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.

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?

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 …

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.

Finally, someone has compiled a step-by-step guide to modern logo redesign. Let’s all take a cue from the fast-food, soft drink, and bad sports team industries and play a little color-wheel roulette.

Also includes handy office-redesign tips to maximize your creative energy. And pixels as big as hams.

It has been a huge week in logo redesigns and it looks like the next couple of weeks are going to be even bigger (and flashier)! First MasterCard and Payless, and now three Rand and one Bass logo. No word on which branding firms took these on, but from the look of the designs, the list is pretty short. Westinghouse gets swooshey, United gets transparent, IBM becomes ibm and ABC rounds it all out. Isn’t this your worst identity nightmare?

This week, automotive machinery conglomorate The Autobots announced a new logo and marketing direction for its company.

Here are some of the rules that I try to abide by while working on logos. Some of them have to deal with process, some with client relations and others on technical issues. I can’t say that I follow these rules 100% of the time, but they are some important things to keep in mind. They are in no particular order.

I’m most interested in learning what standards other designers abide by. Please share.

This is definitely the most logos that I have tackled in one post. I will mainly focus on the new Dr Pepper and Microsoft Dynamics logos. The other logos you may or may not be familiar with, depending on where you live and what your interests are. All of the logos presented here are from national or international companies, but many of them I wasn’t familiar with until now.

I have also included a few interesting links to other logo news at the very bottom of this post.

This is from Bennett’s last comment on Change Is Good? I checked my calendar and April Fool’s Day isn’t for another 10 days, so… yeah.

As graphic design seemingly becomes ever more newsworthy for mainstream audiences, I continue to be amazed and delighted at the random places design discussions crop up. For instance, my wife and I were just watching CBS Sunday Morning yesterday A.M. and happened to catch none other than Mr. Steven Heller introducing a segment focusing on brand design / brand redesign, which then lead to a short feature on C&G Partners working on a 3-day design-a-thon to generate a new title ID for the Sunday Morning annual Money Issue.

It looks like CBS isn’t going to provide any on-line video of the segment at this point, so interested parties should contact CBS about a tape / copy of it or search out friends, neighbors, and anyone with TIVO that you’re associated with to see if you can actually see the segment. The little that you can peruse online are a brief article about the segment: and a page where you can see what C&G cooked up / vote on the audience “fave” from their work:.

If a logo redesign happens in a forest, and no one is there to see it, did it really happen?

Seems like there’s a constant buzz on the design blogs these days about this, that or the other logo being redesigned. (Or, more accurately, “ruined”.) But I’ve been wondering for some time now about why we’re only talking about a select few, while hundreds, if not thousands, of corporate logos are being redesigned in any given year. The newly formed “UNIFI Companies” and their related identity revamp never even made a blip on the collective radar screen.

While watching the commercials during the opening ceremonies of the Torino Olympics I had an entirely different experience than watching the Super Bowl commercials. Sure there were some repeats of the Super Bowl ads, but there was an element in the Olympic commercials that wasn’t as evident in the Super Bowl spots. Design. If the new Super Bowl ads were “punch line” oriented, I saw more evidence of design and more specifically “graphic” design during the Olympic breaks. It only makes sense. It is a different venue and an entirely different feel. Do the opening ceremonies lend themselves better to brand building than the “look at me” Super Bowl commercials? It would seem that the answer is yes. From the look of some of these commercials is seems that there is a resurgence of graphic elements in TV ads.

A few asides: Did Apple start the trend (of graphics centered spots)? Or was it Target? Microsoft seems to be trying to gain a little creative equity in some of their new commercials. I will believe that when I see it. One new commercial that I saw tonight that was very beautiful (looked like the Lemony Snicket’s film titles), but I don’t even remember the product. It was beautiful but had very little connection to the company. A missed opportunity.

What really caught my eye tonight was the new Coca-Cola Company commercial and accompanying logo and identity. Coca-Cola has become a true master of creating intoxicatingly beautiful commercials and products. How well does their new branding effort compare?

While perusing the aisles of the local grocery store, a similarity between a few of the products presented itself to me. Several diverse products, especially in the coffee area, had logotypes where the vowel of the letter was enclosed inside a capital “C”. These were all brands that I was familiar with, but I had never put them together. It made me think of a logo I had attempted to design just a year out of college. The company had the word “cookbook” in their name and I was automatically drawn to putting the “o” inside the “C”. The “C” offered the perfect space for that lowercase “o”, so it must be the correct place for it. It was as easy as that, or was it? Someone else ended up designing the logo, and my ventures in encapsulated vowels failed. I realized that to pull off this sort of thing, the designer would have to do it just right.

And before you continue reading, see if you can figure out what companies the above combinations belong to.

A few weeks ago I saw a long time graphic design inside joke pass away. We morn the loss of Bass and Rand logos (for good reason) but should we morn the passing of a logo that made us chuckle the first time we understood it. I’m speaking of the Cooper tires logo, which was for many years set in … drum roll please … Cooper Black. Obviously I’m not the first to realize this little joke.

Was it a great logo? No. Did it need to be changed? Yes. Is the new design better than the old? In some respects, yes … and others a resounding, NO. To position themselves as a progressive company, Cooper Tires would have to get a new and more sophisticated look. I would assume that much of the “high performance” tire sales are dependent upon youth and those wanting to be youthful. Unless it is used in an ironic way, I don’t think the very bulbous Cooper Black appears youthful. Does a double “milleneum swoosh” and an oblique typeface communicate any better? If the original designer was too lazy to pick something that didn’t have the word “Cooper” in the name, the new designer was equally lazy by using swooshes. I know that ripping on “millennium swooshes” is as tired as the swooshes themselves, but why are we still using these? Here is Cooper Tires explanation from their press release. “Cooper’s first logo redesign in more than 50 years harkens back to the oval logo while conveying a modern sense of performance and speed.” It just says played out and unoriginal to me. Their new logo already looks TIREd to these eyes.

If you read this blog regularly, you are already prepared for another post ripping the latest major corporation to overhaul their logo. I suppose this will probably digress to that point, but let me try and take this a different direction, if I can.

When I read the story on rochesterdandc.com the survey on the right sidebar caught my attention. The questions was “What do you think of the new Kodak logo?” You can choose from one of three answers:
1. It’s definitely what Kodak needs to have a more innovative image
2. I don’t think the new logo will make a difference one way or the other
3. I’m appalled that Kodak would throw away its tradition and bring in a new logo

Undoubtedly, the designer population, will choose number three, but what would the average person think?

Continuing the story Bennett touched on a few weeks back. Apple will be launching a slew of announcements, including their new Intel-based power macs, at the MacWorld Expo on January 10. Apparently, this seems like the perfect time for Intel to drop into a full-on logo redesign to take advantage of all the new publicity they’re going to get.

I’ve been looking online—and looking hard—because I just can’t believe this is a new logo (I confess that I don’t pay any attention to Intel). But everytime I go to Intel.com, they have their “sunken e” logo. The same one that they’ve always had. What we’re getting here is a solid basline for the text and an offical play off of their “Intel Inside” marker-swoosh, into a full-on mellenium-swoosh.

Don’t these people pay attention to anything? How long can company after company churn out the exact same logo? More so than any other millennium-swoosh logo, this one actually feels like it was designed 7 years ago. It wouldn’t be so bad, really, except that it is the perfect physical embodiment of every design cliché from 1999. (no, 3D really hit big a year or two later)

This news is trickling out from an internet leak that focuses mainly on Intel’s new processor plan. Expect the official announcement in a week to 10 days.

Intel, The Red Crystal, Indian Airlines, Yeshiva University, Rugby Football League, Melbourne Cricket Ground …

Brand. Branding. Brand building. Brand refreshing. Brand positioning. Brand strategy. Rebranding.

UPS and AT&T (now at&t) have taught me one thing: Traditional logo design is dead. Identity design is being reborn as a new thing: Branding. It’s a piece of a larger whole, and it is no longer being driven by design.

Checking the news via Logo Lounge this morning and I see that the inevitable new AT&T logo was just released, and a 3-D rendered version of a Saul Bass tear runs down my cheek. Did a quick check, and sure enough, Speak Up is already knee deep in comments about the new logo and identity. Leave your comments there or here, but I’m sure we all have something to say about it. I appreciate Armin’s approach of encouraging people to leave insightful comments, not just one-liners.

New logos for the University of Kansas, the Beijing Olympics, NBC Bank and Visa. Nothing too controversial in the following post, just a legal dispute and a few logo comparisons.

I thought I would share some rebranding and logo news that I have ran across recently. None of these would probably warrant an entire post, but they each have an interesting aspect to them.

I wanted to get a little feedback in regards to our BA logo/identity, now that we have many more readers than we did when we introduced it. The ever changing BA logo has become a bit of an obsession for me, as my wife can attest to my upward gaze and sudden stops while traveling. Adrian and I have collected/photographed well over 250 BA found typography photos to date. Just in case anyone has missed it, the BA photo at the top of the page flips between 32 different photos at a time. We change out the 32 photos whenever we have collected another set. Here are a few questions for all of our astute readers. Please let us know what you think.

Is there anything we can do to improve the BA identity?
Do you enjoy seeing the updated BA photos or are we wasting our time?
Did you know that the photo flipped when you rolled over it?
Would it be interesting or beneficial to have a separate page with all 250 BA photos?

Our initial goal was to have as many people contribute BA photos as possible. If you take a photo that would add to the collection, please email it to us. Thank you for your help.

Given our recent discussions on Quarks' new logo and previous logo discussions I thought I would share this article from the July 2005 issue of Wired (I just now got around to reading it) titled "This brand is my brand: Why logo hacks are the new black." See pages 126 to 127, or the online version. Here is a quote from Rick Klotz, a "remix entrepreneur":

"...clothing companies have built off of each other's ideas since the beginning. Designers get a lot of ideas for new styles by looking through old clothing catalogs. But specifically in terms of brand appropriations, the remix aesthetic levels the playing field for aspiring designers. You don't necessarily have to be formally trained as an artist to take preexisting graphics and rework them."

So what do you think about the idea of remixing a logo?

Tom's "Change is Good?" post has started some pretty interesting discussion. The above well established logos immediately popped into my head when I saw Quark's new logo. I thought I would share the above screen capture and a few links.

Quark's Press Release on the new logo.
SicolaMartin (the agency that designed the new logo)

In order to keep this discussion to one thread, comments have been turned off on this post. Please post your comments on Tom's.

Because of reasons I, ahem, really would rather not get into, we still use Quark here in our office. This means I get to not only be the outsider among the authors of this blog -- as if I probably wasn't anyway! -- but I also get promotional emails from Quark, usually wanting more money for some dubious update or something.

I received just such an email this morning, and just as I was setting down my donut and my Generic StoreBrand cola to hit "delete", I noticed this email was different. It was all lime-greeny. And, wait, the logo was different! A ha, in fact, the email was a memo showing off their new logo and branding system! I held off on the delete key, and took another bite of the donut.

I LOVE LogoLounge. In a relatively short period of time, it has become one of the pre-eminent online and print resources for great logo work. One of the best things about LogoLounge is the dismissal of typical arbitrary logo competition restrictions: submitted logos don’t need to have been designed in a certain year or for a certain type of client. Hell, they don’t even need to have been approved by your client. They just have to be yours. And there’s the reason I’m writing.

So the National Hockey League cancels an entire season, becoming the first “major” sport to ever do so, losing most of their fans in the process. And now that they’re back, of course, one of the first things they do is change their logo.

Great, now I need to buy all new gear, since my “I Love the NHL” shirt is outdated.

You bet.

So what’s really in a logo that gets our design-blood stirring so hotly? It’s boiled me a bit, as evidenced in the Seth Godin string below, but is definitely a great discussion-button I know we all have perspectives on…

The UPS logo is a favorite hot-button for me, especially with an appreciation of all that Paul Rand was able to invest in the original mark and all the meaning that’s been stripped out of it in its current incarnation by FutureBrand.

A quote borrowed from Design Observer to get us rolling:

“The abstract total-design logo is the most marvelous fraud that the American graphic arts have ever perpetrated upon American business. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, these abstract logos, which a company (Chase Manhattan, Pan Am, Winston Sprocket, Kor Ban Chemical) is supposed to put on everything from memo pads to the side of its 50-story building, make absolutely no impact-conscious or unconscious-upon its customers or the general public, except insofar as they create a feeling of vagueness or confusion…Yet millions continue to be poured into the design of them. Why? Because the conversion to a total-design abstract logo format somehow makes it possible for the head of the corporation to tell himself: “I’m modern, up-to-date, with it, a man of the future. I’ve streamlined this old baby.” Why else would they have their companies pour $30,000, $50,000, $100,000 into the concoction of symbols that any student at Pratt could, and would gladly, give him for $125 plus a couple of lunches at the Tratorria, or even the Zum-Zum? The answer: if the fee doesn’t run into five figures, he doesn’t feel streamlined. Logos are strictly a vanity industry, and all who enter the field should be merciless cynics if they wish to guarantee satisfaction.”

- Tom Wolfe, “From Bauhaus to Our House” quoted in 1972, the year he was a judge for the AIGA’s Communication Graphics competition. (See more on the topic at Design Observer)

So I’m at a stoplight. Doesn’t matter what corner. But for the record, it was 60th and Maple, Omaha Nebraska. I’m singing along to Big Poppa by Notorious BIG (is sing the wrong word? rap. thanks. forgot to eat my rap snacks today. sorry.) and as the words “i love it when you call me big poppa!” come out, i’m looking sideways out my passenger window. And the worst thing EVER happened next…

I was really disappointed when I read Seth Godin’s blog today. The usually insightful Godin has apparently fell in love with mediocre logo design saying “…it is okay to have a non-wonderful logo, because the logo is just a placeholder. It gains value AFTER it hits the world, because people associate things with it.” What happened to the Seth Godin who said “Design is the single highest-leverage investment you can make” in his book, Free Prize Inside? Seth comes short of endorsing stock logos, but it is unclear how else you would get a “good enough” logo. Maybe Seth is suggesting that you hire a design firm that is known for their average reputation. Maybe he thinks it is “good enough” to hire your nephew who doodles cartoons on the back of his notebook to develop your company’s identity system. Maybe you should just do it yourself with the fonts that came free with your computer. Whatever he meant, it is truly baffling to hear the champion of the remarkable disregard the value of good logo design.

I followed Seth’s link to Pixellogo.com to see what Seth wasn’t endorsing. Some of the logos were actually pretty good, but the idea of a stock logo is still repulsive. Why would anyone compromise their very identity by purchasing a pre-made logo? The site leads you to believe that logo design is a simple matching game. Their site says, “Our Ready-To-Use logo designs provide an excellent system to instantly match a company/brand with an appropriate logo design.” If it isn’t “good enough” for you to have the exact same logo as someone else, they will even make your logo exclusive with the option to copyright it (for an additional fee).

Seth doesn’t seem to really understand what a logo is, calling it a “blank slate” just like the name of your company. He is trying to imply that it isn’t what your company’s name or logo is, it is how you use it. There is a bit of good advice there, but that isn’t enough to come to the conclusion that it is ok to compromise your logo design. Sure, a bad company can’t be saved by a good logo, but it is foolish to think that the opposite is true. There will be times when people will base their whole perception of your company on nothing more than your logo. If your logo looks mediocre, your company will be seen as mediocre. That goes for your logo as well as everything else about your company including your stationary and your web site. Pixellogo sells stock web templates and stationary, too, if you are going for the completely mediocre package. I seriously hope that Seth reconsiders his endorsement of “good enough” logo design. Contrary to what he says, good enough still is a curse.

“Trendy” is one of the most insulting things you can say about a designer’s work. We all strive to be original. We also find inspiration in the great work of other designers. It is rare for a designer to rip off other designer’s work, and I think design trends are born out of respect and admiration for other people’s great work. To a certain extent, that is healthy. So at what point does a trend become “trendy?”

April’s Graphic Design USA contains Logo-Lounge’s third installment of Logo Trends. It lists fifteen trends and gives 4 examples of logos from each trend. Thankfully the swoosh was absent from the list although a newer and greater danger may have arrived: the whip. Other trends included amalgams, CMYK, Flames, Weaves, Leaves, and blurs. The separated-at-birth logos are mostly well designed identities, and the article doesn’t praise or insult the trends. It is easy to criticize the similarities of the logos, but the article shows that despite the apparent trends, it is still possible to create unique and exciting logos.

I stumbled across this broadcast news story the other day. A t-shirt designer in North Carolina is “in hot water” with New York City. He is selling the above “I Love NC” t-shirts and the New York State Department of Economic Development isn’t happy. It appears that the “I Love New York” folks are becoming pretty defensive of Mr. Glaser’s most famous logo. I understand the validity in defending your brand, but it seems funny that they would go after this small time t-shirt designer in North Carolina.

The interview with the designer is pretty laughable. He better find a lawyer if he is going to try to defeat New York with comebacks like, “there’s no theft … what did I steal?” Come on. You are going to have to come up with a better case than that. It is obviously a rip-off. Why not approach it from the angle of a parody or maybe even the fact that so many other people have copied it before you? Maybe even argue that it is now a part of the national graphic vocabulary, since it has been copied so many times. It won’t be easy, since it is a registered trademark. The least this “designer” could have done was use a typeface that more accurately copied the original.

One more thing that made me laugh was the common hype of local news. With exaggerated terms like “clothing designer” and “fashion feud”, they really make it sound like a bigger story than it is. Why not just approach it as the big city going after the small time thief. That always sells and is a little closer to reality.

I tracked down the t-shirt designer’s website and he had a link to an article with a little more information than the broadcast story. It will be interesting to see how this plays out.

There goes another graphic design legend’s logo. Milton Glaser’s classic DC Comics logo will be no more. Josh Beatman of Brainchild Studio designed the new DC Comics logo. I can’t say that I have deep feelings for Glaser’s logo, but the new one seems a bit to slick and “swoosh” like for my tastes. I really don’t have much interaction with comic books, so I’m not sure that my opinion is very valid in this instance. The new logo is well done and eye catching, but is it a good fit for DC Comics? I would like to hear some comic book lovers opinions on this one.

Can you name what logo the above letters are taken from? Joey Katzen’s Retail Alphabet Game shows just how recognizable the brand giant’s typography is. His site contains 4 editions of the addicting game. I will have to keep this handy the next time a client says they want the font in their logo to be Times New Roman.

(Link via Metafilter)

Here’s a big shocker: Philadelphia Eagles wide receiver and resident loudmouth Freddie Mitchell is in hot water with FedEx for his use of a (slightly) modified version of their logo on his website, and on merchandise he sells.

FreddieMitchell.com

I stumbled across the site a while back while looking for some information to use in trash talking one of my buddies who’s a big Eagles fan. The FredEx logo is splashed all over the page, which struck me as kind of funny, actually. Mitchell is a secondary receiver, and not exactly someone who would have a lot of fans or even groupies. He’s just not that good. I mean, who’s actually going to buy that stuff? Harmless, really.

Its even kind of funny. This is verbatim from the front page. I swear. “From the man that helped bring you 4th and 26, The Peoples Belt, and The Frohawk: ‘FredEx’ aka ‘The Peoples Champ’ aka ‘Hollywood’ would like to thank everybody for checking out his official website. ‘I want to thank my fans for their support and give them an arena to really get to know me’, says Freddie at his website launch party before adding, ‘and I’d like to also thank my hands…I love my hands.’”

Every time I drive by an 84 Lumber I am captivated by the logo. This isn’t a new experience. I remember driving by the store as a kid and feeling unusually drawn to it. Today when I took a pinhole photo of the sign, I stopped to reflect on why this symbol has always fascinated me…

Tom’s post last week on Sears was a great reminder of the ever changing identities of companies today. I myself am already waiting for the retro shirts with the full-caps version printed in velvet.

Researching (which is now just another word for a Google search) the new logo brought me to the attention of Logo R.I.P. � a collection of past logos that will be missed to varying degrees (Sears was absent from the list at the time of this post). Just another reminder of how even the work we think will be around for a while has a limited shelf life.

My ‘research’ ended when I ran across the old UPS logo that was replaced with a gradiant and a swoosh � I became so enraged I could read no further. In fact, the mention of this just now has made me too enraged to finish this post. Terrible.

So, I was watching “Bands Reunited” featuring New Kids on the Block (Shut it, Tubby. So what, I was watching New Kids, who are now Bloated Old Guys on the Block. You were watching it too. You just don’t have the guts to say so in print.) and a commercial for Sears comes on.

Normally that’s my cue to hit “swap” on the ol’ picture in picture, and switch to Telemundo so I can pretend to learn Spanish, but this time I didn’t. Something seemed strange.

Yep, seems those old school peeps at Sears & Roebuck tweaked their logo to a combination of caps and lowercase characters. I’m neither old enough or interested enough to recall a time when Sears didn’t have an ALL CAPS logo. So, that’s got to be many many years.

This bums me out, because as I build my rocketship which will one day take me to Pluto, I shop for tools exclusively at Sears.

OK, you got me, part of that last sentance is a lie.

It doesn’t bum me out.

As for the rest, well, that’s true! My scientist buddy Dr.Cody is working feverishly in a woodland cabin drawing up plans to transport me and my robotic puppy to the outermost reaches of our galaxy.

A place free from gravity. A place free from posers like Boyz II Men. Most of all, a place free from Sears and their new logo.

You Bet.