Type out your company name in a clean sans-serif and you have made something legible. You have not made a logo. The difference between a wordmark that merely reads correctly and one that functions as a mark, a thing a lawyer can defend and a customer can recognize with the type covered up, is exactly the gap most young brands fall into and never climb back out of.
Legible is the floor, not the finish line
Almost any competent typesetting job clears legibility. Pick a licensed typeface, kern it properly, set it in your brand color, done. But a name set in stock Helvetica is a name set in stock Helvetica for a thousand other companies too, just with different letters. Nothing about the form itself belongs to you. If a competitor swapped your company name into the same weight of the same font, most customers would not notice the difference until they read the actual word.
What ownability actually requires
- A custom letterform or two, an altered terminal, a connected pair, a cut counter, something a type designer did not hand you off the shelf
- Consistent, deliberate spacing and proportion that reads as a decision, not a default
- A silhouette distinctive enough to survive with the name blurred out
- A relationship between letters that would be genuinely awkward for a competitor to copy without it looking like a copy
This is the same test trademark examiners quietly apply. A name in a standard typeface gets thin protection, because the words themselves, not the typesetting, are doing all the identifying. A wordmark with real custom letterform work gets protection the typography earns, because now there is something specific to defend beyond the dictionary word underneath it.
The blur test
Take your wordmark, blur it in an image editor until the letters stop being readable, and look at what is left. A silhouette, a rhythm, a shape. If what remains is a generic gray bar, the logo has no ownable form independent of the words, and you are relying entirely on brand recognition built through repetition and ad spend rather than through the mark itself.
A wordmark you can replace with any other typeface and lose nothing was never really a logo. It was a caption.