Advice On Typical Logo Design Issues
January 12, 2011 | Branding
It may not seem like it from the outside, but even the most cynical observer must admit that Logo design is a high pressure industry. 2010 saw many a fine agency crack under the pressure and turn out a frankly rubbish design. The most offensive was the redesign at Gap, which took a logo that needed an overhaul and somehow made it a lot worse (before they U-turned barely a week later). How does an exceptional logo maker avoid making the kinds of design mistakes that characterised 2010 design? Well, any designer (and any corporative, considerate client) know that the process needs time, first and foremost. But there are elements of good practice and general advice worth taking.
A major constituent of the custom logo design challenge is in walking the line between conflicting excess and asceticism. It’s a widely accepted fact that over-complex logos are brand suicide, but it is possible to distil a design down so far that it becomes meaningless. Monograms and logotypes can be extremely un-engaging if they’re presented without some kind of visual element. But you also have to avoid including too many illustrative elements, or illustrative elements for the sake of having something illustrative. If you’re adding elements on some vague association, you’ll probably nail a few cliches into place too. International company? Globes have been done. There are more courier logos sporting letter than there are postage items in the world’s postal systems at any one time. Quite how it happened is beyond most, but regardless: feminine focused brands with swishy, dancing stick figures need to be kicked to the curb. Yes, yes. Aren’t all double X’ers dynamic and in tune with their feminine expressiveness?. Stop it.
There are also some great ways for you to tune your design process. A favourite comparison: a logo designer comes with much the same design baggage as being a cartoon character designer (that is, a designer of cartoon characters. Not a character designer in a cartoon). The silhouette of a cartoon character should be functional and instantly recognisable, and so should a logo. A modern mistake is to start design both on the computer and in full colour. Get a piece of paper and work in pencil or maybe pen on those initial drafts. It’s no coincidence that our longest extant and most memorable logos predate the computer revolution by decades, maybe even centuries. This isn’t just a philosophical point, and it’s worth pointing out that by working in black and white at the earliest stages, you’ll be defining up front how the brand will translated into newspaper print and black and white stationary.
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