I hate to keep dwelling on Seth Godin’s opinions about logos, but I think it is important for two reasons. 1. His thoughts represent a common misunderstanding about the value of logos. and 2. He has a huge audience of marketing people. That is the same crowd that designers need to be educating about the value of design. If they are being mislead we need to set the record straight.

Today, Seth talks about the 2012 Olympic logo story that we have all been following and draws some surprising conclusions. Seth is quoted below in bold with my responses below.

The art of picking a logo, even one for the Olympics, has almost nothing to do with taste or back story.
By that rational Seth should be praising the 2012 logo. The reality is that the 2012 logo fails for exactly those reasons: it is distastefully ugly, and it lacks any element that connects it to the event. Seth puts absolutely no importance on a logo being formally appropriate or contextually relevant. That is essentially what Seth is saying when he points to Nike, Starbucks, and Apple as examples of corporations that didn’t have to pay for their logos. To him these logos are just a random image picked by an uninformed employee. Yikes.

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When I set out to create this post, I was thinking that we might be able to determine the outcome of the Blu-ray vs. HD DVD format war by the quality of their logos. I wanted to determine from recent history if the format with the better logo usually won. While I don’t really like the Blu-ray logo, I simply cannot stand the grafted unbalanced nature of the HD DVD logo. So my vote is for Blu-ray even though I have no real knowledge (or care) of either format. And with Apple’s support of Blu-ray, aren’t we always supposed to agree with their decisions?

With two other video format wars represented in the above logos, I would have to pick the DVD over the DIVX logo. And yes, I do know that DIVX wasn’t a completely different format, just a different setup for movie rental. When I found the Betamax logo and put it next to the VHS logo, I was surprised that I liked the Betamax logo just a little more. Although … I don’t think either is all that strong.

Wouldn’t it be easier if we could determine a corporate success on the quality of their logo?

Yesterday there was a huge announcement in the world of logo, identity and branding design. While the press release does not mention the agency of record or the lead designers, I think we can make a pretty fair guess as to who did this new identity and word mark. The logo and color scheme is a slight departure from the parent company but much of the architecture and supporting elements are in line with the brand.

The word mark itself is very simple and straight typography. Like it’s parent company this new voice is bold and straight forward. I could go on and on, but I will just reveal this new bench mark in identity design . . . errrr critique?

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Here a few things that I have crossed my path. Recent logos, new packaging, imitation that is not flattery and a personal response to the new red Nano . . .

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I (and many others) have been pretty harsh on the new gradient and transparent logos that have been released in the last couple years by the major branding firms. While I’m still not a big fan, I thought it would be interesting to take a look at how these major brands (and the branding firms that represent them) are creating the end files. All of the logos I am looking at are in some way downloadable off the internet without a subscription. I pulled a few off of PDFs, but most of them are from an original logo file. While I am making some assumptions about how these files were created, please pipe up and let me know if you know better than I. I certainly have not created these types of logos on such a large scale. So. . . I’ll just jump right in. Warning: Some serious geekey, production details follow. If you don’t work on a computer or are not a designer, none of the following will make much sense.

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