On Tuesday’s class we did an exercise where we tried to identify parts of logos as fast as possible. I was very surprised by the amount of logos my group was able to identify! After all, these were just parts of logos, but we managed to identify all of the logos correctly except for Vodafone’s (which we thought was part of the Campbell’s soup logo, as befitting university students). The impact of a distinctive colour/style/font is stronger than I thought.
The class got me interested in what makes a logo work, and I came up with some criteria that seemed to apply to most well-known, successful logos. I think that good logos are clean; they express a lot without clutter. I learned this lesson from experience, as once I had to design a logo for a school club. We designers made our initial logo too detailed, and it took some painful editing before that logo could be reproduced on t-shirts without becoming a muddled blob. Another example is Toyota’s logo, which is simply three ovals together: clean lines, simple colours, and through some serious marketing, almost always recognizable.
Another criterion I came up with is that the logo has to be different from logos of close competitors. I was thinking about GlobalTV and CTV, both news channels that cater to British Columbians. Their logos are completely different, even though they’re producing the same product (news). Perhaps if one company is planning to enter a mature category in a market, they’ll have to be careful that their product’s logo design is not too similar to its mature competitors. Unless, of course, the product is a copycat brand!
I found a useful online article called “The Anatomy of a Logo”, in which it examines in much greater thought why some logos work. What I found particularly interesting is how companies have to be careful of colours.
Some colours and shades that show up digitally may be very hard to reproduce in print or on merchandise. Colour meanings could also vary from culture to culture; for example, I know that traditionally Chinese people wear white to funerals, not black. The article also noted rather wryly that while red is always an appealing primary colour, it is “taboo in financial communities”. Of course finance companies wouldn’t want to evoke thoughts of “being in the red”!