How We Designed Our Logo — Six Drafts, One Check, and a Pen (The Making of Markive, Part 2)

In Part 1, we told the story of how the name Markive survived five rejections. Today: giving that name a face. Six drafts and one trademark check stand between a blank page and the logo you see on this blog — here's all of it.

One thing up front: the final logo was not made by AI. We explored a lot of directions with AI (Claude), but the last answer came from a hand holding a pen. That division of labor turned out to be the biggest lesson of the process.

Our method was a simple loop: pick a concept direction → have the AI draft it → judge it with our own eyes → put the failure into words → choose the next direction. Every lap around that loop made the list of "things our logo is not" a little longer — and the territory where the answer could hide a little smaller. Logo design, we learned, is mostly a process of elimination.

Draft 1 — The M that became a bookmark

The first draft sheet — pre-final, for the record

Direction one: "save the mark." We pulled the M's center stroke down into a bookmark ribbon and set the whole thing inside a seal-shaped container — a nod to the maker's marks ancient craftsmen stamped into their pottery, the very heritage behind our name. This draft also settled our colors: ink black plus red, the red borrowed from the vermilion paste of a traditional seal. Not bad at all. But it looked like... an app icon. Next.

Draft 2 — Drawing the archive itself

Next we tried shaping the second half of the name. An open storage tray catching a falling M. An archive box with the M's peaks poking out like file tabs. A red badge with a storage slot cut through it. Three tidy, minimal drafts — and one shared problem: they needed a caption to make sense. From across the room, they were just boxes. Rejected.

Draft 3 — Finding the M inside an open book

The book-M sheet, three variations — pre-final

The turning point arrived by accident. Looking at a photo of an open book, we noticed something: the silhouette of fanned pages is the skeleton of a letter M — high on both sides, dipping in the middle. "Record" (the book) and "mark" (the M) meeting in a single shape.

Three variations followed: a monoline A-version, a filled B-version with a red dot marking the spine, and a badge C-version. That spine dot mattered more than we knew at the time — the little red dot would survive every draft that followed, all the way into the final logo.

Draft 4 — The hybrid, and the stall

The hybrid sheet — pre-final

We refined the filled M by adding a single page leaf: carved out as negative space (V1), painted red (V2), set in a badge (V3). Objectively, the craft was improving. And yet — nothing stirred. It was a good logo that didn't feel like our logo. We didn't have the vocabulary for it yet, but we'd later name exactly this condition in our scoring framework: it passed Meaning and failed Authenticity.

Draft 5 — A detour: meet the magpie

To break the stall, we asked a deliberately silly question: "is there an animal that archives things?" Squirrels hoard acorns. Elephants never forget. And — magpies collect shiny things.

The magpie checked three boxes: it starts with M, it's a collector, and "a bird that gathers shiny marks" writes its own story. In Korea, where we're based, the magpie is also a bird of good fortune. We drafted an M whose right peak became a magpie's head, red dot for an eye — and then we let it go. The cuteness fought the voice we wanted: a blog that reads logos. But the detour wasn't wasted. Nothing tells you where home is quite like wandering off from it.

Draft 6 — Making sure it wasn't someone else's

By now everything was converging on "black M + red dot," so before committing we ran the check we preach: is anyone already using this? The search came back clean — no identical mark. Motorola's white M in a blue circle and Moncler's M-with-rooster read completely differently, and we found no match among Korean companies either.

One tip if you're doing this yourself: text search alone can't catch visual similarity. Pair it with a reverse image search (Google Lens) and your national trademark registry's figurative-mark search (USPTO in the US; we also ran Korea's KIPRIS). And do it before you commit — a logo is far more expensive to recall than a name. Once it's on your favicon, your header, your social profiles, walking it back hurts.

Draft 7 — In the end, by hand

The last step happened off-screen. With six drafts' worth of lessons on the desk, we picked up a pen and wrote the M in calligraphy — and there it was.

In the final mark, the M's center stroke became an upside-down exclamation point. The red dot that had survived since the book's spine became the exclamation point's dot. And the meaning named itself: the moment of discovery — the "aha!" of spotting what's hidden in a logo. That same ! echoes through our wordmark, Mark!ve, and closes our slogan. One device, everywhere.

Looking back, the division of labor was clean. AI drafted six directions at speed and showed us what our logo wasn't. A human took the end of that elimination and drew what it was. If you use AI in your logo process, that's the split worth remembering.

And how would our own logo score on our own scale? It carries a story (M), it emerged from six rounds of elimination as unmistakably ours (A), and it's a single stroke that survives at favicon size (K). But Value — the test of time — we can't score yet. Ask us again when this blog turns ten.

The MARKIVE checklist — 5 questions for when your drafts stall

1. Does it work without a caption? (Draft 2's lesson — if it looks like a box, it's a box)
2. Is it a good logo, or is it your logo? (Draft 4 — they are not the same thing)
3. Have you taken at least one ridiculous detour? (Draft 5 — the detour shows you where home is)
4. Have you checked for lookalikes? (Draft 6 — reverse image search + trademark registry)
5. Have you tried drawing it off-screen? (Draft 7 — a pen goes places a mouse can't)

For how we score any logo — including the seven rules this whole blog runs on — see the MARKIVE 7. Next in this series, the finale: how those seven rules were born out of the seven letters of our name.

Read the logo, Markive!

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