A lot of small businesses arrive with a logo that cannot go into a header bar: a stacked lockup with an emblem, a name and a strapline, where at any height a bar can carry the strapline is five pixels tall and the whole thing reads as a smudge.
The answer is not to redraw it. Cut it into an emblem and a wordmark and set them horizontally — nothing is invented, only rearranged, which is what every brand with a stacked mark does for its own navigation. Find the cut lines by counting non-transparent pixels per row, not by eye.
Then let the type do the work
If the mark is weak, the typeface pairing is the identity. That is a real opportunity: a sector where every competitor uses the same geometric sans can be beaten with one confident display face, because the recognition comes from consistency rather than from a symbol.
Two rules keep it honest. Never ask for a weight the family does not have — the browser synthesises one and a display face's counters close up. And read the tracking off your reference rather than eyeballing it: a missed minus five percent is worth about a tenth of the headline's width, which is the difference between three lines and four.
