The stars have truly aligned for me this past couple of days. I’ve been helping a friend of a friend (actually, a friend of my wife’s, but there you go) to do some design work for a ‘project’ (will be posting the artwork as soon as it’s finalised) and one of the things they wanted was a new logo design. Not just any logo design, but a literal logo design. These are not my favourite kinds of logo, and here’s why.
Logo design is such a grey area (only in terms of the varying quality you see every day – it’s actually one of the most specalised design disciplines). Despite people being affected (subconsciously or otherwise) by the brands they see in their everyday lives, whenever (not always, but the majority of the time) a company/person needs a logo designing for themselves, they don’t seem able to mentally draw parallels between succesful brands, and the one they wish to create. As such, literal thought processes take hold, and the finished project often falls short of what it is their brand needs (notice the ommision of the phrase “what they want”).
If you look at successful brands (especially the cream of the crop) the brand is very rarely a visual description of the service/product, yet it is still indelibly marked in your brain (Nike swoosh, Fed-Ex, Amazon etc). Why? This is open to interpretation, but for me, it’s because the unique design of the logo, coupled (this is the important bit) with the quality of the product/service, creates the brand, not the fact that the ”Mista Kleen-EZ” logo has a mop on it. This is why the majority of designers (particularly the good ones) will always veer away from the obvious, because it’s obvious. Your brand should be unique, and if it’s clichéd, it just won’t cut the mustard.
So, when I was asked to create this logo (I’m not going to go into detail, as I don’t want to offend the client/incur the wrath of my wife) and they made it clear that it needed to literally portray what it was, I heaved a great (internal) sigh. My pride in my work extends to the pride I take in helping a business to establish themselves, and there are some things which (unintentionally) harm your brand, none more so than a logo which, because it describes the business too literally, can’t help but make things look tacky – and that’s the last thing (usually) that a client wants.
Anyway, I digress. The reason the stars have aligned for me (in a very small, particular way) was that I stumbled across an analysed approach to logo design (via the website of the very successful Jacob Cass) and I think it helps to explain, far more eloquently than I ever could, what makes a logo so successful. And through examples of omission, it provides friendly examples to designers who are trying to point out what it is that logos shouldn’t contain. You can read the article here.
A good logo does not a great brand make, but a poor logo can cause serious damage to any desired presence in the marketplace.
