This is an idiotic thing for Seth to say!

I’ve never read one of Seth’s books and I now I don’t plan on it. It is like saying that a good driver wins races, so why not just use an average car. From the covers of his books, it doesn’t look like he has ever really appreciated design. They all look like one of his nephews designed them.

The whole pixie-logo thing is just ridiculous. It is too bad that they are going to get publicity out of this whole deal. I would be hard pressed to find anything worse for our profession. I think the designers behind this should be pulled out of their digital holes, and publicly flogged on every design blog. Of course, this would only give them more press. They are apparently aware that what they do is shameful, since you can’t find a name anywhere on their site.

In a weird way, CA predicted this kind of thing years ago. In their 40th anniversary issue they republished a parody article with stock logos that could fit any company. With the ease of digital technology it is easy to imitate existing logos and trends and sell them as original.

Willful disregard for what I wrote? or just bad writing on my part leading to confusion on your part?

I never endorsed the company. I certainly didn’t get paid by them. All I said was that many companies spend way too much time and money on logos. Why? Well, if you guys are designers you know that everyone has an opinion about a logo. It feels like a safe topic to argue about, to have strong feelings about. No one can tell you that you’re stupid.

Far better for companies to spend the time and money building what the logo stands for. That was my point.

For proof, take a look at the Starbucks logo (which in many ways is overly complex and irrelevant) and the Google logo (which is horrible by any measure).

As for the thoughtless criticism of my book covers, I have to tell you that the bald head logo has been copied by literally hundreds of companies and art directors. But of course, blog comments are usually nasty.

Seth, OK, that was a bit underhanded of me. I usually am not that “nasty” on our blog, but you comments got me a little more worked up than usual. I know Adrian respects your opinions, so it was a bit of a shock.

You’re right, I think a civil discussion about the cost of logo design would be more productive. You are on the money about the Google logo and the Starbucks logo is debatable. I think that these companies are exceptions to the rules. When a good logo is teamed with a strong strategy, that is the most effective use of your money. Just look at the success of Fed Ex’s logo redesign. We all know that they wouldn’t have received that logo for $50 or even $5,000 for that matter.

Seth, Yeah, everybody has an opinion about logos, but that doesn’t mean they are experts. People can argue about logos all they want, but without the experience and skill of a good designer, they won’t be able to create a quality logo. I wouldn’t go as far as to say that no company has ever overpaid for a logo, but like any other product, you usually get what you pay for. I think the history of design should prove that the companies that invested in their companies identity systems have been rewarded. That is probably why so many of the logos on PixelLogo are blatant copies of successful logos that PEOPLE PAID FOR!

Chris, you said “the logo is meaningless without something real behind it.” That is true, but why ignore the benefits that a good logo can give your company. A great company with mediocre design will never be able to present themselves as a great company. A crappy company can fool people into thinking they are legitimate by employing good design, but that shouldn’t be the goal of design. Just because design has the potential to mislead people, doesn’t mean companies should strive for mediocrity.

Well, I have to draw it right back to David’s comments. There’s a certain line where a designer stops selling typefaces and color pallets and starts selling a brand. The logo may be the face of the brand, and it is important, but it should be one piece of a whole. For it to be most effective we must show how it will be used and perceived. That’s where “perfect” logos come from.

Not from kerning, not from PANTONE¬Æ, but from use and perception. The FedEx logo may seem perfect to us now, but is it really the best graphical answer? Who knows? Perhaps somewhere there exists a better answer to that problem. But in how it has been used, and how the viewer perceives it (oh, there’s an arrow in there!), it has become perfect.

Great design is great, but only a step on the road to a great brand.

What is a logo worth?

This is the latest from Seth (Purple Cow ’Äì Free Prize Inside ’Äì Tell a Story) Godin. He states, ’Äúall a logo needs, is to be GOOD ENOUGH’Äù when just a few weeks previous he wanted you to reject ’Äúgood enough’Äù.

Ok ’Äì perhaps he meant to say that your brand is built (or not) regardless of logo design. If that’Äôs what he meant, I agree, but not at the expense of great design.

Let’Äôs make this clear:

A logo is your Brand Identity. It matters. The identity becomes the symbol for your brand image in the mind of the customer. ’ÄúGood enough’Äù is a well designed logo that will feel fresh for a long time. It’Äôs one you and your customers won’Äôt tire of in a few short years ’Äì let’Äôs say the first 10 - 20 years or so. A ’Äúgood enough’Äù logo is one that differentiates itself within its category and begins to tell the story before you know what that story is. It’Äôs memorable. It’Äôs distinctive. It’Äôs representative.

Nike is a great example. That swoosh was commissioned for $35 (they have since upped that payment significantly) but price doesn’Äôt always dictate quality. The swoosh logo gives the viewer a feeling of activity and motion before we begin to know the story of the brand. In ’ÄúGodin speak’Äù, it fits the brand story. I chose Nike because it’Äôs such an obvious example but there are many good ones: Kodak, Amtrak, Cotton, or I Love (heart) NY.

A distinctive, well conceived and designed logo is worth every penny you can spend, but ultimately, it’Äôs only going to be as good as the brand you build around it.

Also to weigh in somewhat on Seth’s argument, logo USAGE is in most ways even more important than the simple crafting of the mark to begin with - even a logo that acutely “tells” the brand story which is never reinforced by consistent usage, clever application, and equally acute surrounding design dies on the vine with the brand attached to it. Any of us could as easily list multiple companies with dreadful marks that have still captivated us with their offerings as we coudl likely mention those that stand above-and-beyond the call of duty.

As a designer, I think this is simply a call-to-arms for all of us to work diligently against producing “good logos” - mediocre marks / irrelevant marks / convoluted marks / etc. and go for the throat with them. A great mark balances message, design flexibility / useability, eye appeal, and ease of remembrance / association in equal measure. It is also, however, a huge call to educate clientele on how to utilize what they’ve paid for once it’s “out of our hands”, so to speak - hopefully, the client-designer relationship is built in such a way that they learn to value the visual acuity of their collaborator and rely on it. The more designer-abuse we inflict on a client (visual direction without suitable description, discussion, and demonstration), the less likely we are to train them to use our materials in the manner intended, logos or otherwise.

I’m probably willing to give Seth a pass on this because much of his argument wasn’t posited directly from the standpoint of the design itself, it was made in regards to the “lucky rabbit’s foot” quality that many business are sometimes led to buy into in regards to logos - “If we spend the money and get a great logo at the start, the rest is going to be easy.” Seth clearly pushed us all back onto his original track by stating:

“Far better for companies to spend the time and money building what the logo stands for. That was my point.”

Coming at that argument from the standpoint of a designer, I’d make a firm argument that building a great visual identity is an integral portion of building what your business stands for - the more the logo reflects the business and vice-versa, the better result that identity has even when seen only momentarily. I tend to use the analogy that a great mark is like a terrific first handshake with a company - lots of first impressions are formed in those momentary exchanges that will either be confirmed or denied with later research. Seth is arguing that you have to back up that firm handshake, no matter how terrific it was in the first place…

Seth is also citing a fairly prevalent attitude about logos - that on one level or another they’re simply corporate window dressing, something execs like to throw a lot of money at in times when they might be better off really hammering out the details of a solid business plan. Having designed marks, I know that this isn’t 100% true of them - done well and put into the right hands, logos are superb collateral for generating interest in a company and sparking associations with that interest each time they’re seen again.

Seth also cites two examples of logos that “work” because of the company they’re attached to - one that is exceptionally beautiful and well-designed but extremely obtusely related to the function of the company it represents (Starbucks), and one that is undeniably mundane, cheeseball, and blatantly low-tech but represents a company with exceptional vision and maximum permeation into every web-user’s life (Google). Sure, thousands of designers all over the world could come up with a really great mark for either of those companies, but the design exercise would be moot in the sense of how it would continue to affect the companies’ successes and failures (if anything, an identity change that accompanied some major business snafus would come to literally symbolize it and an identity change accompanying a massive run of successes would likewise be remembered as the mark of that success).

Seth didn’t mention another example that I find infinitely more fascinating in the discussion of what a logo does or doesn’t do for a company: Target.

In the midst of a great discussion about identities in grad. school, all of us at the table readily admitted that if we’d been hired to design the Target logo we would likely have passed over the design chosen about a thousand times thinking it was “too obvious, too simple, too mundane, etc.” - and somewhat truthfully, all of those things relatively described my sentiments about Target as a store / company up until its recent history. It was simply a mediocre K-Mart / Venture / Shopko knock-off by most accounts, and the logo readily came to mean those same things.

With the new company / store direction and interest in design, however, they grabbed marketing by the reigns and worked their tails off to prove in a thousand remarkable and clever design turns just how much equity there was in that same mark. No major change in the mark itself - simply a “landscaping” change surrounding it. Remarkably, I look at it now and just think “man, what a great little mark”, but that’s all thanks to the multiple designers who have handled that solid mark and revived it with their approaches to it.

Just to further puncture a bit of the luster on the “great logo”, I think any of us can pull annual after annual after annual and design book after design book after design book off our shelves and find at least 5-10 “great” marks in them for companies that we’ve either never heard of and never will or for companies that went under fairly soon after they were launched. Great logo work / design work aside, with no back end to support a mark it’s little more than an extremely sweet-smelling fart in the wind.

“I’m not arguing that any of us should like or adopt this practice, but I also think it’s perfectly blind and naive to thrash Pixellogo for realizing a market, creating a product of a reasonable quality, and offering it to interested parties.”

Paul, If we’re not supposed to criticize what we don’t “like”, what are we able to critique? I obviously see the genius in their plan and the quality of their work. This is similar to the fact that I don’t like cigarets and I think it is a bad habit, but I will openly criticize the industry. Just because a company is fulfilling a want in the market place doesn’t mean that they are beyond criticism.

Does any one else think that pixellogo’s marks look more like the copy of specific logos rather than specific trends? I can’t place any specifics, but they just seem very close to logos that I have seen. Maybe they just hit on the trends so vaguely and on the mark that I think I have seen them before.

Nate: point taken - I’ll try to keep things a bit more concise and / or spaced into seperate posts vs. bundled into one pile-o-text. Sometimes an idea just runs for a bit…

Bennett: two angles of attack on your questions / comments - one, I’m really not of the mind that criticism is based on what we “like” and “don’t like”. I’ve found this to be a great misnomer that’s become attached to critical writings - too many film / TV “critics” who simply rant about the things that bother them have spoiled a field that is really intended as a tool for broader examination / analysis / consideration and for conveying the information and evaluation of something.

If criticism is at its base merely opinion vs. researched analysis, it’s the hot air that most people believe it is.

Two, I don’t find that our “like” or dislike of Pixellogo is well founded - I also don’t liken their design “sins” to tobacco sales. You’re pretty dead on in your observation that most of their marks sincerely look like multiple other existing marks - it’d be the breaking point that would turn me off to the idea of working for Pixellogo since their entire ethos seems to be producing knock-offs for lowball prices.

I don’t think they’ve so degraded the logo development process that we’re going to have clients knocking on our doors asking for five-minute logos at $39 a pop - great process will always last longer than these flash-in-the-pans.

Moreover, hopefully educated and interested readers will tune in to this whole discussion string and realize that there are a large body of designers passionately interested in creating something that’s more than a knock-off for their clients, but the value of that product is worth significantly more than the meager pocket-change that Pixellogo is trading their integrity for.

Another idea to throw in the mix. What about false impressions? Is it right for the consumer to be fooled into thinking that a company is established, when the company only needed to spend $39 to get a “professionally” designed logo?

To me it seems that there are two good reasons to use a stock logo. You need to have a logo for a fictional company in a movie (i.e. Initech in Office Space), or you’re a scam artist and want to get a quick and easy identity.

I think that Seth just want to say something like “You don’t need to be perfect, you need to be remarkable”. And you know what? I think he’s wright. I heard som many times quotes like: “less is more” and “simplier is better” or even “brands are evil” and know I’m seeing you say the opposite.

If less is more and simpler is better, why do you need a perfect logo full of your design skill if you can achieve the same objective doing something that don’t demand so much work?

I mean, you need experience and skill to do something simple and that works. But you don’t need to use ALL your experience and skill. Just use enough to do what you need to do