A Logo, a Favicon, and My First Piece of Collateral — Built in Figma With Claude Driving

Part 6 of a short series on formalizing my consulting business. Part 5: the CRM.

Clarent is the Arthurian sword of peace — Arthur's other sword, the one for ceremony rather than war. So the mark was always going to be a sword. The question was how to get from "a sword" to a logo system that works at 16 pixels and on a 24-by-18-inch sign, without hiring a designer.

Round one: the AI image

I generated an emblem with Grok — a downward sword through broken concentric arcs, a star on top, the name underneath. As a direction, it was right immediately. As a file, it was useless: raster, decorative details that died at small sizes, and lettering I'd never be able to set properly.

I then tried writing my own SVG marks — a signet, a bracket, an aperture. Scrapped all of them. They were fine and nobody would have remembered them.

Treat the AI-generated image as the brief, not the deliverable. It tells you what you want. It is not the thing you ship.

Round two: redraw, don't trace

The temptation is to run the image through a vectorizer and call it done. Don't. Auto-tracing turns a raster into hundreds of lumpy nodes and inherits every flaw.

Instead I bought a Figma seat, connected Claude to it, and had Claude redraw the mark from geometry: a grid, true circles, consistent stroke weights, a sword on the center axis with a round pommel. Two things I learned when we did this properly:

• The original arcs were never true circles. The AI had drawn something circle-ish. At a glance you can't tell. At print size you can.
• My own hand edits had made it worse. I'd stretched the emblem slightly differently in each lockup, so the "same" logo was subtly different in four places. Nobody would have said why it looked cheap. It just would have.

The fix was to build the emblem as a single master component and make every lockup an instance of it. Change the master, every version updates. That's the whole discipline of a brand system in one Figma feature.

The one design decision that was actually mine

The star on top was a quiet West Point nod. My wife pointed out that nothing about the mark said AI. So the star became a four-point spark — the shape people already read as "AI" — sitting just above the pommel. Claude ran a scale study, four sizes side by side, and I picked one. That's the division of labor I want: the tool makes the options real, I make the call.

The favicon

A favicon is a brutal test. Sixteen pixels. Light and dark tabs. The full emblem turned to mud. Claude built two candidates — sword only, and sword plus two arcs — and rendered both at 16, 32, 48, and 180 pixels on light and dark backgrounds so I was choosing between things I could actually see. I went with sword plus two arcs on a navy tile; the spark isn't needed at that size. Out came a complete set: ICO, SVG, Apple touch icon, maskable icons, web manifest, and the exact head snippet to paste in. Twenty minutes.

The first collateral was a golf sign

Clarent's first marketing spend is sponsoring a golf tournament for a veterans' nonprofit — logo on the website and a hole sign. The organizer prints every sponsor onto their own template, so all they needed was clean artwork that works on a photo background. White emblem, white stack of CLARENT / CONSULTING / the URL, soft shadow, transparent background, exported as PDF. Plus a fallback on a navy tile in case their photo is too bright.

Along the way I wrote the first line of copy the business has: Put AI to work in your business. It'll end up on the website.

What I'd tell someone doing this

• Generate to find the direction, then redraw from geometry.
• Start small. Lock the favicon, then build up to the emblem — not the other way around.
• One master component, every lockup an instance.
• Have the tool render every option at real sizes before you choose.
• Purely AI-generated imagery generally isn't copyrightable. The human redraw with real choices is the thing you own.

If you're building a mark for your own business and stuck between "AI image" and "hire someone," ask me — I'll tell you where the line is. And if you're a designer reading this wincing, tell me what I got wrong. I'd rather learn it now than after it's on a thousand business cards.