What Makes a Great Logo
This article isn’t new, but it showed up on Digg today, the discussion of which reminded me of a similar debate on YayHooray! from last week.
What Makes a Great Logo is a nice overview of the qualities and considerations designers must observe each time they create a logo. However, I tend to disagree with one section in particular:
A logo needs to represent the company it serves. This means that the style must be easily identified with the industry/product/service and must give a clear picture of what is being marketed. If a company is selling auto parts, a delicate script font would not capture the essence of the company. A suitable font would be bold and sturdy-looking. A logo sets the tone for the company. This applies to single-serving logos like Dasani or a multipurpose logo like NBC. In the case of Dasani, we are given a clean, smooth, cold-looking logo to represent water and with NBC we are given with a multicolored peacock representing the different divisions of NBC. Originally the logo was created to show enhancements in color broadcasting, also a good representation.
I think the idea that a logo must visually represent a company and its industry/product(s)/services is a little old fashioned. By that I mean that a realty company logo need not feature the symbol of a house, a plumber’s logo need not have a pipe wrench in it; these over-used symbols probably do more harm by negatively affecting the uniqueness of the logo than the perceived benefits of the cliched representation.
In my opinion it is most important that a logo be memorable and unique. Being attractive and communicating the company’s primary function are secondary and seem to have little bearing on the success of a logo mark. In fact many companies choose non-representative forms in their logos to avoid being pigeon-holded into a certain group or to keep the mark relevant as they expand into other areas, evolving the business. Furthermore, what tends to happen is the logo’s meaning is informed by the company and the intangible qualities it projects.
A classic example is Paul Rand’s design for IBM where the strong horizontal stripes, which because of their presense in the technology giant’s mark, took on the meaning of high-tech and were subsequently adopted by many companies — like the AT&T example in the article, for instance. In fact, Rand actually used the stripes to solve a purely visual problem with the awkward way the three letters I-B-M work when placed together.
I think a common mistake made by amatuer logo designers and uninformed clients alike is the assertion that the logo is single-handedly responsible for establishing and communicating what the company is and does and all of the intangible things we want customers to know about it. Clients worry that “it has to show that I sell houses, but not just houses, and it has to show that I’m friendly, hip but experienced, and traditional, but not old-fashioned, and that I’m female (because that’s important to my customers) and it has to be blue because I hate green.” However, it seems that the reality is a good mark is a vessel for holding these qualities no matter the form and that in the end, the qualities imbued on a logo have more to do with the quality of the company it represents and it’s customers’ perceptions than any representative visual communication.