Currently featured in the iOS App Store is a Get Stuff Done (Productivity) category. I found it interesting that the first seven Apps all use a check mark prominently in their icon.
To be effective, every brand must make decisions regarding when to say “No.” Your brand must embrace aspects that some individuals will perceive as a ‘dead-end’. A brand must do this to benefit from what your actual audience views as a strength.
Every audience has particular desires and influences, and no single solution can meet everyone's needs. Understanding context is the key to creating meaningful connections. It's a designer's and clients best opportunity to ensure their audience smiles wide and proud.
I was asked to contribute an article for the quarterly publication on the subject of logo design—specifically how design should be approached as a business exercise and not simply a task of crafting a pretty visual. Armed With a Purpose outlines the importance for a graphic designer to understand context through research and not simply be a taxi driver.
Social media services like Twitter, Facebook and Google+ can provide companies with insight into how their brand is viewed. These services provide opportunities for interaction, to strengthen customer relationships, and can be used to research your business space.
Choice can provide an illusion of security, a false guarantee that quantity will result in something good. The reality is that more crap results in a bigger pile of crap—it doesn’t make it better.
Successful brand design relies on understanding, strategy and hard work. Design services that offer unlimited logo designs and revisions also offer very limited understanding and strategic value.
Like rushing headlong into tattooing your lower back during a drunken stooper, fast tracking and penny pinching a logo will leave you with a painful and expensive reminder of a bad decision. Slowly, the full effect of your uninformed choices will come to light. The work might have been done by a relative, a “desktop publisher” or an online logo warehouse but the result will be the same—regret.
The most common example of hidden imagery in a logo is likely FedEx and it’s arrow. For me however, it isn’t what first comes to mind. As a child I saw something in the Kentucky Fried Chicken logo that I can’t help continue to see to this day.
Logo design should not be approached with the goal of filling that blank spot on the top of your letterhead. It is not the time to recklessly do something trendy and cool. Most importantly, it is not about getting a task off your to-do list so you can move on to selling widgets to your customers.
“Over the years, I have traveled a great deal all over the world. When I arrive at the airport in a city, I have a business problem to be solved. I am at the airport and I need to get to my hotel. As I leave the terminal building, I usually see a number of taxis waiting to take passengers to their destinations. All I have to do is tell the taxi driver exactly where I want to go. The taxi takes me to my destination, and I pay a fee for this service.
A logo is often the fastest way to build brand recognition. It is the easiest way to consistently apply a visual brand, and is usually the most powerful single visual or verbal brand asset companies possess—apart from their name.
Inevitably all graphic designers are asked (or told) to make the logo bigger by their client. Possibly out of a sense of pride? A need for their logo to be bigger than their competitors? Concern over an aging population, and their ability to see clearly? Whatever the reason, logos seem to be getting bigger and bigger.
Photographers grumbled, and now logo designers are whining as stock takes over, making them obsolete.
This seems to be the sentiment of a comment left for my recent guest post on the Logo Design Love website. I agree in part. I have heard the grumbling and whining, and I do see a similarity between the increased use of stock photography and stock logos — change does not equal progress.
What is the best question to ask in a Creative Brief? If you were only given one question to ask a client about her business, what is the most important?
It’s not very often a brand surprises me and creates an immediate connection. What was once the domain of Girl Guides selling cookies seemed very rock ’n roll today. It convinced me there would always be alternative ways to reach your audience while remaining authentic to your brand.
The two current posts on Processed Identity have me thinking about the importance of authenticity in branding. Design Kompany has created a reflection of their personalities that is warm, personal and caring. Kaboom Schneider is the opposite—extreme, aggressive and opinionated. They are both authentic and they are two great examples of why we can't be all things to all people.
As logo designers we are trained to make things look good. Much of the creative process can sometimes appear as a struggle to maintain both the strategic and the aesthetic nature of the solution. As a group, we are opinionated and are often very quick to point out what we like and dislike. We have dozens of graphic design sites that thrive on the idea of praising pretty design, but does everything really need to be pretty? Is the best solution always what is both traditionally believed to be 'good design', and the beautiful examples we go out of our way to praise?
If you work with me there is a good chance you will be getting a copy of this in the future. I think this is a great tool to inspire anyone involved in a branding project.
