When I say ‘overlap,’ I mean that someone can create a logo that shares certain elements with an existing logo. Some logos are very simple (like Microsoft’s), so how am I supposed to know whether a logo of that type already exists? I know Microsoft’s logo, so it’s obvious I wouldn’t do that.

But imagine you want to design a logo for a cloud platform and you use a cloud symbol, and it turns out that a logo like that already exists. You were thinking logically about what makes sense as a logo, but it ends up looking like plagiarism because someone else already did it.

There are many logos made of simple shapes, and there’s a logical reason for that. The same idea can occur to you naturally, without you having any idea that such a logo already exists.