“One of the optional aspects of this project is to remake the company’s logo; it’s not mandatory, but the company is willing to listen to ideas for a new logo. I’ve been reading some of the previous Design Talks and thought this could be a possible topic, and something that the company could actually use. The logos are attached. If you have any thoughts, comments, or ideas for a new logo, please let me know. Thanks.”

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Hi Mike,

Thanks for bringing this project to our attention; I’ve forwarded it to a few photographer friends.

I couldn’t attempt a makeover without a creative brief, which requires direct interface with the client — do they want a logo, and why, and what, and etc., etc. But here’s a 30-second crit.

The logo is serviceable as a label but visually out of touch. The dense block of bold, cap, slab-serif type on the massive black rectangle is too heavy-handed for the gentle-spirited nature of the project (“families during their most fragile time”), although I see that the rectangle is not used on their site. Its complexity, too, makes it difficult to remember,* opposite what you need in a logo.

The camera lens looks like a giant, all-seeing eyeball staring RIGHT AT ME, radiating power. It makes me want to look away. The awareness ribbon doesn’t add much, and it’s too generic for use in a logo. You want a logo to be ownable.

On the upside, it’s well crafted, and the typestyles, shapes and colors all coordinate well.

My sense is that this project requires something small, light, and low-key, probably in black & white or shades of gray, which is soft, like their site (and mission), and evokes photography. The point is not GRAPHIC DESIGN (in caps on purpose) but the photographers’ gifts to those losing someone to cancer. But without speaking to the client, I couldn’t know.

Thanks again. Keep us posted.

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*Is your image simple? Apply the three-second test. Look at the image for three seconds and look away. What do you remember? Try it on a friend. Or have a friend try it on you.

If your project can stand a little adventure, try this. “Connect” your initials by using a radically styled typeface in which the letters have been designed to look alike. Here are three . . .

Then, create a motif based on the character of the typeface. For example, Van Doesburg consists entirely of straight horizontal and vertical strokes, with neither curves nor, more radically, angles. Each letter looks like a block. Take advantage of this by arranging the letters in a block bisected (in this case) by horizontal and vertical hairlines, and soften with color . . .

Finish by adding the company name; below, it’s in curvy Cantoria. Many other typefaces would work here, too, because the DRD is so different that it automatically creates contrast. Generally speaking, for readability avoid using the logotype font for the company name.

This technique has limits, obviously. The thing to remember is that wild styles can often be civilized by presenting them in conservative, low-key settings. Try it!

Van Doesburg and Planet Kosmos are free typefaces. Mojo is an inexpensive Adobe font.

For more reading on letter-based design, check out Before & After’s PDF Type bundle #1.

Current logo:

My comps:

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Joe, keep in mind that an old logo is filled with personal meaning, regardless of its aesthetic qualities. While your new design is technically sound, it doesn’t pack the history, tension, or emotion necessary to overcome their attachment to the familiar (and beloved) old one.

By discarding the old one completely, my guess is that you took away too much. Try a simpler redesign that incorporates one element (at least) from the old — the Long Island silhouette or the target (called a “house,” I believe), and possibly keep an older-style, serif typeface.

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Dear readers, I wrote about this topic in Issue 33. An excerpt . . .

As a designer, you most likely think first in terms of aesthetics — this image is prettier than that — or about what each element “symbolizes.” But be careful. What an image symbolizes to you has no bearing on what it means to the client. To the client, it’s the old logo that has meaning.

Why? Because everyone who works for a company has to some degree adopted an identity. We bring to a job our education, abilities, ambitions, and take from it income, friends, lifestyle. We identify these experiences with the company and infuse its logo with personal meaning, whether the logo is artistically attractive or not.

The logo is not “just a graphic” any more than a flag is a piece of colored cloth.

That’s why it’s so hard to design. You’re working on sacred soil. I’m exaggerating only a little, but I’m not kidding.

Thing is, a client asking for a redesign will not be aware of this — that what he knows and values about his company is attached to its logo, and that he’s asking you to replace it. He’s asking for a new flag.

Advice. If you feel qualified, do the job. Before unveiling it, prepare your client. Tell him he can expect to feel uncomfortable at first, because you’re replacing what he knows with a foreign thing. Tell him to not look for his familiar symbolism in it. It is being changed. But assure him that once his choice is made, his old meaning will gradually be transferred to the new logo.

Then show him your best work.

When I think of a logo, I think most often of two kinds.

One is a signature, which is a distinctive way of writing your name and includes no additional marks . . .

The other is a cattle brand; it’s a simple, memorable image that identifies you in the herd. A classic example is Nike . . .

(Variations are military insignia and the family crest, which, historically, marked your presence at a gathering or coronation or battle.) . . .

Everything else falls into a large-but-vague morass of complex graphics and typefaces and colors and “target-audience” intentions that do a whole lot of nothing much. Some are well crafted, some are not, doesn’t matter. The net is zero.

One reason, perfectly valid, to have a logo is simply because you want one. It’s a means of personal expression. Online avatars are of this kind — unnecessary but kind of fun.

But do you need one? Ask, can the job be done without it?

In the case of Nike, absolutely not. Nike needs a logo. How many shoes and shirts and pieces of sports equipment does it mark? At a glance, it identifies a hundred million products to billions of people in every nation, culture, and language on earth. Could that happen without a logo? It could not.

Many companies are like Nike, especially those with many products and competitors and locations. Apple, Starbucks, Ford, on and on.

Campbell’s needs a logo to distinguish its soup from lookalikes on crowded shelves. Campbell’s logo is a signature.

And so on.

But our thrift store. There is only one. It’s in the neighborhood. It has a name. It won’t be confused with something else. It’s where you shop for second-hand bargains. Occasional shoppers know it as the thrift store. Veteran shoppers know it as the Restored Blessings thrift store, which is different from the Restore thrift store across town.

What purpose would a logo serve here?

I’d say none.

But here’s where the line blurs. You have to write the name on the store front, on the Web page, on the stationery, and everywhere else. The written name looks like something — blocky, swashy, funky, whatever. So what it looks like becomes, by default, the logo, assuming that you write it the same every time.

This kind of logo — a consistently applied way of writing your name — conveys an understated sense of organization and professionalism, a good thing no matter what the enterprise, and always appropriate.

Do you need more than that?

Dear readers, that is the biggest misconception EVER.

Whose logo is this? . . .

How long would it take to draw? Let’s say 10 seconds in InDesign to make the rectangle and 10 minutes to get the width just right. How much do you bill per hour? To make it easy, let’s say $90. By that reckoning, this is a $15 logo.

Not only that, but the yellow border is not the designer’s creation; it’s been the trademark of the client, National Geographic magazine, for a century.

Yet when he “designed” this rectangle in 2002, Tom Geismar (Chermayeff & Geismar) created one of the clearest, most identifiable, most portable images on the planet, meaning one that works beautifully in every venue regardless of size, resolution, or surrounding clutter.

That’s design.

How powerfully simple can you make your next logo?

Was this year’s field the best designed of all time? There’s a lot to like. Christian Annyas gives you his rundown.

Orange gradients! Text on paths! Don’t you need computers for those? You may have been born yesterday, but a lot of great stuff has been around since dirt was new, and how it looks now is because of how it looked then. So the question is, in what decade was this Tide design (on the left) on store shelves? Extra credit if you know its debut year. We’ll answer next week.

(Those of you with the Before & After Master Collection will find the answer in issue 34, page 6.)

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May 23, 2011

The first really successful household detergent, Tide was invented in 1943 and came to market in 1946. This is its original box. Barely changed in nearly 60 years, Tide’s whirlpool is a textbook study in design excellence. Orange gradients (Hey! Don’t those require computers?) circle around a center (text on a path!), pulling your eye in and pushing it out at the same time, mimicking — with no animation at all — the mesmerizing action of that new washday miracle, the automatic washing machine. As fresh today as it was then, its look has been widely imitated. Photos courtesy of Proctor & Gamble.

P.S.: The responses below were posted before this answer was revealed.

Here’s the logo we use as our avatar and on fax stationery. It’s bright, clear and colorful:

But here’s how it looks to the fax recipient:

Because scanners see colors unevenly (and some colors barely at all), and printers print unpredictably, logo colors are basically uncontrollable. The solution is to create a black & white original, which allows you to adjust the gray values yourself.

We replaced our colors with these shades of gray . . .

. . . which then faxed like this:

Much better! The results are a convincing black & white rendition of our color logo. In our case, every gray printed twice as dark our original, for which we adjusted by trial and error. So getting your grays just right will require some fiddling, and the results will not be uniform on every fax machine. But the results are WAY better than the unreadable color version. Try it!

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Speaking of color logos, I heard yesterday from a reader who asked, “I was wondering what your opinion is on changing the color palette of an existing logo to suit the needs of a parent agency print piece. The logo in question was designed to match our previous color palette, which has now been changed.”

Dear readers: What follows is a funny little conundrum regarding logo design by committee originally published in Before & After Issue 27, 1996. I reprint it for you here.

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Reader Darrell Jamieson of Broken Arrow, Okla., sent us the following clip from the Jan. 21 issue of the Tulsa World newspaper:

“Just when it looked like Tulsa County’s mayors and commissioners were working smoothly on the new Tulsa jail trust authority, an impasse has developed.

“The Tulsa County Criminal Justice Authority members can’t agree on what the group’s letterhead should look like.

“County Commissioner Bob Dick, chairman of the seven-member jail authority, wanted the group to have its own letterhead so officials would not have to use county letterheads when mailing materials to other government agencies or companies involved in building the jail.

“At a Jan. 12 meeting, Dick submitted three designs to other members of the authority, thinking one would be accepted with little discussion. However, four members, including Tulsa Mayor Susan Savage, rejected the designs.

“One of the designs, a triangular logo with the authority’s name over the motto ‘Dedicated to Community Safety,’ looked ‘too much like a road sign,’ in the words of County Commissioner Lewis Harris.

“Another design, which featured the authority’s acronym superimposed over a set of jail bars, was “too artsy,” Harris said.

“Owasso Mayor Charles Burris also noted that every city in the county except his was included in the three designs.

“Dick concluded, ‘We want a non-artsy-craftsy, dynamic logo that doesn’t look like a road sign.’

“Although jail authority members joke about disagreement over the letterhead, they admit that picking a symbol to represent the group is taking a little longer than they had thought it would.

“With a few exceptions, members have agreed on several key points in the jail building process so far, including unanimously picking a law firm to represent the authority.

“On Friday, members saw two new designs, one from Burris with Hollywood western lettering and another from county staffers with the motto ‘TCCJA: Justice for Green Country’s Second Century.’

“‘I don’t really care what it looks like, but I’m not sure that [motto] is something I’d like to go along with,’ County Commissioner John Selph said after the meeting.

“Savage also wants to submit designs.

“‘We’re not graphic artists, but it’s clear we want to have something simple but functional,’ she said. ‘This is just a housekeeping thing we need to get done.’ ”

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And there you have it. A fellow submits three designs to his colleagues who embrace his idea but reject his art. One town mayor responds with his own design, and another wants to submit hers. Never mind that this is about a letterhead. What’s funny is that all of it is perfectly normal.

Design looks easier than it is, and it’s more important than it looks. For sure it’s not “housekeeping.”

Why would the mayor offer to do the housekeeping? How can this group agree on legal counsel but not on the housekeeping? Why do all have an opinion about the housekeeping? “I don’t really care what it looks like,” said one commissioner. What he doesn’t see is that he actually does.

We all do. Design is us and it is personal. How something looks tells the world who and how we are. The commissioner, certainly, doesn’t care what his letterhead looks like in the way that a designer would. But the right look will speak to him, and the looks he saw didn’t. This is what I mean when I say design has a voice.

This voice can be heard everywhere. It drives the mondo-billion-dollar apparel, accessories and cosmetics industry (we’re designing ourselves). It drives the auto industry. It drives the building industry. It drives the consumer-products industries.

When Steve Jobs started his Next computer company, his first act — before he had a building, before he had employees, before he had a product — was to pay Paul Rand $100,000 to design a logo. And Rand’s black cube gave Next its sleek identity.

NBC once paid a designer a million dollars to design an N.

Tulsa’s mayor calls for a letterhead that is “simple but functional.” What she means (or hopes) is a color or shape or a few lines that embody and express, for all to see, the jail trust’s abiding attributes: dignity, service, competence, integrity.

To find this, though, you must look up . . . toward the light. Not down at the dust mop.

But they were stuck.

What they’d hoped for was an image that would convey three character attributes of their company — integrity, resilience and commitment. These are wonderful qualities. Problem is, any one of them is almost impossible to convey in a graphic (quick! what does resilience look like?), not to mention all three.

Not only that, but they’re inward-facing; that is, they have meaning not to the customer but only to the company.

My recommendation: Turn and face the customer. One hundred years in business, all by itself, speaks plenty about values and vision. The company has stood the test of time and all that that implies — and the customer will get it.

I cobbled together a rough and said how about if we picture it this way:

It’s a Model T wheel and a modern car wheel, a compact image that spans a century of automobiles. Use it as a badge and stick it on everything all year — Web site, stationery, print advertising, signs, posters, invoices, all of it, wherever the company name or logo also appears.

It of course needs refinement, and whether they use the image or not remains to be seen, but I pass along the idea because I’m sure there are many old-new topics that can be depicted in a similar way.

Think about yours.

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