The silhouette a customer recognises survives. What changes is the craft around it: the proportions are corrected, the spacing is tightened, the weight is adjusted for screens that did not exist when the mark was drawn, the colour is brought into line with a contemporary palette. A redraw replaces the mark. The thing a customer recognised is gone, and a new thing takes its place. The first is continuity with better execution. The second is a deliberate break. The confusion is that both arrive through the same door — a sense that the identity looks tired — and both are described with the same vocabulary. A founder asks for "a fresher logo" and means a redraw. A board asks for "a bolder identity" and means a refresh. The brief uses adjectives, and adjectives do not distinguish between keeping the asset and replacing it. The decision gets made implicitly, inside the design process, by whichever direction the studio happens to push. That is the wrong place for a decision of this consequence to be made.

What a refresh actually changes

A refresh is craft work on an asset whose strategic job is still being done. The mark still points at the right company; it just shows its age in the details. Refresh work corrects the things that accumulate over a decade: optical imbalances that were always there but now grate, a typeface that has fallen out of licensing or fashion, a colour that reproduces badly on the surfaces the company now lives on, line weights that vanish at favicon size. The output reads as the same brand, more sharply executed. Customers mostly do not consciously notice; they register that the company looks current without being able to say what changed. This is the lower-risk intervention, and for most companies most of the time it is the correct one. The equity in the mark — the accumulated recognition that took years and considerable spend to build — is preserved. The work is contained. It does not require re-papering every surface the brand touches, because the mark is close enough to its previous form that old and new can coexist during a transition.

What a redraw changes

A redraw discards recognition and rebuilds it. That is the real cost, and it is rarely the cost that gets discussed. The new mark has to be applied everywhere at once, because a half-changed identity reads as a mistake rather than an evolution. Signage, product, packaging, the app icon, the email footer, the partner co-brand lockups, the merchandise, the building — all of it changes, and all of it changes on a schedule. The internal cost of that rollout usually exceeds the design fee by a wide margin, and it lands on teams who did not ask for the project. A redraw is the right intervention when the mark is doing the wrong strategic job, not merely doing the right job tiredly. A mark that depicts a product the company no longer sells, that carries a name the company has left behind, that was built for an audience the company has outgrown, or that is legally compromised — these are marks that cannot be refreshed into correctness, because the problem is not execution. The problem is meaning.

The tests that decide it

Before commissioning either, work through five observable conditions. They are deliberately about the mark's job, not its looks.

• Recognition — the existing mark still triggers correct recognition in the audience the company depends on. If it does, you are protecting an asset, and refresh is favoured.
• Accuracy — the mark still depicts something true about the company. A mark tied to an abandoned product or category fails this test and points toward a redraw.
• Reproduction — the mark survives the surfaces the company actually uses now, down to the smallest. A reproduction failure is a craft problem, which refresh solves.
• Ownership — the mark is legally clean and defensible in the markets the company is entering. A trademark conflict is a redraw trigger, not a refresh one.
• Continuity cost — the cost of carrying the existing mark into the next phase is lower than the cost of rebuilding recognition. When this inverts, a redraw earns its price.

The decision rule is unglamorous. If recognition, accuracy and ownership all hold, the answer is a refresh, however much someone wants a redraw. A redraw is justified only when accuracy or ownership has genuinely broken — when the mark has become a liability rather than merely an embarrassment.

The reasons that are not reasons

Three patterns push teams toward a redraw they do not need. The new-leader signal — an incoming chief executive or brand lead wants a visible mark of their arrival, and the logo is the most visible thing to change. Fashion drift — a wave of competitors flattens, or adopts a variable system, or drops a serif, and the mark suddenly looks out of step with a trend that will itself date. Internal fatigue — the people closest to the brand have seen it ten thousand times and are bored of it, long before any customer is. None of these is a reason to discard recognition. All of them are real pressures, and all of them are best answered with a refresh that gives the internal audience something new to feel without spending the company's recognition equity to do it.

The equity you spend when you redraw

The argument for keeping a mark is the same argument that applies across an identity system: recognition compounds. Every impression a customer has of a consistent mark adds to a store of familiarity that is genuinely valuable and genuinely slow to rebuild. A redraw spends that store down to zero and starts again. Sometimes that is the correct trade — when the stored recognition is pointing at the wrong company, it is worse than worthless. But it should be a conscious trade, costed honestly, not a side effect of a design exploration that drifted. The same discipline that makes a brand's colour system hold up over time applies to the mark: the asset has value precisely because it has not changed.

What This Looks Like in Practice

In our identity work with BGR, the instinct in the room was toward a full redraw — the company had matured well beyond the moment its original mark was made, and the leadership team felt the identity no longer matched their ambition. Working through the tests changed the conversation. Recognition held strongly with the audience that mattered; the mark still depicted the business accurately; there was no ownership problem. What had actually aged was the execution — proportions, weight at small sizes, a palette built for print rather than for the screens the brand now lived on. The work became a refresh: the recognised mark survived, its craft was rebuilt for the surfaces in current use, and the recognition equity stayed on the company's balance sheet rather than being spent to satisfy a feeling. The result read as a more confident version of the same company, which was exactly the strategic message the team wanted to send.

Closing

The choice between refreshing and redrawing a mark is not an aesthetic one, and it should not be settled by whoever has the strongest taste in the room. It is a question about whether the mark is still doing the right job. If it is, protect the recognition and improve the craft. If it is genuinely pointing at the wrong company, redraw it and accept the cost of rebuilding with eyes open. If you are weighing whether your mark needs a refresh or a redraw and want a candid, criteria-led read before the budget is set, we are happy to walk through the tests with you.