The Birth of the MARKIVE 7: Building a Logo Scoring System

After the name survived five rejections and the logo emerged from six drafts, something still felt unfinished. We were about to launch "a blog that reads logos" — without deciding what to read them with. Reviews need a standard. Calling someone's logo "nice" or "meh" isn't a review; it's a mood.

The problem with standardless reviews is twofold. First, the yardstick shifts from post to post — if we can't explain why we were generous to Nike and harsh on Apple, our scores are just taste confessions. Second, the reader leaves with nothing. A good review should hand you the same lens it used, so you can turn it on other logos — including your own. So the standard had to be clear, and it had to be memorable.

Then one day, staring at our own name, we counted. M, A, R, K, I, V, E — seven letters. And the idea landed: if a great logo has seven conditions, the name itself could be the standard.

Seven letters, seven rules

A name-based standard had obvious charm. Readers only need to remember the brand to carry the framework, and we'd be reminded of our own bar every time we write. Brand and content fused into one structure. The idea was seductive — now it had to survive execution.

Some letters found their seats instantly. M claimed Meaning — a logo is a vessel for a story, the founding conviction of this blog. K took Keep it simple — the oldest first-rule in logo design. E landed on Emotion — in the end, a logo has to move somebody.

Others took deliberation. I became Idea — the FedEx-arrow kind of clever twist. R settled into Recognition, V into Value, A into Authenticity. A full draft, one rule per letter. But stopping there would have been malpractice. Rules reverse-engineered from a name still have to answer one question: are they actually true?

Testing against the classics — and finding two holes

Logo design already has time-tested principles. The best-known set comes from David Airey, author of Logo Design Love: a logo should be simple, memorable, timeless, versatile, and appropriate. And "keep it simple" has been industry gospel since Paul Rand.

We laid our seven-rule draft beside the classics and compared. K matched simple. R matched memorable. Relief. But two of the classics had no seat at our table: timeless and versatile — conditions the field had spent decades validating. A framework that skips them isn't a standard; it's a vanity acronym.

The fix wasn't inventing new letters. It was absorption. Timeless folded into V (Value): a design that ages can't compound brand equity, so timelessness is value's precondition. Versatile folded into K (Keep it simple): the whole reason simplicity matters is that it makes a mark work everywhere — favicon to storefront, and in black and white. With that, the seven rules stopped being a name game and started standing on the shoulders of the classics.

The fight we had longest — aren't M and A the same thing?

One question refused to die during testing: "Meaning and Authenticity — isn't that one rule wearing two hats?" If a logo means something, isn't it automatically authentic?

The answer came from an incident in Part 2 — the hybrid drafts. Those logos clearly meant something. They just didn't feel like ours. That's when it clicked: M asks whether a story exists (what does it say?); A asks where the story comes from (is it truly yours?). A logo that borrows a meaningful concept passes M and fails A. An original logo that says nothing passes A and fails M. Not the same rule — a pair, each catching what the other misses.

Setting the weights — declaring what matters most

With the rules locked, one question remained: are all seven equally important? Scoring demanded an answer. Divide 100 by seven and you get 14.28 — a number that refuses to split evenly. Which turned out to be a gift: uneven weights let the scoreboard itself declare what Markive believes matters most.

So K (Keep it simple) got the top weight: 20 points. Without simplicity the other rules have no floor to stand on — a complicated mark can't be remembered (R), can't scale down, can't deliver its story (M). V (Value) got 10, on purpose: time is its judge, and a young logo deserves the right to a deferred verdict. M, A, R, and E carry 15 each; I carries 10. Total: 100.

We attached grades to the totals, too. 90 and above: masterpiece. 80s: excellent. 70s: solid. 60s: lacking. Below that: needs rethinking. Every review on this blog ends with one of those verdicts. We're as curious as you are about which logo takes the first masterpiece.

MARKIVE note

Sorting all this out surfaced one distinction we keep coming back to. The classic principles ask whether a logo functions — simple, memorable, durable. The rules we added — M, A, I, E — ask whether a logo stays with you: carries a story, is genuinely yours, rewards discovery, leaves a feeling. The MARKIVE 7 was our attempt to hold both questions inside one name.

And looking back, the three parts of this series were one story all along. The name came after five rejections. The logo came after six eliminations. The philosophy came after a collision with the classics. None of them was a first answer — each was what remained at the end of everything we threw away. If you're building a brand right now, the drafts you're discarding aren't waste. They're coordinates, closing in on the answer. We say that from experience.

The full framework, with examples, lives in the MARKIVE 7. And now that the making-of story is told, the real work begins: reading actual logos through these seven lenses. Our first guest is the most famous stroke on Earth — the Nike swoosh.

The Making of Markive — Part 1: The Name · Part 2: The Logo · Part 3: The Philosophy (this post)

Read the logo, Markive!

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