Quick! What are the first questions you have to answer when starting a business?

Did you say:

How do you set up an LLC? Should you do it yourself or pay someone?
Do you need a registered agent? What even is a registered agent?
What about a Bookkeeper? CPA? Lawyer? Business bank account? Virtual business address?
What do you mean all my emails are being sent directly to recipient’s spam folder??

That’s just a fraction of what I had to figure out when getting ELK Strategies off the ground. And in all of that, one thing I definitely didn’t spend much time on — until it was almost too late — was my logo.

I had a business name. I had a plan. But suddenly, it hit me: Oh, shit — I need something besides plain text to represent this thing. This… brand. I’m by no means an artist but surely, this can’t be that hard, right? A little AI wizardry and one more item checked off the entrepreneurial to do list.

Eh — not so fast. First we have to head down the rabbit hole of logo design.

AI to the Rescue? Not So Fast.

Everywhere you look, people are telling you to “just use AI.”

So, I did.

I turned to DALL-E first, and honestly? Not bad. The first attempt was promising — until I looked closer. AI sloppiness everywhere. The letters were warped, the shadows were off, and random artifacts showed up where they shouldn’t be.

Ok, maybe there is something to this. While a good start it just wasn’t…right. So I refined my prompts. At that time I was thinking of positioning myself more as a fractional Chief Analytics Officer, which led me to start playing with ideas around fractals and structure.

And wouldn’t you know it? The next attempt? Like Larry David would say, “Pretty…pretty…pretty good.”

For about five minutes anyway

Once again, I started seeing the weird inconsistencies — the little details that made it clear this wasn’t quite right. Did you notice the following?

So Many Tools, So Many Almosts

I kept looking and I kept experimenting. GoDaddy has a logo creator, but it’s only available if you purchase your domain through them, so no go for me. There was some rando logo builder that appeared in my IG feed, which honestly wasn’t bad — but it wasn’t what I was looking for either. You’ll see some of those towards the bottom of this post. I tried a few other options too but nothing was really hitting the mark

Once again though, there are layers to this because let’s say I did stumble upon the perfect design. Wonderful; but now I have to work out all of the file formatting, scalability, and usability issues. What’s that look like? Well:

Does the logo have a transparent background?
What about horizontal and vertical variations?
Where’s the version with the company name attached and without? Is that name to the right? Left? Underneath? Are the words stacked?
Do you have the necessary various sizes that aren’t warped or stretched when you try to use it as an icon or cram it into favicon size?
How will it look on a business card (and who’s going to design that)?
How does it look in the corner of a Powerpoint deck?
Does this even match my brand colors??

It turns out, a logo is way more than just a picture. A few days from launching is not the best time to really understand that.

The Human Element (or, Why I Still Needed an Actual Designer)

At this point, it was clear: I needed backup.

I know plenty of talented artists, and I wanted to support them, so I reached out to a friend whose work I really admired to see if he’d want to take the task on.

But here’s the thing:

Custom design takes time. I, however, was nearly out of it.
Communicating what I wanted was harder than I expected. Turns out, humans need prompting, too.
Creative work isn’t just about the final product — it’s about process. And I wasn’t sure I had time for that process before launch.
The common wisdom is right, yet again — Careful with your business, your friends, and your money.

This was a side gig for my friend and he had plenty else going on in his life; no way was the logo creation process going to completed in the time frame that I had (naively) imagined. So now what?

COMPROMISE! I was going to find (somehow) something good enough to launch with, then refine it later. Maybe completely overhaul it, who knows? But after all the work and getting this far, I couldn’t let a logo stop me from launching.

Still — need a logo and I’ve exhausted my options. Or have I? Apparently not, because who swooped in at the 11th hour, ready to save me from myself?

Canva Joins the Fray

I don’t even know why I thought about Canva for this. Perhaps incepted by all of my grad students who swore by it when creating their finals presentations. Whatever the case, out of all the tools I tried, Canva’s built-in image generator got me closest to what I wanted without making me jump through hoops. It wasn’t perfect, but it was good enough to launch:

And that’s the key lesson here:

✅ Your first logo doesn’t have to be your forever logo.
✅ AI is useful — but not perfect.
✅ A logo is a functional asset, not just a design. It has to work everywhere you need it to.

Would I eventually like a fully custom, hand-crafted masterpiece? Absolutely.

But for launch? Canva got the job done.

A logo might not be the most urgent thing when launching a business, but as I found out, it’s more than just a picture — it’s part of the story you’re telling.