Logo Design Workshop

 

By Joe Gillespie

For Web designers, the time always comes when you are asked to design
a logo. Now, you might well be a seasoned graphic designer with years
of logo designs under your belt or, you might think that it is just a
matter of finding a typeface and tapping the words out on a keyboard
and applying a Photoshop filter. Either way, you can improve your
logo designs if you follow a few tried and trusted guidelines.

If you study some of the best known logo designs around, you will notice that
they have some aspects in common - well, maybe not. After all, the
most important thing about any logo design is that it is totally different
from all others.

Okay, we have a paradox here! What all good logo designs have in common is
that they go out of their way to be different!

Take a look at the logo designs of Coca Cola, Mobil Oil, IBM, Kellogg's. They
are all uniquely different. They are instantly recognizable across the
world and if you were to take any one of them and cut it up into
pieces, even the individual pieces would still be identifiable.

To make a logo design so powerful takes two things, time and money. All these
logo designs have been around for quite some time and have had millions spent
on promoting them in advertising and packaging. When you design a new
logo, you certainly won't have the benefit of time - not to begin with
anyway - and you will be very fortunate indeed if it eventually gets
the megabucks behind it to make it an icon of our times.

One thing is for sure, if you don't get the basic principles right, it
doesn't matter how much you spend, a bad logo design won't get a chance to
stand up to the test of time, it will be replaced pretty quickly.

Some logo designs have been around for years with little or no changes. They
look every bit as relevant today as they did when they were introduced
umpteen years ago. The Coca Cola logo design, for instance, has been tinkered
with by designers over the years but the changes have been
evolutionary not revolutionary. It's not what you would call a modern
logo design, how could it be? It was originally designed `in-house' back in
1886 and despite the many changes and translations that have been made
over the years, it is still essentially the same logo design - in fact, the
most recognizable logo design in the World.

There are two lessons to be learned here. Firstly, overtly `trendy'
logo designs date quickly and can become embarrassments. If you can put a
date to a logo design, there is probably something wrong with it - unless, of
course, `being of today' is an essential part of the brief. Almost any
well known logo design that you can think of is just as relevant today as it
was years ago - timeless, in fact!

Secondly, there's consistency. Unlike the Coca Cola logo design, the Pepsi
Cola logo design has changed significantly over the years. It was originally
very similar to the Coca Cola one, written in a flowery script style.
Today, it is arguably more modern, with its bold sans serif typeface,
but loses out on the classic, timeless aspect that helps perpetuate
Coke's heritage. To gain universal recognition, any company or brand
image depends on the amount of exposure it gets. If it is changed
every few years because it is starting to look old fashioned or
through some chairman's whim, then it has to be relearned by the
public and its back to square one.


If you are designing a logo design for a company or product that already has
an established logo design, think twice before suggesting any radical change.
Look first at an evolutionary change that it makes it more relevant to
today - that doesn't mean `modernize' it. Some years ago, the fashion
was to `modernize' logo designs with a starker `Swiss' look. Many of the `big
name' logo design designs that I have been involved with were for traditional
English brands like Bovril, Horlicks, Colman's Mustard, Rowntrees,
Trebor and Frank Cooper's Marmalades. In each of these cases, I found
that I had to take two steps backwards to go forward because they had
all previously had their logo designs `modernized' and had lost much of their
hard-earned traditional values in the process.

Of course, you could be designing a logo design for a new, hi-tech company
and you don't want any hint of fuddy duddy tradition. Or,
`fashionable' might be an essential part of the image you are trying
to portray. Fine!

Let's look at the logo designs of some successful hi-tech companies and see
what we can learn from those. Take Microsoft, IBM, Canon, Sony, Apple.
They are all fairly simple, with the exception of Apple's `apple'
symbol, all are just the name of the company written in a distinctive way.

`Distinctive' is the important factor here. These are not ordinary
typefaces bought from Adobe or downloaded from a free font site on the
Web. They have all been specially designed and hand-drawn so that they
are NOT the same as any other typeface.

Microsoft has a fairly ordinary bold italic sans typeface, but the `o'
has a nick out of it making it more distinctive, recognizable and
memorable. IBM has `scan lines' running through a bold `Egyptian'
style font. Canon has a particularly distinctive initial `C'. Sony has
what is probably the least distinctive type style of all these
examples, an extended slab-serif, but the word itself is so unique it
can get off with it. The choice of company and product titles is
another very important factor, but I won't go into that at the minute.

The Apple logo design is the only one which has seen a recent change, albeit
an evolutionary one where the rainbow stripes have been replaced by a
single color. The word Apple is written in an ordinary typeface, a
derivative of Garamond, designed way back in the sixteenth century!

None of these logo designs are what you might call `fashionable'. Apple's
rainbow stripes were, but have given way to a more classical approach.
In doing so, the logo design has lost some of its distinctiveness but it was
clearly dating the company's image and that is undesirable for a
company wanting to appear to be innovative.

Trendy, graphically fashionable logo designs are okay for companies or
products that are ephemeral. Graphic styles, like clothes, go in and
out of fashion all the time. Obviously, it wouldn't make much sense to
design a logo design for a computer company using an Art Deco typestyle
because it gives all the wrong signals. On the other hand, flying in
the face of convention is more likely to provide a unique, creative
answer than by repeating the same popular images as everyone else.

This is where design gets really interesting.

There are certain `visual vocabularies' - clichés, if you like -
associated with every discipline you can think of. Look through Yellow
Pages or a clip art CD and you will see thousands of them - stars,
stripes, chefs' hats, wooden spoons, chickens. In logo design design, clichés
are counter productive. Instead of making your logo design look unique, they
are confusing it with every other one that uses the same visual idea.
In fact, using such a device makes the company look run-of-the-mill
and cheap. But, take a cliché and give it a twist, use it out of
context or in a different way, and you will have given your logo design
something that people will remember.

There is very little value in copying somebody else's logo design - unless
you deliberately want to look like a me-too. A logo design should ideally be
as different from every other one as you can possibly make it. It
should also communicate something about the company or product other
than just its name. You have an opportunity to add some additional
values subliminally through your choice of typeface and color.

Most corporate logo designs need to work across a wide spectrum of usage
situations - signage, stationery, packaging, promotional items and
mainstream advertising. They probably require different sizes and
versions for different applications too - a full color version on the
front of the company's annual report or notepaper and a gold-leaf or
etched glass version that works on the main entrance door.

If it appears on television, the logo design could be animated, and there is
always the give-away, printed balloons!

Designing a logo design today means that it will probably be used on the Web.
In fact, the Web could well be its main expression and print of little
or no consideration. A logo design designed for Web use has to take into
account that it will be displayed at a small size, in relatively low
resolution and possibly with a restricted color palette. If designing
a logo design specifically or primarily for the Web, you should start with
Web safe colors, not Pantone or ink colors. It is easier to match
printing ink to Web safe colors than the other way around.

Rather than resize a large master to every conceivable size, try to
make do with two or three fixed sizes and optimize those by hand. Get
rid of any unnecessary anti-aliasing on vertical and horizontal
strokes. This will make the logo design look crisper and reduce file size
slightly.

For very small type sizes, don't use anti-aliasing at all, use a font
optimized for screen display like MINI7 or Sevenet. 

 

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