Cutting a logo out by hand
Process
by
Hugo Marchetti
on
December 4, 2025
2 min
Why every logo we make is cut out of black paper before it becomes a file, and the forty crows it took for Corvo Tonic.
Before a logo goes near a screen, Hugo cuts it out of black paper with a pair of scissors that have lived on his desk for nine years. It takes an afternoon. Redrawing a mark that doesn’t work takes a week.
Paper forces the decisions a pen tool lets you put off.
Scissors can’t draw a hairline
A cut-paper mark has no thin strokes, no gradients and no tiny counters that fill in when printed small. If a shape can’t be cut, it won’t survive a rubber stamp, a stitched label or a photocopy of a photocopy either.
That rules out about half of what we sketch, which is the point. The half that’s left is already halfway to working everywhere.
It keeps us honest too. A sketch can hide a weak idea under good drawing; a paper shape is only a shape, and it either holds or it doesn’t.
Forty crows for Corvo Tonic
For Corvo Tonic we cut the crow from Lisbon’s coat of arms forty times before one stood up on its own. The rounds went roughly like this:
First round: feathers, which tore every single time.
Second round: a crow in profile, too thin at the legs.
Third round: a solid shape with one notch for the eye.
The third crow is the one on the can. It has six edges and no curve tighter than a fingertip, which is why it still reads on a dented can at the back of a bar fridge.
“The paper crow sat on our fridge door for a week before it ever became a file.”
Rita Alves, founder of Corvo Tonic
From paper to file
Only once the paper version works do we scan it and redraw it. The redraw is faithful rather than tidy: we keep the slight unevenness of the cut, because perfect curves look printed, and this should look made.
Then the scissors go back in the jar, and the offcuts go in a box under the bench. We open that box at the start of every new identity, mostly to remember how many wrong turns a right answer takes.
Cut your own
Print your logo large and cut it out with ordinary kitchen scissors. Where the scissors struggle, your logo will struggle too: on a sticker, a stamp, a shirt, a sign in the rain.
It takes ten minutes and tells you more than a month of feedback rounds. If you’d rather we did the cutting, send us the file.
