David Airey: Not Love at First Sight

David Airey has been making logos for twenty years and writing about them for seventeen. His third edition of Logo Design Love just came out, and rather than sit down and talk about what's in it, we ended up talking about what changed — in the book, in his practice, and in how he thinks about what he's actually doing when he hands a client a mark that's supposed to outlast them both.There's a moment in this conversation where David describes presenting design directions to clients in words only — no visuals, just paragraphs — before a single pixel gets drawn. And it sounds so simple when he says it. But the thinking behind it, and the years of expensive mistakes that led him there, that's what the episode is really about.We talk about the gap between what a client thinks they want and what they actually need. About the logos David preferred that the client didn't choose — and what he did with them anyway. About a landscape gardening project early in his career that went quietly sideways because he forgot to ask one question at the start. About whether working increasingly through screens and email changes the work itself, in ways that are hard to prove but impossible to ignore.And then there's the bigger question underneath all of it — what does it mean to design something enduring? Not timeless in the abstract, but actually built to carry meaning for a decade or more, through every association a customer will ever have with a brand, starting from a first impression that might be completely wrong.David is thoughtful, honest, and very good at saying things that sound simple until you sit with them for a minute. This is exactly the kind of conversation Rough Drafts was made for.